Meet the ecologists surveying Brogo Reserve to track pockets of wildlife refugia after the fires

The 120 hectares of Brogo Reserve actually preserves and protects some of the last remaining dry rainforest in NSW and creates an area of vital refuge for many species of flora and fauna.

The parcel of land was purchased by independent not-for-profit Bush Heritage Australia in 1995 and was its first property purchased on the Australian mainland.

The reserve is special in that it protects pockets of dry rainforest around rocky outcrops bursting with low canopies of Port Jackson figs, Kurrajong, and native quince.

The higher slopes and gully heads of the reserve are forested with the rare wet vine forest (only found in the Bega Valley) and are littered with red gum, coast grey box, and blue box.

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The Black Summer bushfires that ravaged Far South Coast communities also wreaked havoc on the existing pockets of bushland and the habitat of a number of native species.

A wind change left the Brogo Reserve unscathed by the fires and it has become an isolated wildlife refugia for bird life and other animals.

Bush Heritage was the successful recipient of a grant from the Department of Agriculture, Water, and the Environment for $130,000 to implement a 12-month project, finishing up at the end of March 2022.

The aim of the government's investment was to support bushfire recovery for wildlife and their habitats.

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Grant activities included targeted surveys and habitat mapping for threatened fauna, building partnerships with traditional owners, and managing and controlling invasive pests and weeds.

Reserve manager Joshua Wellington started working at the reserve one day a week following the fires doing weed management and road maintenance.

He grew up and has lived most of his life just on the other side of the Reserve and previously worked as an ecologist, so he was an obvious choice when the project management role came up.

Mr Wellington said Bush Heritage facilitation with traditional owners had already begun and he was hoping by next year they would be able to come on country and share knowledge and implement some small-scale cultural burns.

The survey component of the grant was being conducted by ecologists to work out the presence or absence of specific species, targeting a range of threaten species.

"So I've gone through and figured out all the species that potentially occur here and then we've tried to design a survey methodology that will target those particular species.

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"It will allow us to determine whether a species occurs here and if we've got the data and recorded them.

"Hopefully in the future we can do some more really specific targeted surveying and determine say like a population or something like that," said Mr Wellington.

The surveys are being run by Verona-based ecologist Sam Patmore and Moruya-based ecologist Vanessa Place. Both are fauna ecologists running their own consultancy companies in the region.

Mr Patmore is always busy when it comes to spring as he conducts wildlife surveys for various organisations, but this season he was particularly excited to score a contract just around the corner from home.

The ecologists employ various techniques to scope the area. Wildlife cameras, call playback, and spotlighting are used to conduct a census of life in the reserve.

In October Mr Patmore said they had already managed to spot powerful owls, scarlet robins, native bush rats, dunnarts, wombats, possums, gliders, swamp wallabies, and eastern grey kangaroos.

They are also looking for as many threatened species as possible, such as spotted-tail quoll and the southern brown bandicoot.

They are also on the hunt for forest owls including the sooty owl and barking owl, bats such as the grey-headed flying-fox and the yellow-bellied sheathtail-bat, and birds like the gang-gang cockatoos and dusky woodswallow.

"If they [BHA] find threatened species they can then use that data to get more funding from the government to do more initiatives," said Mr Patmore.

"It's hard work at times but it's a lot of fun" he said.

The other big job Mr Wellington does is weed management. He has been trying to find the most effective way to control tiger pear (relative of the infamous prickly pear) in the reserve.

He prefers not to use herbicides, but instead has been surveying the effectiveness of a biological control method using a South American cochineal beetle that only attacks the cactus.

"The outbreaks here are pretty small and confined so I think they're controllable manually, but it's intensive and really hard work, it's hard on your body. I get quite a lot of enjoyment from it personally, but it's hard on your back sometimes," he said.

So far the reserve has been quite successful in controlling the weed outbreak and the main infestation has been removed. Mr Wellington's main focus was to now remove any new plants that pop up.

Surveying introduced species such as foxes and deer was another aspect of his job and he wanted to build on his skills to carry out pest management directly on the field in the coming year.