Three and a half years ago, Karst Kreun bought 60 hectares (150 acres) of land by Mount Buller in memory of his late wife, Lindy.
Located in Mansfield in Victoria’s north-east, the property, named “Karlindy” after his wife, had been used for generations for intense farming and seed production.
“It had 11 mature trees on it,” Kreun says. “That’s it.”
Kruen has planted 13,500 native trees and shrubs so far and is aiming for 90,000 by the time he is finished. “I’ve always been keen on conservation and I thought this was a good project to work on,” he says of his mission to attract more birds and wildlife.
“They come for miles. Robins and swallows, wrens and the gang-gang. They have a unique sound.”
Gang-gang cockatoos are listed as endangered under the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act due to habitat loss in the cool alpine forests they call home.
Rewilding rural Victoria
A similar project is under way at Tillabudgery, a property in the hamlet of Woodfield, near Bonnie Doon, owned by Kirsten Hutchison and her sister Neridda. They inherited the land after their father’s death four years ago and have been continuing his conservation efforts with help from the Victorian government’s BushBank program. The scheme is funding 20,000ha of native forest replanting across the state through partnerships with private landowners.
Hutchison says their aim is to provide foraging habitats for the native wildlife, including gang-gangs, through restoring 43ha of native forest.
The site is steep and challenging to work on but they have managed to plant thousands of trees and to control weeds, rabbits and sambar deer.
“It is gang-gang cockatoo country,” Hutchison says. “We sometimes see or hear them during the warmer months when they return to the higher, wetter forests.”
Conservation was their father’s passion. “We always grew up with a strong sense of moral social conscience when it came to the environment,” Hutchison says. “It is our hope that our restoration project will help provide more foraging habitat and help buffer the adjacent Maintongoon bushland reserve to reduce any edge effects for [the gang-gang].”
“Edge effects” are the intrusion of invasive plants and animals into native vegetation through adjacent cleared farmland.
Sean Dooley, the public affairs manager of Birdlife, an Australian non-profit organisation, says gang-gang cockatoos were first listed as endangered in 2022.
“Many people attribute this uplisting of threatened status to the impacts of the black summer bushfires, however, the declines in population were happening well before this,” Dooley says.
The most reliable surveys of the species show population declines of as much as 69% between 1999 and 2019.
“The black summer bushfires were another hammer blow with somewhere between 28 to 36% of their habitat burnt, and an estimated 10% of the population killed in the fires,” Dooley says.
According to the Action Plan for Australian Birds 2020, habitat loss, particularly nesting hollows, due to land-clearing and continuing native forest logging is the main threat to the bird.
Hutchison says she and her sister are also working with the conservation organisation Trust for Nature to permanently protect the property in a conservation covenant, ensuring it remains a long-term habitat for the cockatoos.
“Dad spent most of his time on the property and really threw himself into planting trees on the land,” she says. “We thought we would fulfil Dad’s dream and legacy, transform his property and leave something for the future.”
At Karlindy, Kruen has a similar plan: “The aim is to bring it as close as I can to what it was 200 years ago.”
