Bathurst Regional Council wants you to have your say on Open Space

Participate and provide your feedback on how you would like to use the
parks, gardens, sporting fields and natural areas in the Bathurst region
over the next 20 years.

Bathurst Regional Council, together with specialist open space, recreation and sport planners Parkland Planners and Otium Planning Group, is preparing the Bathurst 2040
Open Space Strategy to guide planning and provision of open space in the
Bathurst Region over the next 20 years.

The strategy will cover the Bathurst urban and suburban areas, as well as
the region’s rural villages.

Mayor Graeme Hanger OAM said the population has increased by 50 per cent
over the last 25 years and more residential development is occurring.

“We want to ensure that open spaces will meet the needs of a growing and
changing community in the future,” he said.

Residents, workers, students and visitors are encouraged to comment and
Council is also seeking input from schools, sporting, recreation,
environmental, community and business groups.   Join in the conversation
online by telling us:

• What open spaces do you like to use, and why?
• What do you do there, and how often do you visit?
• What are the best open spaces in the Bathurst Region, and why?
• What open spaces will the community need in the future?
• Where should these open spaces be provided?
• How can existing open spaces be improved to meet yours and the
community’s needs?

To provide feedback, complete a survey on
yoursay.bathurst.nsw.gov.au/openspace or visit facebook or twitter, email
council@bathurst.nsw.gov.au or post to Private Mail Bag 17, Bathurst NSW
2795. Comments can be made until Friday, 15 December.

For more information on the Bathurst 2040 Open Space Strategy, please
contact Nicholas Murphy, Senior Strategic Planner at Bathurst Regional
Council on 6333 6211.

The Secret Life of Mudgee Cats Exposed!

The secret lives of Mudgee’s wandering cats have been exposed as part of a Domestic Cat Tracking project organised by Central Tablelands Local Land Services.

During the project GPS motion sensing devices were attached to 12 domestic cats in and around the city of Mudgee to track their every movement for up to 10 days.

The citizen science project funded through the Commonwealth’s National Landcare Program was designed to educate cat owners and promote awareness of the surprisingly large distances domestic cats can roam if given free access to the outdoors.

Land Services Officer Julie Reynolds says the results shocked some owners.

"People will tell you their cat just lays around the house, that it doesn't go anywhere, however the tracking data has shown many cats are far more active than their owners realised,” said Julie.

"Most of the cats regularly roamed up to two blocks from their homes and many wandered half a kilometre away on a daily basis.”

Mudgee cat, Mason, was recorded wandering up to 2 kilometres away from his home base, and stayed out for several days.

“We wanted to track Mason because he would disappear for a few days at a time,” said Mason’s owner, Margaret Hoffman.

Mason’s family assumed he was off visiting his girlfriend at a neighbour’s house, but it turns out Mason was travelling much further afield.

“We desexed him because we thought it would stop him wandering but he still disappears and when he comes home he sleeps for two days. Now we know why,” said Michael Hoffman.

The cat is a very important companion animal, however Local Land Services is urging cat owners to restrict the movement of their pets to the house, the backyard, or a cat enclosure.

Researchers estimate pet cats kill approximately 61 million birds every year, with cats likely to significantly increase the extinction risk faced by some bird species in Australia.[1]

Keeping your cat in at night can halve the number of wildlife killed by your pet. Other options include putting a bell on your cat’s collar and desexing to reduce your cat’s drive to roam, and more importantly to stop unwanted kittens being born.

“We’re hoping this research will encourage more cat owners to keep their pets from roaming and reduce their impact on native wildlife,” said Julie Reynolds.

Controlling cat movement will also protect pets from traffic accidents and fights with other cats, while reducing exposure to infections such as feline AIDS.

The Cat Tracker project is supported by funding from the Australian Government through the National Landcare Program.

________________________________

[1] Report compiled by John Woinarski, Brett Murphy, Leigh-Ann Woolley, Sarah Legge, Stephen Garnett and Tim Doherty, published in

The Guardian 4 October 2017  https://theconversation.com/for-whom-the-bell-tolls-cats-kill-more-than-a-million-australian-birds-every-day-85084

Photo Caption: Mudgee cat, Mason, was tracked wandering up to 2 kilometres away from his home base

Research into habitat restoration wins scholarship

Climbing up trees searching for possums and endangered birds is just another day in the office for PhD candidate Reannan Honey.

Reannan Honey conducting field work, climbing trees is all part of the fun. Image courtesy of Reannan Honey.

It’s all part of Ms Honey’s current research project investigating habitat restoration for animals that are dependent on hollows.

“Tree hollows take a very long time to form—usually over one hundred years,” Ms Honey said.

“With native forestry, we tend to cut down the trees that are over a hundred years old because they are the big ones that provide the most wood.”

The current strategy to solve this problem is using nest boxes. But so far, they haven’t proved to be very effective, with many endangered animals often rejecting the nest boxes.

Ms Honey’s research is looking at whether artificial hollows can provide an alternative option to nest boxes.

“Artificial hollows are basically hollows that are cut into the tree itself,” she said. “The face plate is removed, the trunk is hollowed out and then the face plate returned with a hole in it, so the animal can enter and exit.”

The project is in its early days with Ms Honey often travelling into the bush, trapping possums and sugar gliders in order to microchip and track them to see which animals are using the artificial hollows, and how.

Now Ms Honey’s research has received a generous boost thanks to the 2017 AWS Wildlife Ecology Science Research Scholarship, which she will spend on data logging equipment that will allow her to effectively measure temperature and humidity.

“Thermochron and hygrochron are the size of a button-battery and they can collect three months of data, such as temperature and humidity every hour—so they’re pretty cool,” Ms Honey said.

Reannan’s research will investigate whether artificial hollows can provide an alternative option to nest boxes for animals, like this possum.
Image courtesy of Reannan Honey.

Ms Honey’s PhD project is also generously supported by the Central Tablelands Local Land Services, the Wettenhall Environment Trust and the Central West Councils Environment & Waterways Alliance who created over 200 artificial hollows to increase habitat for the Superb Parrot.

Ms Honey has been at UTS for six years, starting in a Bachelor of Science in Applied Chemistry, before transferring into a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Sciences. Last year she completed her honours research year investigating whether incubation temperatures affect the learning abilities in hatching geckos.

Ms Honey is also part of the Student Promotional Representative of UTS (SPROUT) team at UTS Science, and is passionate about science communication and talking to the general public about scientific discoveries.

“Communicating science is challenging, there’s a lot more things that both scientists and the media could be doing to help explain scientific research better,” Ms Honey said.

“I enjoy communicating my work to difference audiences and that’s something I hope to develop more at as I progress through my PhD.”

You can follow Reannan Honey on Instagram @reehoney17.

*This article was written by Filip Stempien and originally appeared at www.uts.edu.au