Bird Bandits Fly In To Take Rural Livelihoods
The Age
Sunday June 14, 1992
In the western Wimmera bird bandits are stealing the crops. This means the loss of a livelihood for many farmers, the end of the sunflower industry in the Wimmera and enduring rural frustration with city bureaucracy.
Gil Ampt runs a 380-hectare farm about 65 kilometres from Horsham and is the president of the Western Victoria Cockatoo Control Committee. Mr Ampt's farm is home to about 1000 corellas, a white long-billed cockatoo. Many of his neighbors are worse off; one farm hosts about 5000.
For more than 10 years the region's farmers have seen plague after plague of corellas. They fly in, eat and destroy the crops and fly away. Farmers have tried scare guns, shooting, scarecrows, chasing, shouting and even screeching, to little or no avail.
The corella problem first became unmanageable in 1980. Three hundred and fifty local people packed out the Town Hall in Goroke. Impassioned speeches were made and motions passed. The locals resolved to approach the State Government and ask that they be allowed to poison the birds or to trap them for export.
But despite many approaches to successive ministers, poisoning and trapping is still illegal. Not daunted, Mr Ampt said he planned to ask the Minister for Conservation and Environment, Mr Pullen, to review the prohibitions.
Mr Ampt has heard of corellas being sold in the United States for $7500.
``There is a big market for them," Mr Ampt says. ``Of course the price would go down if they were exported but the Government won't allow it, which is a bit stiff.
``They are just getting shot around here anyway and there is no money in it for the country. If they were exported there would be money not just for us but for the Government, cage builders, lots of people.
``It's a major problem for the whole district. The birds are living on the backs of the farmers."
© 1992 The Age
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