How volunteer sporting shooters are culling feral pests in the Flinders Ranges
Welcome to the frontline of the battle to save our endangered species, where a bunch of blokes with guns are among our fiercest protectors.
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A trio of shooters is walking through the Flinders Ranges in the hours after dusk. The terrain is rocky and rough, the vegetation reasonably sparse.
One carries a pair of thermal binoculars. Another has a night-vision scope on his rifle.
A mix of expensive, hi-tech equipment is spread across the trio.
They tread carefully and deliberately.
Their target appears in a small glow of body heat through the binoculars.
It is quick and cunning, so they need to be patient. Their mission is reasonably simple: eliminate the target.
Their work begins.
There is almost a begrudging respect in Rob Parkes’ voice when discussing the feral cat.
“They’re very wary, they’re very crafty animals,” says Parkes, the vice president for conservation and wildlife management for the Sporting Shooters Association.
“We’re pitting ourselves against an animal that has a home right across Australia and just adapts to absolutely anything.”
So much so that Parkes and his shooting colleagues, all volunteers, have been forced to turn to hi-tech thermal imaging and night-vision equipment to track the cunning feline after dark.
It saves them having to rely on bright spotlights which the cats, particularly if they’ve been shot at before, quickly learn to avoid (along with the sound of bullets being fired).
Parkes and his colleagues are not vigilantes, nor hillbillies, nor thrillseekers.
Far, far from it.
They are among our most effective conservationists.
They are highly trained and skilled shooters tasked by the state government with ridding our national parks of pests – goats, rabbits, foxes and feral cats – which have, for the past century, destroyed native species and native vegetation.
Our state’s Department for Environment and Water is this year celebrating 30 years of the Bounceback program, which has seen the reintroduction of species once thought extinct and the regeneration of others.
This has provided a significant fillip to not just the environments they inhabit, but to the Indigenous communities that see these animals as interwoven with their heritage.
It has also been a major victory for a wide coalition of park rangers, ecologists, landowners, conservationists, wildlife experts and Indigenous communities, to name a few.
However, the truth is none of this would be possible without the likes of Parkes and his colleagues … and their rifles.
Culling is a necessary trade off to allow native species to firstly be reintroduced, then survive and, finally, thrive.
Take the western quoll or, as the Adnyamathanha people refer to it, the idnya. A Tassie devil-like marsupial with a smooth face, long black brush on its tail and white spots on its brownish back, it had been all but wiped out in the Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park, thanks largely to the aforementioned feral cats, and foxes.
This was devastating for both the species and the area’s Traditional Owners.
So in the 1990s, the culling of pests and predators started, which was a mixture of shooting and poison baiting. It worked.
Quantifying the number of cats killed would be near impossible, but it’s safe to assume it’s well into the thousands.
In its wake, between 2014-16, 92 quolls were released into the national park from a population in Western Australia.
They have since developed a strong breeding population, with record numbers reported last summer (130 were captured, giving the all-clear for future translocations).
Today, Parkes and his team have a pretty straightforward mission: protect this population from the cats and foxes.
About once a month a small group of shooters meet for a long weekend and take out as many feral animals as it can (the cat numbers have reduced markedly in recent times, so this is usually in single figures).
However, if left unchecked, the quolls won’t make it, and still often fall victim to the cats.
Parkes is unequivocal when he says he is a conservationist first, a shooter second.
“Definitely a conservationist,” he says, and is fiercely proud of the often unheralded role he and his colleagues play in the state’s conservation efforts.
A high point was the realisation of the crucial role their work played in building up the population to the point that 25 quolls could be translocated into Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park, in the northern Flinders Ranges, for the first time.
“One of the researchers just looked at us and said, ‘What we are doing right now would not happen without you guys’,” he says.
“We don’t get a lot of kudos about it, but that meant a fair bit to us all.”
He accepts there might be a stigma associated with firearms, but says this often misses the mark, pardon the pun.
