The goose of granite islands – by Suyanti Winoto-Lewin
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
Forty million years ago a great rift was opening across the remains of the supercontinent Gondwana. Australia and Antarctica had snuggled together for more than a billion years, but now they slowly cleaved apart. Ocean rushed in to sizzle over the hot, fresh scars, but the break was not clean. One band of granite, old and insistent, stretched between the parting continents. As Australia drifted north, the granite arm held fast to a corner of Antarctica, pulling a piece free and dragging it behind.
This was the birth of Lutruwita/Tasmania and the hundreds of granite islands that tie it to the mainland’s southernmost promontory. Steady and solid, rounded friendly by caresses of wind, salt and sea over millennia, the granite lands rise in several groups from the eternal motion of the sea. The Furneaux group is dominated by Flinders Island, around which many smaller islands cluster. My colleague and I have come to one of these small, windswept outer islands to survey its ‘natural values’. My hair dances in the wind as I peer through my binoculars at the granite hill that rises ponderous above the grassy lowlands. A stone ruffles its feathers, and blinks.
Born of the rock, the Cape Barren goose is granite grey. She has a sculptural quality, a solidity which belies her feathers and hollow bones. Her stocky legs are pink-red and scaled, her feet broad and dark, and a bright green cere cloaks her short beak. As humble grazers of grass, she and her partner live on this island year-round, faithful to their territory through summer droughts and the grassy abundance of winter. They nest only in these safe grasslands where there are no predators. The only mammals on this island are the occasional human and a fair few sheep.
The caretaker is old stock, with leathered skin and blue eyes. He feels a connection to the lichened gravestones resting in the south-west corner of the island. It is his duty to burn the grass to keep the quail plentiful and the boxthorn at bay. Spotting us tramping through the long grass, he moseys over in his ATV. He knows where the weeds are, where the closest eagle nest is (an island to the north) and how the quail population is faring. He tells us about a woman who lived here with her family in the late 1800s. A marsupial lover, she insisted on establishing a population of wallabies. After she died, the men shot all 800 of them dead.
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When the British arrived, the Furneaux Islands – unlike the peopled continents to the north and south – were not being actively managed to maintain grasslands, game and tuberous plants. There had been no Aboriginal population on the islands for 2000 years, so heathlands and wind and drought-stunted forests came to rule. But the reign of forests over this small archipelago fell when, ten years after the arrival of the first fleet in Botany Bay, a ship ran aground on one of the Furneaux Islands. A rescue mission for the stranded sailors spurred the British exploration of the islands of the Bass Strait, and soon the area became an unlikely centre of colonisation. Sealers arrived with their Aboriginal wives/captives, then farmers came with their sheep. They cut vegetation for timber and firewood and hunted Cape Barren geese for food. They used fire to remove tough shrubbery and maintain grass at a tasty ‘green pick’ stage for their sheep. Many of the islands were soon totally deforested, while intensive burning and grazing depleted topsoil, brought invasive weeds and turned parts of islands to desert. The colonists hunted with little regard for the continued existence of their quarry. Only 40 years after the first goose was eaten, naturalist John Gould visited the islands to find the population of this granite-born bird ‘almost extirpated’.
A small population of Cape Barren geese did persist on those islands too unfriendly for humans. After the Second World War, people abandoned settlements on the outer islands and converged on Flinders Island. They left their sheep to forage and visited as they would the outer paddocks of a farm. This exodus finally gave the geese a break from dinner pots. Between the 1950s and 1970s, the breeding population almost doubled. Pairs recolonised the islands they had avoided during human occupation. Soon all the available breeding habitat was claimed – an area of grasslands more extensive than it had been before deforestation by settlers. Meanwhile on Flinders Island people were establishing large-scale ‘improved’ and irrigated pastures. Farmland on Flinders became a site of abundance which beckoned young geese and those with no mate nor territory. Termed ‘flock geese’, these free spirits fly wherever greener pastures call, leaving behind their more settled kin. The flock geese began to exploit farmers’ lush and cherished fields each summer. In 1976, 5,500 geese flocked to farms on Flinders Island and feasted on the fields.
Geese were a pest to farmers. Not only did they eat the grass (competing with the sheep), but were also perceived to foul pasture and water with their droppings. Conservationists and those who had heard stories of the birds’ plight, had a different perspective. They saw an endangered species that was making an epic recovery but was still vulnerable, with a small population and limited distribution. Farmers found it difficult to believe that the seemingly abundant bird was threatened. Many felt that Parks and Wildlife was ignoring their calls for help in order to appease city-born ideas of conservation. In response to farmers’ concerns, Parks and Wildlife cautiously allowed the hunting of flocking birds on Flinders Island in the 1960s. Licences were restricted so the population would not drop too steeply. Hunts were broadcast on the ABC, in stories that stressed the ‘endangered’ status of the birds. Many people were outraged by what they saw. Following the 1976 hunting season, Parks and Wildlife received 64 letters of opposition. Meanwhile, hunters cherished the opportunity to hunt the geese, and farmers, who had felt ignored by Parks as geese numbers had risen, were pleased with the results. Carefully regulated hunts have occurred most years since, and Cape Barren goose populations in the Furneaux group remain steady.
