Wildlife is returning to the Queens Domain after a program to restore its rare and endangered native grasslands. Mammals and birds are back in unprecedented numbers and there are even reports of the critically-endangered forty-spotted pardalote being seen there.
The transformation of the Domain is the result of a comprehensive program to clear the reserve of its thick cover of out-of-control she-oaks which are crowding out other plant species.
Although she-oaks are native to Tasmania they have become invasive because of their rapid spread. Factors that have kept them at bay in the past – like Aboriginal fire regimes and then grazing by domestic, colonial-era animals – no longer apply.
Over the millennia, the local indigenous people, the Muwinina, camped on the Domain and there is still evidence of their middens around the lower slopes of the escarpment which falls away to the River Derwent.
In the Hobart area, the Domain remains the last surviving cultural landscape that was created by Aboriginal burning over tens of thousands of years.
The Hobart City Council’s long-term plan for the Domain is to create an environment of kangaroo grass and scattered white gums that would have been familiar to the Aboriginal people and seen by the first European settlers.
The plan has largely been successful in the areas where it has been applied.
Initially, the council team assigned to the project had to clear invasive foreign weeds like gorse and South African bone seed. Then they set to work on thinning out the she-oaks, by various means including burning and selective tree removal.
As soon as the ground was opened up, not only kangaroo grass but a rare plant only found on the Domain, stinking pennywort, has re-colonised areas rich in moisture and sunshine. Kangaroo grassland itself is a threatened plant community in Tasmania.
The she-oaks had not only denied the understorey and grasslands sunlight, they coated the ground in thick layers of their spiky leaves which meant rain did not reach the soil.
The Domain’s white gums were also suffering dieback because the she-oaks were soaking up moisture demanded by their roots. In the early stages, large areas of she-oaks surrounding the gums were cleared and this has been particularly successful.
As the council’s project team explained during a walk and talk during Threatened Species Day last month, the open grasslands have attracted a range of bird and mammals which have not been a common sight for years. These include brown and barred bandicoots, potoroos, bettong and ring-tailed possums.
Of birds, more and more raptors – including a hunting peregrine falcon – have been seen, along with a single reported sighting by a council team member of a forty-spotted pardalote in a white gum – a favoured tree of the forty-spots –along the joggers’ loop around the northern end of the Domain.
The pardalote is exclusive to Tasmania, mainly to Bruny Island.