Wildlife Queensland Kedron Brook Branch - Wildlife Australia Guide

Keeping Kedron Brook bubbling

(An article on Kedron Brook Branch of Wildlife Queensland, recently published in Wildlife Australia magazine).

WILDLIFE Queensland’s Kedron Brook Catchment Branch is one of the most unusual conservation groups in Australia. Its members protect and rehabilitate the meandering waterway that interconnects critical habitat areas across the inner northside suburbs of Brisbane.

It is a challenging environment in all respects, starting with a baseload of pollution and litter to manage and pressure to provide more dwellings in the area.

Branch members strive to engage with the public to make them aware of the constant threats to the ecosystems dependent on the brook – and to enlist their support when the area is negatively encroached upon by residential and industrial development.

The vigilance of the Wildlife Queensland Kedron Brook Catchment Branch is continuous because the high demand for land in the area has often driven rezoning applications that would have far-reaching ecosystem impacts.

Defending the waterline

In recent years the branch has helped defend the waterway itself from an intensive development on a local area known as Murphy’s Paddock in Everton Park; a high density multi-storey development on flood plain and erosion-prone land at Northmore St, Mitchelton, which also included aged care and childcare elements as ‘sweeteners’ by developers; and a proposed development of 32 townhouses at Walkers Way, Nundah, which required a fill of more than 5m to elevate it out of the flood zone.

“Along with the intense development in the headwaters of the Brook, it can be seen that the idea of ‘green corridors’ and sympathetic development is more intent than practice,” wrote branch president Robert Standish-White in his annual report.

“The upper catchment areas are rapidly being covered with development too, so the Brook struggles to remain viable as a natural asset. Other invaders are spreading weeds and feral animals, which seem to hold little interest for authorities.”

While keeping a constant vigil on such development proposals, Kedron Brook Catchment members are always operating at community level, staging monthly bird walks, led by Jenny and Charles Ivin, in conjunction with Bird Queensland. Members are also maintaining the local Squirrel Glider Program – which includes locating nest boxes in local forest areas – and presenting regular Glider Program Community Awareness Days.

Keeping engaged with science

Kedron Brook members are also engaged in a range of scientific research projects vital to the region. Water quality research is regularly conducted and the branch has been engaging with students to assist.

The branch’s Student Catchment Immersion Program day in early August of 2019 was a major success, while another QUT student group came to Kedron Brook’s temporary catchment centre and did some planting, birding and fish analysis, followed by lunch and a “planning exercise that all went very well”.

Fish snapshot programs are run in areas such as the Mitchelton and Kalinga Park areas of the creek, where it was recorded that, although numbers were slightly diminished, “native fish are hanging on against the odds”.

The branch has also worked with the local Keperra Sanctuary to develop a series of ‘floating islands’ and place nest boxes to assist gliders, possums and threatened bird species. The islands are proving to be quite a wildlife attraction, Mr Standish-White reported and “the planting along their little waterline is going well”.

There is more to do than ever, for members of the Wildlife Queensland Kedron Brook Catchment Branch.

“Challenges we are not short of, with climate change looming ever larger on all our horizons,” Mr Standish-White said. “Let’s hope we can continue to muster up the energy, humour and courage needed to make a difference.”

www.kedronbrook.org.au

www.kedronbrook.wildlife.org.au

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