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This story inspires many questions about our relationships with animals as stock, game and nodes of biodiversity. My colleague and I ponder these as we walk the island; we will interrogate them later as we consider our recommendations. As ecologists, we have been asked to survey the natural values of the island for a prospective buyer. Our client thinks they might plant trees on the island for carbon credits. Done well, this could convert native grassland (back) to native forest. But conservation is never simple, and we need to think about all possible impacts, including to the Cape Barren goose.
On the helicopter ride in we saw the signature of mosaic burning in the patchwork of different hues of green. On the ground, we walk over still-smoking black earth and longer unburnt areas where coast wattle and tea tree are emerging. In response to burning, the ecosystem has developed into tussock grassland. Despite early graziers’ attempts to cater to their stock by sowing pasture species from the northern hemisphere, the grassland here is mostly native.
Native grasslands are one of Australia’s most threatened ecosystems. Before colonisation, the grasslands of mainland Australia and most of Tasmania were regularly burned by Aboriginal people to care for and maintain them. When those people were displaced by colonisers, grasslands were the first ecosystems to be converted to farmland. Those that were left grew into shrubbery or forest from lack of fire. But on the Furneaux Islands the situation was different – without human habitation during the centuries before European colonisation, these grasslands have been managed with fire for only 200 years.
This island, seen through my lens of conservation ecology, is a paradox. I see a native grassland which is burnt in a semi-traditional way and supports a bird significant to conservation (though no longer ‘endangered’). It is a landscape to be valued and retained. At the same time, I see a grassland which is the result of intense deforestation, grazing and burning – processes that have led also to loss of some flora species and topsoil. It is a landscape to be restored. This island exposes the biases that nestle amongst the few clear truths of conservation science.
Reforesting the island and removing stock and fire may be a traditional conservation approach; to learn what a place ‘used to be like’ and aim to return it to that state (though even the pre-human state of the island is debated). Might looking backwards, though, come at the expense of the present values? Further, the ideal of returning to a prior state becomes oblique in the context of ecosystems which were human-managed before European settlement. How do we choose our baseline?
The idea of a steady, pre-European baseline is further complicated when we centre disturbance in our conceptualisation of ecosystems – as is necessary with grasslands. In the fire-managed landscape, grasslands, woodlands and forests shift through time and space, each ecosystem holding its own relationship to the disturbance. Orchestrating these shifts has been vital for Aboriginal people to focus resources in a predicable dance across the landscape. Settlers inadvertently engineered the Furneaux Islands to a similar, though much more static, effect. Breeding habitat for the Cape Barren goose is sustained on the outer islands, while juicy pasture on Flinders Island is nurtured through summer. Hunting the geese who flock to Flinders Island is easy, in the same way it is easy to hunt kangaroos enticed to the freshest grass in the landscape. That there are more geese than available breeding habitat means that geese can be killed without reducing the number of fledglings the following year.
Our discourse about conservation can be sterile. The conservation of species is contrived as a one-way relationship; humans care for biodiversity by protecting species, not by interacting with them. This is all so different to the way in which the people of Lutruwita and Australia cared for their land before colonisation. Then, there was no need for ecologists such as me to advise on land management. Species were respected both as fellow beings and as life-givers. Ecosystems were managed to provide meat, vegetables, fibres and medicine as well as pathways across the landscape. All purposes were part of the same dance.
I’m not advocating hunting threatened species – but relying on an animal for food or sport can engender deep and connected knowledge of that creature. In every breeding season since regulated hunting began, Cape Barren goslings have been counted. We have a more detailed understanding of their population than we do of many other much more threatened species. We also have an idea of how our land management is benefitting the species. We have forged a relationship with the birds – we provide them with more expansive breeding habitat, they breed more each year than the breeding territory can support, we hunt an amount sustainable for the population. This is a dialogue; we can change the hunting limit one year or reduce the available breeding habitat. They can alter their breeding rates, change the places they forage, or expand their territories. Any action will elicit a response. Humans closely track the birds’ population so that we can pick up their messages.
In their way, the visiting flock geese extend an invitation to the farm to take part in the wider ecology of the islands. From the farm and the geese, this relationship extends broadly, to those who participate in hunts, buy produce from the farms, nurture the pasture, burn the breeding habitat, count the birds or just enjoy watching them, and many more besides. Relationships such as this, with species endemic to our corner of the world, should be celebrated. It makes me wonder about all the other relationships that could be possible.
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Images: Biodiversity Heritage Library and Francis Norman - Flickr
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