I had a long-held dream of one day restoring a plot of degraded farm land. When the chance came up here in 1992 we soon discovered that, rather than revegetating, the job was conserving the incredible biodiversity that had endured and was recovering from years of livestock grazing. Living here came with challenges of poor soils and limited water, and it involved not only consolidating the garden and orchard already started, but minimising disturbances from our activities and managing the effects of other plants and animals, both native and introduced.
Feral rabbits, cats and foxes, rats and various weeds are a constant problem, but ironically the greatest threat to the vegetation and soils over the last ten years has been increasing overgrazing by kangaroos, which camp in the cover of the trees and continually graze the nearest grass. The formerly dominant ‘kangaroo grass’, Themeda triandra, along with many small shrubs, forbs and climbing plants are continually eaten to the ground. Small trial fenced exclosures allowed Themeda to recover, cover the bare soil and set seed for the first time in years, so Frank constructed a larger two-hectare high-fenced exclosure. The regeneration in six months is obvious when compared to the area outside where kangaroos still graze.
Vegetation patterns fluctuate and ecosystems always change and are resilient. But local extinctions of native species in a landscape fragmented by human land uses are losses to that resilience and that place, and they lead to total extinctions.
