Helping Strzelecki koalas at Hallston

GEOFF and Donna Russell hosted a tree planting day at their Hallston property on Sunday in glorious sunshine.
The day attracted 20 volunteers, including friends and family of the Russell’s, as well as members of the local Landcare community and supporters of the Friends of Strzelecki Koalas group.
The Russell’s spent both days on the weekend planting a mixture of trees, shrubs and ground covers. They also established a number of sedges and reeds in their wet areas. Funding was made available through the Friends of the Strzelecki Koala and South Gippsland Water’s One Million Trees Project to complete stage two of their plan to fence off, remove willows and revegetate gullies on their property that drain into the west branch of the Tarwin River.
The aims of these grants are to restore habitat for the Strzelecki Koala population and other local fauna as well as helping to improve water quality draining into local waterways. According to Nicole Walsh, a Landcare project officer with the South Gippsland Landcare Network “the seventeen hundred plus plants were supplied by Strzelecki Plant Farm at Allambee Reserve and included a number of eucalypt species favoured by koala, including blue gum, manna gum, messmate and Strzelecki gum as well as wide variety of understorey species”.
After walking a short way down to the planting site the volunteers, a number of who were Environmental Studies students from RMIT in Melbourne, got stuck in and planted out 800 plants and shrubs. Afterwards they enjoyed a well deserved barbecue lunch. It was a fantastic effort by all involved and a great way to spend a sunny Sunday.
Geoff and Donna Russell also recently had a visitor according to Donna “we got woken up early one morning to the dogs barking furiously, and heard something (or someone) walking along our front deck and thought it was an intruder.” After getting up to investigate, they discovered it was a male koala passing through. “He went up one of our paperbark trees at the bottom of our garden and stayed there for three days before moving on”, Donna said. “We had to keep the dogs locked up in the yard for the whole time, but we didn’t want them harassing our special visitor.” Donna and Geoff were thrilled to finally see a koala on their property after sixteen years. “We are so happy to think we are providing habitat for our local koalas and other wildlife” Donna said.
If you are interested in obtaining a grant to protect or restore koala habitat please contact the South Gippsland Landcare Network on 5662 5759 or email [email protected].

Planting a future: volunteers from Sunday’s planting day at Hallston aimed at restoring habitat for the Strzelecki Koala population.

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Posted by Sarah Vella on May 19 2015. Filed under Rural News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry