Local ecological defenders tackle the rising tide of invasive species

As the sun sets over the fairway at Boonah Golf Club, about an hour south-west of Brisbane, the ladies of Women Against Cane Toads begin to turn up.

Their mission? Fill their buckets with as many cane toads as they can catch.  

Introduced to Australia in an attempt to control the beetles damaging sugar cane, these warty toads excrete bufotoxin from glands located on their back, making them highly toxic.

A group of women gather at night under the lights of the Boonah Golf Club
Women Against Cane Toads gather at the Boonah Golf Club before a night of toad busting. (ABC/Closer Productions: Poppy Fitzpatrick)

Native animals, such as goannas, snakes, dingoes and quolls, are particularly vulnerable.

Despite being introduced in Far North Queensland, they can now be found in New South Wales, Western Australia and as far south as the outer suburbs of Melbourne, according to the Invasive Species Council.

So, armed with gloves, buckets and head torches, WACT (as they are also known) scour the golf course and nearby paddocks for their prey, filling buckets as they go.

But these ladies are just one of many community groups engaged in the prolonged battle with Australia’s invasive species. 

Toad busting

The reason WACT regular Linda Kimber ventures out at night to hunt for cane toads is simple — it’s good for the environment. 

“If we don’t get out and do it, who else is going to?” she told ABC iView’s Eat The Invaders. 

Linda is responsible for the groups toad-o-meter, which originally went to the hundreds but has since been revised after nearly 10,000 toads were caught in the first week alone.

Out on the golf course, they pick up toad after toad, buckets groaning under their weight.

“People get excited about getting these big ones,” she said, holding up a particularly large and warty toad by the leg.

“But they’ve already done the damage … the little ones have the next 15 years to decimate the environment.”

By the end of the night, WACT have collected 215 toads, which they will then store in a fridge to ensure they fall asleep before being transferred to a freezer for “eternal sleep”.

Cane toad numbers in Australia are estimated to be over 200 million and growing so does this type of toad busting have an impact on their numbers?

According to Linda, yes. 

“We’ve found that places where we’ve done toad busting before, the next year the numbers are down enormously,” she said. 

Members of Women Against Cane Toads gather aorund a toad being held by its leg
Women Against Cane Toads inspecting the toads they’ve just caught.  (ABC/Closer Productions: Poppy Fitzpatrick)

While WACT tackle the cane toad problem in their backyard, further south solutions to reduce numbers of a different pest are underway. 

Rabbit invaders

At Barwon Park, just over an hour south-west of Melbourne, you’ll find the stately bluestone mansion built by pastoralist Thomas Austin and his wife Elizabeth in the late 1800s. 

According to Guy Hull, author of The Ferals That Ate Australia, Austin also built an aristocratic game park for himself, filling the ground with partridges, pheasants, blackbirds and around two dozen wild rabbits.

“It was from this point here that the rabbit plague really started,” Hull told ABC iview’s Eat The Invaders.

Black and white illustration of the Duke of Edinburgh rabbit shooting at Barwon Park.
Illustration of the Duke of Edinburgh rabbit shooting at Barwon Park in the 1860s.

According to CSIRO scientist Tanja Strive, the 24 bunnies Austin brought in were the ones that eventually colonised most of Australia.

“We’ve done some genetic studies that show that quite clearly,” she said.

Taking less than 70 years to colonise most of Australia, rabbits are one of the fastest-ever recorded invasions of a mammal anywhere in the world.

They’ve also gone on to become one of our most destructive pests.

“They threaten over 300 native species … more than cats or foxes,” Dr Strive said. 

“Take the bilby, the greater bilby is threatened and the lesser bilby is already extinct and rabbits had a major role in that.”

A nation of rabbit eaters

Australia was once a nation of rabbit eaters, according to Guy Hull.

“Back in the forties, we were eating around 27 million rabbits a year,” he said.

Widely available due to their sheer numbers, so called “rabbitos” would trap bunnies and sell them door-to-door,  often announcing their arrival by singing out “rabbit-oh!”.

Kim Johnson from the Winchelsea’s branch of the Country Women’s Association, fondly remembers her mum’s beautiful rabbit stew.

A fellow member recalls how during the depression the local hospital was built on rabbit pelts, which they sold to raise money for the local hospital. 

Kim believes we’ve lost our rabbit cuisine because we’ve lost the recipes for them.

“Everyone’s mum would have one of these [handwritten book of recipes] … this book is my mum’s and it brings back memories of my mother because there’s beautiful cursive writing,” she told ABC iview’s Eat The Invaders holding up her mother’s recipe collection. 

“A simple recipe like what’s in here has just proven that simplicity is the key to being able to have a tasty, tasty dish.” 

Pets or predators?

Cats are believed to have arrived in Australia on the First Fleet before taking as little as 70 years to spread throughout the country.

Each year, cats kill over 1.5 billion native mammals, birds, reptiles and frogs, according to the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.

Kiwirrkurra rangers scan for signs of feral cats in the Gibson Desert
Kiwirrkurra ranger coordinator Dannica Shultz with Kiwirrkurra rangers Mantua James Nangala (left) and Yukultji Napangati (right) scan for signs of feral cats. (ABC/Closer Productions: Poppy Fitzpatrick)

This includes the bilby, a culturally significant animal to the Kiwirrkurra in the Gibson Desert, one of the most remote communities in Australia.

According to the Indigenous Desert Alliance, feral cats are a major threat to the vulnerable bilby. 

But tackling this problem is a tricky one, given the emotional connection many pet owners have for their furry companions.

Kirsha Kaechele is a curator at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) and author of Eat The Problem, about eating invasive species.

She said the cat problem is a difficult topic but one that needs to be addressed.

A bilby in the desert
The bilby is sacred to the Kiwirrkurra community.  (Supplied: Australian Wildlife Conservancy)

“It’s all very confronting and I know it’s upsetting, but we need to think about it,” Kaechele said.

According to Jaana Dielenberg from the Biodiversity Council, as a nation we don’t understand what our cats are up to and the impact they might be having.

“Two-thirds of people still let their cats roam and I guess that’s why, partly, we’re having this sort of national-level rethink about cats,” she said.

“It’d be great if we start thinking that this is what we aspire to as a country — to stop our cats having an impact and particularly people getting new cats.”

Mantua James Nangala hunts for feral cats in the Gibson Desert
In Kiwirrkurra, feral cats have been hunted for their meat and to protect the bilby, which is sacred to this remote Indigenous community. (ABC/Closer Productions: Poppy Fitzpatrick)

Dr Rachel Paltridge, an ecologist from the Indigenous Desert Alliance, works alongside the Kiwirrkurra rangers to help combat the cat problem.

“The rangers can track down the actual cats that are hunting around the bilby burrows,” she told ABC iview’s Eat The Invaders. 

“So we find that cat that has visited that burrow and we track that cat down and basically no cat can escape the Kiwirrkurra hunters.”

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