Pearls and Irritations

A juvenile greater glider explores an area about to be logged in Badja State Forest. Image: Wilderness Australia.

Government inaction has prompted conservation groups to apply citizen science and sleepless nights to find greater glider den trees and use the NSW logging industry’s own rules to prevent logging and save 3,000 greater gliders.

In response to government inaction, a community effort in ‘tactical science’ has blossomed over the past year in NSW. It is a last-ditch attempt to save an iconic forest species.

The greater glider, one of the largest gliding mammals in the world, is headed towards extinction. Its population is thought to have halved in the last two decades, just three generations of the species. The primary cause is native forest logging in combination with bushfires that are now being magnified by climate change. Both the NSW and federal governments have taken little meaningful action so far, despite their ‘no extinctions’ catchphrase.

Rather than protesting from the sidelines, conservation groups developed a plan to save the species with direct action on the ground. The idea was to use citizen science to apply the logging industry’s own rules on greater glider protection more comprehensively than the industry themselves would.

The eyeshine of a greater glider reflects from a hollow near the top of an old growth eucalypt, identified as a den tree during a thermal drone survey. Image copyright Ripper Corp.

Greater gliders live in ‘den trees,’ or old trees containing hollows that provide them with shelter during the day. Whenever these are found and recorded in the government’s BioNet database, under NSW logging rules called the Coastal Integrated Forestry Operations Approvals (CIFOA) logging must be excluded within a 50-metre radius of that tree.

As a result, each den tree that conservationists find creates a permanent conservation zone of 0.78 hectares in size. While that is a relatively small area compared to each greater glider’s home range of several hectares, in forests with a high density of greater gliders those zones can add up. Intensive and systematic surveys can blanket an area in so many overlapping exclusion zones that the forest becomes effectively unloggable.

When a glider is spotlighted, a phone app like Avenza is used to record its location with GPS data. Image: Wilderness Australia.

Blanketing Badja with den trees

Badja State Forest, east of Cooma, sits on the crest of the Great Dividing Range, where it rises to more than 1,100 metres in elevation. Because greater gliders suffer from heat stress that can prevent them from eating enough, high elevations and their cooler conditions are preferred as habitat by the species. We estimate that more than 3,000 greater gliders live in Badja, making it one of the most critical populations in the State.

Badja State Forest in the foreground connects seamlessly to the rugged hills of Deua National Park in the background. Image: Wilderness Australia.

Wilderness Australia’s Project Manager Ella stands by a den tree in Badja compartment 2017, prior to logging commencing. Image: Wilderness Australia.

In July 2024, with snow still on the ground, Wilderness Australia and South East Forest Rescue began spotlighting for den trees in two areas that had been recently scheduled for logging – compartments 2017 and 2018 in Badja state forest. Over the next five weeks we found and mapped thirty den trees. It was at that moment that the logging machines were trucked in, ready to begin work.

We submitted the den tree records the same day the machines arrived. They were contained in a report made to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who provide regulatory oversight of logging, and Forestry Corporation of NSW (FCNSW), who oversee the logging. Each of those records then had to be located, their exclusion zones mapped, and the harvest plan modified by FCNSW.

That intervention bought us twelve days’ reprieve. During that pause, we found and mapped another seven den trees – bringing the total to 37. On the twelfth night we located a koala sitting in a narrow-leaved peppermint (Eucalyptus radiata) directly in the path of the logging machines.

The next morning the operation went ‘active’ on FCNSW’s publicly accessible Plan Portal, meaning logging would likely begin that day. The first thing they would do was bulldoze an access road and construct a log dump – but the koala was sitting beside that road, and within a planned log dump. We believed that, without urgent action to halt work, the koala could be killed within hours.

An excavator, harvester, bulldozer, snigger and fuel tank parked where a logging access road was to be constructed. A koala sat less than 250 metres ahead through the trees, right in the path of planned work. Image: Wilderness Australia.

The large male koala, photographed at night during spotlighting. It was almost impossible to see and would likely have been missed by a bulldozer or excavator operator, and thus killed without anyone knowing it was even there. Image: Wilderness Australia.

We submitted another report, now with a koala added to the usual den tree records. That koala sighting stopped the road construction immediately. Further koala assessment surveys were ordered by the EPA. We made complaints about FCNSW’s incorrect marking up of koala feed trees (another thing required under logging rules). It was all too much, and a week later they abandoned that entire half of compartment 2018.

We discovered this fact when they bulldozed a new road into compartment 2017 just to the south. It seems they had decided they couldn’t go through us, and so they would go around. They took several days working on that road, removing post-fire regrowth and constructing drainage lines and rollover banks. In that time we found and mapped another ten den trees, blanketing key sections of the new road in a way that would completely prevent logging there. We submitted those records on November 11, and logging was halted there as well.

The newly constructed road in compartment 2017. Every tree in this image was soon protected within den tree exclusion zones. Image: Wilderness Australia.

FCNSW’s harvest plan for Badja compartments 2018 (top half) and 2017 (bottom half). The magenta circles define the 57 den tree exclusion zones found during our survey work. The new road (in black) winds roughly east to west across the width of the southern compartment.

A greater glider photographed sitting in the entrance to its den hollow in compartment 2017, a short distance from the newly bulldozed road. Gliders must be seen entering or exiting a hollow for a den tree to be legitimately recorded. Everything within 50 metres of this tree must now be protected. Image: Wilderness Australia.

We were prepared to keep our surveys going until the bitter end. But on November 13 or 14 all the machines were trucked out of Badja State Forest. They had abandoned the six logging compartments that were scheduled for logging there.

In the 107 days since we recorded the first den tree, a total of 57 den trees were found. Not a single tree was logged in that time, other than the bulldozing of four-year-old fire regrowth along the newly cleared road.

Greater glider den tree surveys have been conducted by many community groups with Wilderness Australia in more than a dozen NSW state forests over the past year. They have found 825 greater gliders. A report has detailed the results in four of the forests.

In the coming few months, the NSW government will conclude its Forestry Industry Action Plan, which will decide the future of the NSW forestry industry. If that process results in a permanent end to native forest logging, then the three months of citizen science in the Badja will have protected some three thousand greater gliders for good.