“Firearms don’t get a good run anyway, because maybe people don’t understand how they work and what we do,” he says.
“But putting the firearms aside, the overwhelming feedback I get is that it’s great we are reducing feral cat numbers, so our native wildlife can build up again.
“People do know we shoot them, and we shoot them humanely, there is a code of conduct we abide by – if we can’t take the shot cleanly and there’s a chance we might miss, we won’t take that shot … the fact is I think the people that know, really appreciate the work we are doing.
“We have a lot to offer the environment and we don’t necessarily promote ourselves as well as we should. But we are proud of what we do.”
This is not an isolated story and one central to the conservation effort in South Australia.
Geoff Axford and his son Callumare climbing to the top of a rocky hill in the Gammon Ranges. It is a typically pristine day in this neck of the woods that Geoff knows like the back of his hand. Callum is helping out on his uni holidays. They’re both feeling a little crook so it takes a little longer than expected.
When they arrive at the top, they perch themselves on a rock and are, in an instant, transfixed by the sea of green and brown as far as the eye can see and the scores of yellow-footed rock wallabies jumping around below.
“It’s late afternoon and I’m watching the next generation just so excited and thrilled about seeing these animals in this magnificent landscape,” says Axford, the Bounceback project officer, Flinders and Outback region, for the Department for Environment and Water.
“That was a really poignant moment for me. In that instance I thought, ‘see, that’s what this is all about’.”
Just 30 years earlier numbers of the yellow-footed rock wallaby had become critically low. Only one or two individuals were counted during aerial surveys around Wilpena in the early ’90s. Vegetation also had been over grazed on a mass scale.
Today, the landscape is regenerating and the wallaby population, despite a few years of drought, is healthy and growing.
The yellow-footed rock wallaby – known as such due to the colour of its forearms and hind legs, which range from bright yellow to orange-brown – is by and large a story of recovery and redemption. And that is pretty much the story of Bounceback, Axford says.
He goes back to the early ’90s, when a small group of rangers and wildlife managers realised they had a serious problem with wallaby numbers in the Flinders, Olary and Gawler ranges.
“The foxes were either preying on the newly emerged out of the pouch young or they were harassing the wallabies so the wallabies would throw their young out of their pouch if they were stressed and harassed,” Axford says.
“So in those early days they discovered there weren’t many young coming into the (wallaby) colonies.”
Feral goats were also an issue, effectively muscling the wallabies out of the high ranges, depriving them of food, water, grazing and shelter.
So a decision was made that something big had to be done to tackle both issues at the same time, over a large enough area to make a genuine difference. National park staff and the owners of neighbouring properties began working together to reduce the foxes and feral goats. A group of volunteer hunters was alse enlisted. Bounceback was born.
At first, this involved widespread culling of foxes and goats; shooters and bait drops to target the foxes, mustering, trapping and shooting the feral goats.
An estimated 200,000 goats were killed as part of the effort.
It proved effective and the program was gradually expanded across more parks and private properties, from the Gammon Ranges and then over to the Olary and Gawler Ranges, essentially following the footprint of the yellow-footed rock wallaby.
Over time, this grew into a firm partnership between the state government, government agencies, landholders, the conservation and wildlife management branch of the Sporting Shooters Association, the management boards of both SA Arid Lands and Northern and Yorke natural resources, Indigenous management groups, conservation and wildlife agencies, and volunteers. The partnership survives to this day.
Pests and predators have not been eradicated, but the numbers have reduced exponentially.
“It’s almost impossible to eradicate them from those landscapes,” Axford says. “What it’s about is trying to reduce those numbers down to thresholds or levels where the native animals and the landscape and the vegetation and ecosystems can recover and do well.”
Which is precisely what has occurred to the extent that the wallabies and the quolls were merely the opening chapters of the recovery efforts. In 2015, 79 brushtail possums were reintroduced to Ikara-Flinders from Yookamurra Sanctuary, a fenced wildlife reserve in the Murray Mallee region.
