Newsletter No. 20 / Autumn 2007
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Winter 2007 weed ecotours
Numbers are shaping up for the 2007 weeding ecotours. June has two trips that will be well attended with mainly new recruits into the program. We have two couples who have been before on the first trip, and on the second trip just one, Lesley Inglis, who has been before. Robert Coenraads will be supervising the bush regeneration on both of these trips. Robert was instrumental in early volunteer weeding on Lord HoweIsland, with a number of Australian Academic Tours including weeding as part of the program in the mid 1990’s.
July numbers are down abit, but interest is still coming in. Judy and Brian Arnold plus Malcolm and Danina Anderson are regulars now and will be along on this week. Elizabeth Brown will be along to supervise the bush regeneration.
August 11to 18 has a full complement, mainly many regulars that have been on many trips, including Treasurer Steve Gale and his wife Leonie, who have been coming since 1999.Also along will be the Pallins, the Gyes. Jane Gye will be supervising the bush regeneration.
August 26 trip was the first to fill, and a few people have had to choose another week . Is this popularity the closeness to spring?Or is it that charismatic leader Bill McDonald?
And there was interest in another Spring trip for 2007, so we have scheduled one for October, and name are coming in for that one.
World Heritage Manager Terry Wilson has indicated groups will be able to contribute most to the overall weeding effort being carried out on the island by continuing work in the area above Pinetrees- moving west of Edie’s Glen into Climbing asparagus and also looking at follow up work east of this gully in areas treated over many years, to ensure any weed seedling regrowth is kept in check.. In 2006 the October group focused on this west side of Edie’s Glen and found the work very satisfying, as working with a large group, a very visible difference can be seen after a weeks work.
The groups each year do a small project off Transit Hill, and this year some groups will assist the LHI Board with a restoration project for the rare plant Calystegia affinis at the base of Dawson’s Ridge (next to Old Settlement paddock). From October 2006 to May 2007 Robert Coenraads and I carried out an herbicide trial for the Dept Conservation at this area and it has proved to be worth pursuing to restore some habitat for this endangered plant species.
Don’t forget, if you have a slide show or PowerPoint of an interesting project, or unusual travel destination you have been to, bring it along and if it is of enough interest the group may enjoy seeing it, or hearing your talk. In the past, people have put on plant drawing classes; demonstration of medieval life, a slide show of a trip to Mt Kinabalu in Borneo and last year the Pallin’s showed their travel photos of a trip to Machu Pichu..
Presidents Report
My sincere thanks to the dedicated 2006 committee, without whom our organization could not exist.
Apart from the weeding activities FLHI members assist with regeneration programs, and it is pleasing to note the success of the Soldiers Creek and Old Settlement Creek regeneration projects.
It is also very warming to note the numbers of regulars who will be out here this year again, giving their valuable time in the interestof the welfare of Lord Howe Island.
It is not only the Island community that appreciate the efforts of the weeding teams, but the Lord Howe Island Board very much appreciate the efforts to assist with the eradication of noxious weeds and assistance with bush regeneration.
The FLHI organization is also grateful for the assistance and encouragement given to them by the LHI Board and in particular Terry Wilsonand his hard working team.
Des Thompson President
PlacostylusLand Snails surveys
In February Keith and Jo Weir, Friends of LHI members and regular weeders, were here on a holiday and came out one night doing surveys of these endangered snails.
While the Friends of Lord Howe weed teams have been on the ground over 43 weeks removing Asparagus fern from Transit Hill and the lowland areas, there have only been three live Placostylus landsnails found. But it appears that the snails are only very active on wet nights, so we spent around threehours crawling on hands and knees searching by torchlight, uncovering numbers of 54 in a 10 x 20m plot..
Interesting results turned up; for example just south of Pinetrees cemetery where Friends have weeded many times, 15 live adults were found in a 20 x 10 m area.Surveys on another site repeated over nine wet nights, marking adults with a number, revealed that on any one night only 19 to 34 percent of adults will be found in a one hour search. This could make the number next to the Pinetrees cemetery somewhere between 45 and 75 in just one 20 x 10 m area..
Answer to the Guava problem!!
A letter received in February from a phasmid breeder in Switzerland.
Dear Visitor Centre
I am a phasmid breeder and heard from Dryococelus australis
Try Guava as a food plant for them, ca 98% of all phasmids eat Guava. . They are a member of the Myrtacae.Of course you could feed them also their original food plant, but as the Guava is a very common tree in the tropical regions and there are excellent breeding results of other phasmids with Guava. It could be that there are better breeding results of D. australis with Guava as food plant and kitchen paper as ground.
Best regards
Daniel Ballmer, Switzerland.
