Room to roam for Australian wildlife

A private conservation group buys 607,000 hectares of pristine outback land as sanctuary for endangered species.

Australia's Gouldian finch population has been decimated.

SYDNEY // Conservationists have created one of the world's largest private wildlife sanctuaries in the pristine Kimberley region of Western Australia, which offers new hope for the survival of such threatened species as the iconic Gouldian finch and the northern quoll, a carnivorous marsupial. The Kimberley reserve covers more than 607,000 hectares and is a wonderland that is home to hundreds of types of birds and mammals as well as an array of amphibians and reptiles.

"It's a very expansive landscape, big rolling hills of different sorts of savannah," said Sarah Legge, a scientist employed by Australian Wildlife Conservancy, a non-profit organisation based in Perth, which has purchased the remote property for AUS$4 million (Dh12.1m). "It's punctuated by ancient sandstone ranges that are all contorted and rippled and run in parallel lines. The landscape is dramatic.

"If you're sitting at a waterhole, and you see the bluest sky and this ancient red rock and purple water and then the green spinifex, it's very intense and very emotional. It creates an atmosphere that people connect to. It's very spiritual," Ms Legge said. The Kimberley region spans much of the northern part of Western Australia's rugged outback. The Indian Ocean sparkles to the west and the aqua blue expanses of the Timor Sea lie to the north. Environmentalists said this sparsely populated land is one of the world's last great wilderness areas and its flora and fauna have been under increasing pressure from wild fires and feral animals, such as cats and foxes.

Atticus Fleming, Australian Wildlife Conservancy's chief executive, said the private sector has an important role to play in caring for such a fragile environment. "In Australia, it's traditionally been government that does all of the on-ground conservation. We are developing a pretty exciting new model for conservation in Australia. We're out there acquiring large, remote properties where we can and, more importantly, we're putting people out there on the ground to do the fire management, the feral animal control and the science that needs to be done to protect Australia's wildlife."

Managing the bush fire menace is a fundamental part of conservation. A single outbreak can cover almost one million hectares, and the impact on native species can be catastrophic. Controlled burning can alleviate the savage effects of wildfires by creating buffer zones that stop their advance and aerial incendiaries are dropped by helicopter to replicate the system of strategic burning that was once carried out by Australia's indigenous people.

Australian Wildlife Conservancy was formed in the 1990s and owns 18 properties covering 2.4m hectares across the country. Half of the funds for the new reserve, which joins an existing sanctuary to create a huge wildlife haven in the central Kimberley region, were donated by the federal government, while the rest came from benefactors across Australia and others in Europe and the United States. "In Australia, we've got the worst mammal extinction rate in the world, so worse than anything in Africa, Asia or South America," Mr Fleming said. "We've left it to government to do all of the work for a long time. That's obviously not enough. The job's too big for government so we desperately need organisations like Australian Wildlife Conservancy to be complementing and building on what government can do."

Australia is an enormous place. It is the world's sixth largest country after Russia, Canada, China, the United States and Brazil, and is the planet's biggest island. Michael Kennedy, the director of the Humane Society International, agreed that protecting the continent's vast assortment of plants and wildlife is too big a job for government. "There is a huge place for private conservation activities not just non-government organisations that can buy large amounts of land but also small, private landholders who have anything from a few acres to a couple of hundred hectares. Those sorts of smaller places are also increasingly important for building a national network of conservation, and private efforts, whether by big guys or small guys, are very important."

Mr Kennedy described the ability of Australian Wildlife Conservancy and other non-government organisations to get such places protected as "first-class conservation. It's what we need more of," he said. Such intervention could help save the colourful Gouldian Finch, which is an indicator of the broader health of the ecosystem. Observers said when its population is increasing, there is a good chance that other seed-eating birds are also doing well.

"This landscape is full of endangered species, like the Gouldian finch, which is an iconic Australian bird, the northern quoll and purple-crowned fairy wren. You might not have heard of these species, but the key thing is the Kimberley is in quite a bit of trouble. In the past few decades the populations of species like the Gouldian finch have really been decimated," said Mr Fleming. "It's not just a stunning landscape, it's a hot spot for the wildlife of northern Australia."

@Email:[e-mail]