They had been all but wiped out by foxes and a major bushfire in the 1950s, which destroyed scores of large trees with hollows, where the possums would nest. A year later, another 50 brushtail possums were again translocated from Yookamurra and, in 2018, an additional 51 were added to the population from Kangaroo Island.
This year, 20 captive-bred red-tailed phascogales have been reintroduced as part of a trial in Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park.
Axford says one of the great successes of Bounceback is the ground its making without the need for exclusion fencing.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with exclusion fences, they certainly have a place,” he says. “A lot of reintroduction projects rely on having these predator fences that keep the predators out … The problem is you can’t fence the whole of Australia if we want to try to look after what we’ve got.”
Bounceback instead went a different route – a range of management activities and clear targeting of pests and predators.
Which brings us back to the shooters.
“They’ve been enormously effective,” Axford says. “They’re a volunteer organisation that’s spent thousands of hours on the job helping the Bounceback program from the get go.”
It’s a sentiment shared by the executive director of Parks and Wildlife, Mike Williams, who also points out the savings to taxpayers.
“Trained volunteers involved in the program have provided thousands of hours to these missions, which would otherwise come at great cost,” he says. “It’s only by removing overpopulations of feral and pest animals that the landscape has been able to return to good health, which has paved the way for species recovery and reintroductions of locally extinct species, such as the western quoll.”
This Dreamtime story was passed down from generation to generationof the Adnyamathanha, the Traditional Owners of the Flinders and Gammon Ranges.
The quoll had fallen in love with the goanna, but it was a forbidden relationship, and the lovers were hunted down in the South Australian outback.
This is the reason the goanna has stripes on its tail – it was beaten by a boomerang – and why the quoll has spots … it was speared.
It’s a tale Pauline McKenzie vividly recalls being told as a child and is why her own small role in the quoll’s reintroduction to Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park meant the world.
“It was down at the homestead in Wilpena Pound,” she recalls.
“I was one of a few elderly ladies from the community given a quoll to release from its bag.
“We’d only ever heard about the idnya in Dreamtime stories as children, so to bring it back after more than 100 years since it was last seen locally has been a wonderful thing for this and future generations.
“It was the first time I’d laid eyes on a western quoll in the flesh, this cute little animal that is part of our Dreamtime that hadn’t been seen locally for 100 years and, lo and behold, here it was right in front of me.”
All the quolls were named after a WA football player from their home state. Hers was “Fyfe”, after the Fremantle Dockers’ star Nat Fyfe.
“We released our quolls down near the waterhole,” McKenzie says.
“It was an emotional moment and an incredible experience to be part of as a community.”
The Adnyamathanha woman and member of the Ikara-Flinders National Park co-management board says the meaning of this ongoing connection cannot be overstated.
Her people have a special relationship with the land, plants and animals called Yura Muda, meaning belief of creation.
The Yura Muda tells of people, spirits and animals weaving through the Flinders Ranges, Gammon Ranges and beyond. And safeguarding this for future generations cannot be achieved without Bounceback, she says.
Another victory has been co-management of the Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park, Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park and Gawler Ranges National Park in partnership with the Environment Department.
“Co-management boards have given our people a voice in the future of our parks and that has been important,” McKenzie says.
And she reserves a special mention for the shooters.
“Through Bounceback’s activities to reduce feral animals, and predators such as foxes and cats, our ancient landscape is recovering,” she says.
“The removal of feral animals such as goats has seen the return of native plant species that are important bush tucker to our people, including quandongs (urti), which are now in abundance in places they weren’t years ago.”
Rob Parkes is already planning his next long weekend to take on the feral cat.
While he no doubt sees it as a worthy adversary, there is no love lost between the two.
“I’m not a big fan of the old cat,” he says.
“The science is saying they eat millions of native fauna every year. They’re an animal that do not belong in the outback.
“They have significant impacts on our native wildlife; I mean they took the quolls out.
“There were no quolls in the Flinders Ranges because of wild cats.”
Not anymore. ■
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