Norfolk Island Landcare
Recently Louise Tavener from Norfolk Island was visiting Lord Howe Island and we spoke about volunteer conservation on Norfolk Island.
A Norfolk Island Landcare group was formed in 2006 by concerned residents.
Achievements of the group in brief are:
.Done planting of Norfolk Island Pines in the Arthur’s Vale historic area at Kingston on a steep eroded bank which backs onto the sea (at the request of the Government Conservator)
.Run a “lantana” competition for kids 5 to 12 years old, whereby for every lantana plant dug up off the roadsides they received a ticket in the raffle to win one of ten great prizes donated by local businesses. Special prizes were given for the child who submitted the biggest plant and the one who bought in the most plants.
.Ran also a “Party of Ten Roadside Cleanup”. People grouped into parties of ten and could choose a 1 kilometres stretch of road to remove roadside weeds e.g. lantana, Hawaiian Holly, Thistle etc. There were 37 X one kilometre stretches of road to choose from and 34 of these were taken up by teams. Any team who completed their stretch in the time period (1st to 31st May) got a ticket in the draw to win enough food and booze for a party of ten. Every eating house and restaurant gave a salad or a dessert and the butchers gave BBQ meat, the clubs and liquor store gave each 1 bottle of wine and one carton of beer, the bakeries donated bread. Our Bounty day is on the 8th June with a lot of families home for the event so the draw was on the Saturday night before Bounty Day and the lucky team took home all of the food and grog. This was a fantastic success and will become an annual event.
.Our main project as a group is in the Cascade Reserve Area in the Cockpit Waterfall region. There we have fenced a glen area (now called Ruby’s Glen after Ruby Matthews, a lady on the Island who turned 100). This area was cleared of woody weeds and planted in Norfolk Island Pines and White Oak (Lagunaria patersonia). We have just completed a fencing a forest area within the reserve (thanks to a grant from Australia) and have been several weekends working hard at clearing woody weeds from it. There is still much to do but when complete we will replant the bare areas with native trees of Norfolk Pine, White Oak, White wood and Iron wood trees. Nature reforestation will naturally in the heavily wooded areas once the cattle are kept out. We are hopeful of obtaining another grant to enable us to construct a walkway and viewing platform of the waterfall which is currently hard to access and quite dangerous with unstable rocks.
We are also working at getting other projects in the reserve areas through the paperwork and permission stages which we will try and encourage other community groups to do.
The President of the Norfolk Island Landcare is Warren Langman, Louse Tavener is the secretary.
Phone 0011 6723 23119 or email jltavener@norfolk .nf
This was most interesting to hear how things are being tackled on Norfolk Island, which does have a bigger population ( about 2,000) than Lord Howe Island (350).
Louise took details of the Friends of Lord Howe Island weeding ecotours and may try to develop a similar program to assist on Norfolk Island.
Earthquake monitoring station installed on Lord Howe Island.
As part of the Australian Government Tsunami warning system in the Pacific, an earthquake monitoring station has been installed on the Island.
This move by the Australian Government follows from the 26 December 2004 earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra in Indonesia. This was the fourth largest ear quake recorded since 1900, with a magnitude of 9.2. A tsunami generated from the displacement of the sea floor of up to 10m over a length of 1200km, hit the coastline of 11 countries in and around the Indian Ocean, killing over 280,000 people.
Australia is surrounded to the northwest, northeast and east by some 8,000km of active tectonic plate boundary capable of generating tsunamis, which could reach our coastline within two to four hours. One third of all earthquakes worldwide occur along these boundaries. The impact of a tsunami hitting vulnerable low lying areas of the Australian coast could be significant.
Map showing subduction zone plate boundaries
As a direct result of the 2004 tsunami off Indonesia the Australian Government identified the need to be able to warn the Australian population of such a phenomena, with the aim of minimizing loss of life and economic impact. At the time an informal Tsunami Alert System was operated by the Australian Bureau of meteorology and Geoscience Australia and Emergency Management Australia. This system had limited capabilities and since then the Australian government has committed $68.9 million to establish the Australian Tsunami warning System by 2009.
Part of this system is an establishment around the Pacific and Indian Oceans of seismic monitoring sites such as the one installed at Lord Howe Island. Also a network of sea level monitoring sites will be established. All of these monitoring sites will be linked to a central system and if a seismic event the Bureau of Meteorology will use tsunami computer modeling to generate a first estimate of the tsunami size, arrival time and potential impact. The Bureau will then verify the existence of a tsunami using information from an enhanced sea level monitoring network. Any warnings and advice will be disseminated to the public through the Bureau of meteorology and, and State emergency management services.
