Remaking Nature - A story about Yandina Creek Wetland

One day in November he ventured beyond the road and into the adjoining private land to survey the full extent of the wetlands. He was amazed by what he found. "Flocks of migratory shorebirds flew about; a pair of stately black-necked storks strutted their stuff; scores of egrets, spoonbills, pelicans and other waterbirds graced the horizon in every direction," he wrote on his blog http://sunshinecoastbirds.blogspot.com/.

Roberts was especially struck by the shorebirds. There were large numbers of Latham’s snipe, a Japanese migrant, as well as the similar but unrelated, and endangered, Australian painted snipe. There was also the once abundant curlew sandpiper: a bird that breeds in Siberia, now critically endangered due to habitat destruction along the East Asian–Australasian Flyway, a migration passage stretching from Russia and Alaska to Tasmania and New Zealand. There were aquatic mammals such as the rakali, or water rat, and terrestrial ones including the swamp rat. Along with the thousands of smaller birds, they provided abundant prey for a variety of raptors: common species like black and whistling kites, and scarcer ones including spotted harriers, grey goshawks and peregrine falcons. At night, the rare eastern grass owl patrolled the verges of the marsh.

Roberts was a naturalist of repute. In a Brisbane share house in 1974, he’d borne witness to the bizarre breeding biology of a curious, recently discovered frog, a female of which he and some friends kept in an aquarium. One evening, to their astonishment, the frog began vomiting live, fully developed baby frogs from its mouth: it had incubated them in its stomach. The southern gastric brooding frog is now extinct (as is its northern congener). The southern gastric brooding frog had lived under rocks along the rainforest streams of the Conondale Range in the Sunshine Coast hinterland.

In 1976, Roberts rediscovered the isolated southern race of the nocturnal and cryptic marbled frogmouth, a bird long feared extinct, in the same area. At the height of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s development-mad rule of Queensland, Roberts became a player in the fight to protect the ranges from logging.

In 2015, Roberts stepped up his campaign to save the Yandina Creek Wetlands. Having worked for decades in the newsrooms of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Bulletin and The Australian, he knew how to connect with stakeholders, politicians and the media. But whereas the Conondale Ranges featured some of the best remaining subtropical rainforest in Queensland, the boggy river flats along the Maroochy River was no wilderness. Moreover, it was privately owned. The land had been occupied by cane farmers before it was sold to developers in the mid-2000s, after the Nambour sugar mill shut down.

A few years later, the farm’s ageing floodgates failed, inundating the area with tidal water from the river and Yandina Creek. The accidental result was a refuge for native and migratory birds and other animals whose habitat elsewhere on the Sunshine Coast had mostly been destroyed. It was a classic example of a novel ecosystem: a heavily human-modified landscape that nonetheless retained significant natural environmental value. The failure of the floodgates meant that the land returned to something like what it might have looked like before sugarcane was planted, creating what Roberts said was one of the best wetlands in Queensland, with a variety of sedges, grasslands, deep pools, mudflats and mangroves.

Technically, novel habitats can be defined as almost anything altered by human hands, whether through ingenuity or wanton destruction. The Anthropocene has ushered in Earth’s sixth mass extinction, an event the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal called a "biological annihilation"" constituting a threat to human civilisation. Almost half of 177 mammal species surveyed had lost 80 per cent of their habitat between 1900 and 2015. The fauna and flora most vulnerable to extinction through human land usage and occupation are the specialists: obviously, species that occupy limited ecological niches are the most vulnerable to habitat loss or disturbance. But others are doing their best to hang on, some by adapting as best (and as quickly) as they can to whatever landscape, whether modified or natural, enables them to find enough food, shelter and opportunities to breed.

Roberts’ initial proposal to the Sunshine Coast Council that the land be acquired and protected had already been rejected. He then approached Queensland’s Minister for Environment and Heritage Steven Miles and then federal environment minister Greg Hunt, arguing that threatened species were protected under state and federal laws, with migratory shorebirds being afforded additional support by Australia’s membership of the East Asian– Australasian Flyway Partnership. Miles and Hunt were unenthusiastic. To them, Roberts was trying to convince them of the aesthetic and environmental values of a low-lying swamp. They declined to intervene, on the grounds that the wetland was human modified.

In July 2015, the floodgates were repaired, preventing tidal inflows. Within days, the swamp had been drained, leaving hundreds of waterbirds, many of them nesting, literally high, dry and in many cases dying. The story of the Yandina Creek Wetlands is an environmental parable. There are parallels elsewhere.

GREG ROBERTS DIDN’T give up on his fight to preserve the Yandina wetlands after their drainage in 2015. He found an ally in Peter Wellington, the speaker of the Queensland parliament in Annastacia Palaszczuk’s minority government. Steven Miles was persuaded to visit the site in person. Roberts also wrote a series of features for his former employer The Australian, not normally known for its environmental advocacy. He compiled a mailing list, and community groups – from national bodies like BirdLife Australia to local ones including the Sunshine Coast Environment Council – joined the campaign. Other media organisations jumped on board.

The landowners, who had leased the property back to cane farmers to repair the floodgates with the intention of establishing continued use, eventually signalled a willingness to negotiate with the government. The game changer was the involvement of Unitywater, chaired by former Brisbane Lord Mayor Jim Soorley, who became aware of the site via BirdLife Australia. Unitywater, responsible for water supply and sewage on the Sunshine Coast, found that by reopening the gates, nutrients from the Maroochy River would be released into the wetland, offsetting releases by the local sewage treatment plant, while providing rich pickings for birds.

The landowners sold the property to Unitywater for $4 million in August 2016. The Yandina Creek Wetlands were officially opened in November 2017. Unitywater said that it purchased the 191-hectare site as a "green alternative to upgrading sewage treatment plants in the area", with Steven Miles saying the wetlands would act as a natural filter, removing over five tonnes of nitrogen from the Maroochy River per year.

In May 2018, the floodgates at the northern end of the wetlands were reopened for the first time since December 2015. Birdlife Southern Queensland volunteers will be undertaking quarterly surveys at the site for the next three years. As the Maroochy River tide flows back in over summer, hopefully the birds – many of them returning from Siberia – will return with it, along with everything that sustains them.