Feral job, but someone’s got to do it
Victoria Laurie; 3/9/08
Finding a dingo tracking collar in the Kimberley grasslands is one of the hardest tasks animal ecologist Malcolm Kennedy faces in his research. He’s helped by a GPS satellite that communicates with the collar as the dingo slinks across the stony heat of northern Australia. But it takes a helicopter and a needle-sharp eye to find the animal and retrieve its $2000 collar after the tracking is over.Kennedy’s research is a case of hunter and hunted. He has put collars on dingoes and feral cats, and tracked their movements through several months. “I want to know how dingoes and cats interact,” he says. “Dingoes will eat cats, but do they do it to an extent that has a benefit in protecting small native mammals from cats? “If we found that there was a very big benefit then we’d encourage people to stop persecuting dingoes where threatened native animals are involved. Dingo baiting goes on in national parks.”
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Kennedy’s research involves an odd manoeuvre in a helicopter. Every few weeks, he must upload the information held in the collars of the dingoes and cats he is tracking.
In the Kimberley’s rocky terrain, that can usually be achieved only through a helicopter hovering over a site for up to 20 minutes while information is uploaded from
the ground. “Dingo and cat interaction has grabbed people’s imagination in universities,” says Kennedy, who recently completed a PhD in small mammal fire ecology at the, University of Queensland’s school of natural and rural systems management. “We should have a good idea by the end of the year whether dingoes affect the way cats behave.”
Kennedy is a strong advocate of basing conservation methods on solid scientific knowledge. “I give the analogy of agriculture,” he says. “If you went to a farm and the farmer didn’t know how many animals he had on his property or whether the number was going up or down, or how to change that, you’d be concerned about their capacity to manage their property.”
Tags: Australia, Environment