The equipment at Lord Howe Island is a set of sensors buried 3m below ground level, placed on basalt bedrock. This is to keep temperature variation to a minimum for calibration of teh equipment. There are two sensors to pick up and record vibrations- one fine sensorand one coarse sensor. On a demonstration of the unit, the fine sensor even picks up waves as they hit the shoreline. The coarse sensor is for any seismic event close to Lord Howe Island that would probably destroy the fine sensor. Information from the station is fed directly to Canberra, 24 hours a day. The unit has a battery system capable of running the system for two weeks in the event of a power failure. Battery and equipment status can be monitored from Canberra.
The earthquake monitoring site on Malabar
Climate Change
Global warming and the threat of climate change are very topical at the moment,asincreasingly pieces of evidence come from different parts of the world.
How will climate change affect Lord HoweIsland?
Well the obvious one is that if sea levels rise due to melting ice caps then the sea could be partially submerge low parts of the island, such as through the airstrip area and at North Bay picnic area. This would result in three islands, causing disruption to human settlement.
On a broader environmental front there would be three identifiable changes likely:
The moss forest.
The orographic cloud sits on the mountains for most of the summer, creating the conditions for the moss forest to develop and survive.
Some scientists believe that the first land habitats to be affected by global warming will be the moss forests that exist on only a few isolated islands and mountains. The only reason the moss forest exists is that for many days of the year, the clouds form on the mountains and this cloud provides water droplets that condense on leaves of the foliage, plus creates extra rainfall. Predictions have been made that for every 1 degree C rise in global temperature, the cloud base will lift by 150 metres. This would take the cloud off the top of the mountains for mostof the year. The delicate ferns and mosses that live only on the summit would die out with this decrease in moisture, along with many of the invertebrate animals that live on this foliage.
Decrease in food supply for seabirds.
In some subtropical areas, when sea surface temperatures go above a certain value the food supply of some seabird species is not available for the birds. If the birds are relying on a close source of food when raising chicks, the result could be a crash in survival of seabird chick numbers. This has already been noted at a number of areas around the world when El Niño events occur, and even with Wedgetailed shearwaters in the Coral Sea.
If sea surface temperatures increase then this may become a more frequent occurrence and seabird species at Lord Howe Island could be affected...
Changes in marine species. Lord Howe Island is at latitude 31 degrees south, where it receives the warm East Australian current in summer months and cooler temperate water currents in the winter months. It is these varying temperatures that allow both tropical and temperate marine species to co-exist here side by side. If ocean temperatures increase, the variation in warm and cooler water currents around the Island could change, and with that the species composition of the marine life.
Already there is some evidence from aerial photographs that the amount of coral in the lagoon at Lord Howe Island has increased in the past 20 years. So tropical marine species may increase, and some temperate marine species be displaced.
FRIENDS OF LORD HOWE ISLAND INC.
ABN 39 322 895 360
ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING 13 JUNE 2007 - SECRETARIAL REPORT
Please accept my apologies for not being able to be present in person at this seventh AGM of the incorporated Friends. I would like to acknowledge the support I have received from other Committee members during the past year, and the many friendly messages received from members generally.
Membership at 27 April 2007 (the last update received by me before sending out the Agenda)
Financial (31 Oct) / Total / Household / Single2007 / 120 / 43 / 77
2008 / 33 / 15 / 18
2009 / 18 / 3 / 15
2010 / 11 / 2 / 9
2011 / 24 / 9 / 15
2014 / 1 / 1 / 0
2015 / 1 / 1 / 0
2016 / 1 / 0 / 1
Total / 209 / 74 / 135
Unfinancial (2006) / 34
It is pleasing to report that we have 52 more financial members than in 2006 and that many have taken up the multiple year subscription option. Unfinancial memberships decreased from 81 to 37.
We also have 4 corresponding memberships, mostly environmental organizations.
Email memberships:
Over 100 of our members have supplied email addresses, which greatly reduces our workload and costs. I apologize to those members who may not have received email communications (few, I hope). Sometimes attachments such as the Newsletter are caught by the multitude of virus protectors and spam traps, in which case we resort to posting hard copy.
Please help us by remembering to update any change in your email and/or postal address or by advising us of problems in receiving emails.
John Flint
Secretary & Public Officer
Unusual Bird sighting March to June
A number of Cattle Egrets were seen in pasture areas in April and May. These birds stop briefly as they are migrating to New Zealand after breeding in Northern NSW in summer. We have small numbers stop for a few days en route to New Zealand, and in October see them briefly again returning to NSW.
One of the three White Ibis that came to the Island in March 2006 is still here on the Island.
A Greater Frigate bird was sighted over RoachIsland in March.
Jack Shick sighted a Great Skua on BlackburnIsland in March.