Friends of Trevallyn Reserve celebrate 20 + years

Friends of Trevallyn Reserve

After the work, a cake to celebrate Landcare Tasmania’s 30th – FOTR

Trevallyn Reserve covers an area of over 440 hectares, bounded on the south and west by the spectacular gorge of the South Esk River and Trevallyn Dam and to the north and east by the suburb of Trevallyn.

Friends of Trevallyn Reserve (FOTR) has been around since 2001, so they’re well into their 20s. They work in all parts of the reserve, some of which is administered by the Launceston City Council and the remainder by the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service. They hold regular working bees with the major objective to “engage in environmental maintenance and restoration”.

Join them at 10am tomorrow! Details below.

Like many Wildcare groups, they are also part of the Landcare network and at last month’s working bee they celebrated Landcare’s 30th birthday, and their own achievements over the last 20 + years.

President, Anna Povey describes their last working bee:

Good work well done – FOTR

We had a really lovely time last month, with lots of volunteers coming along, including some newcomers, and Gill brought delicious berry cake to celebrate Landcare Tasmania’s 30th birthday. It is good to come together to celebrate the great work that landcarers like us have done around the state over the last 30 years.

We looked at some native heaths (like Ants Delight and Cranberry Heath) which look similar to the weed but have sharp leaves, and we discussed how the removal of trees under the powerlines has actually created a native grassy system that provides habitat for many tiny threatened species.

We got rid of some outlier Spanish heath plants, and worked back to a dense area of seedlings amongst bracken – the same patch as we keep tackling. We marked the extent of it for future control, and later I (Anna) rang TasNetworks’ contractors. They had sprayed this patch, but it doesn’t seem to have had a good kill rate as the plants were under drought stress at the time and so probably didn’t take up the herbicide well. We’ll see if more die as time goes on. Heartening to find out that TasNetworks has prioritised our site for ongoing control, due to our longterm commitment here, so we will meet the contractor in future and make sure they can find all those heath patches hiding there.

Working Bee, Saturday 13th July – Meet at 10am near 125 New World Avenue. Make sure you wear long pants and covered shoes.

For this Saturday’s session, please join us to get rid of some other weeds that slipped through the contractors’ net, behind the houses of New World Avenue. We might check out some of the plantings we have done in the past, as well as some periwinkle that we think was sprayed by ranger Daniel a few months ago.

If you have any questions, ring John on 0437001 498.