How Dingoes are Saving the Outback

hello i'm david pollock and i'm from moline station in the murchison region of western australia so william is a 134 000 hectare pastoral property and for most of its history it's been a sheep station and the murchison region which is mainly mulga and salt bush country has a reputation for having produced some of the finest wolves in the world and certainly 30 years ago the murchison was considered to be well and truly sheep country we ran sheep here because we'd always run sheep here and it had been very profitable in the past we had 130 years worth of infrastructure put in for sheep we didn't have cattle fences we had sheep fences and we had sheep yards and we had sheep troughs and we had a wall shed so we were set up for sheep but the problem is that our landscape was becoming very degraded particularly after every drought and i would argue that it was much less because of the humble sheep and much more because of the animals that came with them because it was something that we weren't really taking into account the unmanageable grazers the goats and the kangaroos the kangaroos we had a kangaroo shooter everybody did out here and we thought that was the most that we could do to control the kangaroo population and as for the goats we mustered and sold as many of those as we possibly could and we convinced ourselves that the money that we got from the goats was a bonus but it wasn't a bonus it was a false economy because between the kangaroos and the ghosts it meant that we could never rest areas and it meant that we could never take animals out of an area during a drought so that they didn't cause more damage so in 2006 my family made a decision to swap from running sheep into running cattle uh we did that for three main reasons firstly neither my brother nor i were particularly keen on running sheep cattle look like about the same amount of work and the same amount of money for a lot more fun to be had so uh there was that our woolshed also blew down that was a factor and uh also the dingoes were quite obviously about to come back into this region that was going to make running sheep pretty unviable pretty quickly so i saw my first dingo in 2007 and i resisted the urge to shoot it because we just had a visit from a very good passers from the northern territory and we we got him over because i was particularly keen on recovering the pasture particularly the palatable perennial grasses which you can see in the background so we drove him around for three days and uh at the end of the three days we said you know what do you reckon bob and he said what you need is a road train full of dingos uh because he recognized that we certainly weren't likely to be able to recover the pasture with the amount of unmanaged grazers that we had in the landscape prior to that the wa ag department had done a uh survey uh the southern range zones and they estimated that 61 of the grazing pressure was coming from goats and kangaroos that's 12 percent coming from goats and 49 percent of the grazing pressure was coming from kangaroos and the kangaroos are particularly problematic not just because there's heaps of them but also because uh they're a specific grass eater and uh the palatable perennial grass is really important for providing energy it is essentially the limiting factor in production out here uh because it provides energy in the drier months our inability to control the total grazing pressure has always been the biggest threat for australian pastoralism in semi-arid and arid regions it might not seem like it but the total grazing pressure is the reason that we have no mechanism for dealing with drought it's the reason that we haven't designed and adopted more appropriate grazing systems and it's the reason that our resources have been decimated we must reduce and control the total grazing pressure if we're going to claim that we are managing this land and for that we need the dingo once the jingo's returned to william the effect on the landscape was immediate because something we tried to achieve as pastors for 30-plus years without any sort of success happened within a few short years without us doing anything at all essentially the dingoes wiped out the entire goat population and they also reduced the kangaroo population from about fifteen thousand to about fifteen hundred and that reduction in grazing pressure means that now for the first time in 130 years we've got new generations of important riparian trees like the ones you see behind me coming back in the river system things like gum trees and she oaks and calystomans so those plants are so important because they are what slows down the water in the river systems and splits that water back out onto the floodplains where we can use it for productive purposes grasses appeared that i'd never seen before and while the grass has appeared the foxes disappeared and i know it doesn't add much to the bottom line but seeing things like baby busters for the first time in your life because there's no foxes going around and eating their eggs is a pretty exciting thing even more exciting is that some of the some of the creeks and even some of the rivers have started to flow clear out here because the understory has come back and that's able to filter the flood water and slow it down as it moves through the landscape so pardon the pun but i think there can be no clearer example of how important the dingo is to our rangeland ecosystems people often ask us but don't the dingoes eat your calves and digos certainly are known to eat calves and we expected a certain level of predation because that's what we were told to expect by uh people who have not been persecuting dingoes on their property but we actually haven't had any evidence of dingo predation on our carves whatsoever and i think that's the three main reasons firstly we rotationally graze so our cows are always in a different area which means they're always coming into contact with different dingoes and i don't think that those dingoes realise that calves could be on the menu secondly we don't make any attempt to regulate the numbers of dingos because i think the science is pretty well settled that they're pretty good at regulating their own numbers and thirdly i think that the level of calf predation is closely linked to the distances that cows are walking in between the water and the food in a degraded landscape and especially if there's also drier conditions the cows are having to walk long distances to get from the water to the food and if they have a calf at the time the calf can't necessarily walk those long distances so the cow is forced to leave the calf out into the bush and it walks into the water and then it walks back out to the calf but if it leaves its calf for too long it's vulnerable to predation uh by dingoes whereas here at william we've been putting a lot of effort into getting the perennial pasture back on track so there's a lot more pasture closer to the trough which means the cow doesn't have to walk out anywhere near as far to get a feed so even if it does leave the the calf out in the bush it's uh vulnerable for a much shorter period of time but most of the time the calf can actually accompany the cow into the water in the cow can protect it the whole time i think that's why we haven't had any level of predation in the last 14 years but don't take my word for it there are plenty of pastors who've been using dingoes to their economic advantage and some of them have been doing so for a very long time for example gil campbell he owns claravale station uh near mitchell in queensland uh he runs 13 000 hectares of popular box in lance wood country and he's got a self-replacing cattle breeding operation and he's uh he's found consistent benefits uh in not controlling dingo since 1995 in order to manage his populations of kangaroos wallabies goats and pigs and angus and karen emmett uh would be well known in the long reach region because they run nun bar a 50 000 hectare cattle operation and they stopped dingo control back in 2001 and have been reaping the ecological and economic benefits ever since

Channel: Outback Australia Conservation

Views: 192,326

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Id: eRp2xp73n0s

Length: 7min 54sec (474 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021