This was published 3 months ago
In her day job, Rachel works with koalas. One call changes that
By Mary Ward
In her day job as a NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) threatened species officer, Rachel Labador looks after Sydney’s koala population.
But one phone call from a concerned member of the public to the service’s 13000 PARKS number, and her day changes instantly.
Rachel Labador and Luke McSweeney can be called into action at a moment’s notice.Credit: SMH
Labador is one of 45 NPWS employees who have put their hand up for the service’s “large whale disentanglement team”, a special group on-call to assist whales caught in fishing lines and other ocean debris on their migration along the east coast.
After a strategy meeting, determining how best to reach the animal and if the team can do so safely, she and her colleagues in the team’s greater Sydney branch will set off into the Pacific Ocean, braving choppy seas in an inflatable vessel to free unlucky humpback whales who become stuck in fishing lines off Sydney’s coast.
A typical rescue involves a parent vessel and a group of three wildlife staff on an inflatable, working to free the whale by cutting away the netting, ropes or wires it is trapped in.
“There’s chop, you’re wet, you get cold, you’re getting thrown around in the boat,” said Luke McSweeney, a ranger at Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, north of Sydney, who has been with the disentanglement team since 1998.
With tens of thousands of humpbacks travelling along the NSW coast, the risk of entanglement in fishing gear is high.
All things considered, the days with koalas seem a bit more manageable.
“No, they bite more, and they have claws,” Labador said.
The program is part of a state government effort to understand and minimise whale entanglements, which also includes working with the fishing industry to develop whale- and dolphin-friendly equipment and investing in research about migration and entanglement risks.
If a whale falls behind its migrating group, it can be traumatic for them and impact their family structure.
In 2023, the team freed 13 humpback whales from entanglements. To provide better coverage across the state’s coast, an extra 11 people have joined this year, based at a Hunter-Central Coast branch.
McSweeney said it was great to see the group grow, as the response to a fast-moving entangled whale could require the involvement of staff at multiple locations.
“Last year, we had one caught in fishing gear that wasn’t heavily entangled, and the animal was moving quite quickly; they can get up to four to six knots [seven to 11 km/h],” he said.
While difficult to count, anecdotally, the number of southern hemisphere humpback whales migrating between their feeding grounds near Antarctica and their breeding grounds in the South Pacific is increasing.
“The obvious reason for this is that we’ve stopped whaling, but there are likely other factors,” said Dr Vanessa Pirotta, a Sydney wildlife scientist and author of the book Humpback Highway: diving into the Mysterious World of Whales.
“These animals are able to reproduce quite well – they can have a calf every two or three years, or even every year – so they have been able to grow their population. But there may also be more favourable conditions to support their growth: more krill, or maybe even a climate change impact.”
The Sydney whale-watching season began last week, and Pirotta said the chance of spotting one of the animals off the coast would increase every day until the season peaks in mid-June.
Last week she herself sighted a group of false killer whales in Botany Bay with the Gamay rangers, an Indigenous group caring for conversation land owned by La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council.
But while Pirotta said it was exciting for the public to see one of the 40,000 whales that will transit past Sydney each year, she urged whale watchers to keep their distance.
“There are requirements for keeping distance from the animals both physically and when using a drone,” she said, adding that some footage of whales up close she had seen circulating on social media was a cause for concern.
“When you free them, they have this rush of energy, splashing their tail. That’s amazing to see”.
Rachel Labador, NPWS
The disentanglement team also need to work at a distance, often spending hours assessing the situation and planning their approach.
When a whale is still moving while stuck in debris, additional buoys may be needed to stop its movement, so it can be safely cut free.
“I often get asked: ‘Do they know you’re helping them?’ And the answer is: no, they’re wild animals,” Labador said.
“But you do often have animals that look very exhausted and tired. And when you free them, they have this rush of energy, splashing their tail. That’s amazing to see.”
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