AllanL I am interested in the name of the Nature Reserve - I can add it onto my list of failed conservation reserves in Australia that I am studying and arrange for an assessment of its benign neglect.

Tragedy, I’d be interested to know just how you would define a failed reserve.

Sure there are management problems with many reserves, with insufficient fire management, weed and feral animal control. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are a failure. They may still be valuable habitat for rare species or for threatened ecosystems, and they may now be safe from land-clearing or large-scale disturbance from grazing or forestry that they may have been subjected to if not declared reserves.

What exactly does your study entail?

While some National Parks rangers and their contractors may be conscientious but possibly misdirected, the adundance of exotic plants and pests indicates that many rangers and contractors may have been swinging the lead. They would want more money to do more of the same.

Any wonder they are so precious and defensive when it is suggested that other controls might complement their work, especially voluntary work outside of their control.

Locking people out of national parks is a good recipe for the degradation of those areas it would seem.

Did you hear about the helicopter shoot carried out by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service in the Warrambungles National Park? It cost the taxpayers thousands of dollars an hour to hire the helicopter, pilot and shooter, and they couldn't find any goats or pigs in the thick scrub anyway. Unfortunately, the helicopter pilot got a bit lost and they wandered over an adjoining property where a farmers herd of prize angora goats were situated, and they shot the lot of them. However, some of the shot goats were still alive when the angry farmer found them. The enraged farmer took the NP&WS to court for animal cruelty.

Meanwhile, the more clued up Barradine Forestry Commission, which managed the adjacent Pilliga State Forest, had been using teams of SSAA accredited recreational shooters to ferret out and dispatch feral goats and pigs in the forest, for many years. The shooters (I am one of them) had shot tens of thousands of goats and pigs, and had broken up the huge herds of over 200 hundred goats into much smaller groups of a half dozen or more. It did not cost the taxpayers a penny, and the Barradine Forestry Commission is still closing the forest a couple of times a year and using the services of the shooters. T

A similar thing happened at a State forest near Orange where aircraft dropped poisoned baits and they killed everything in the park except the pigs and the goats. This forest then used SSAA accredited shooters who cleaned the place out in one long weekend. It was a simple matter to close the forest by closing off the roads leading into it and putting up signs.

Shalmaneser does not know this because he is a city boy who is unaware that the sort of parks where the shootings are proposed, are usually very remote and extensive outback areas where no member of the public has any interest in bushwalking in anyway. If Shalmaneser lives in Sydney, he probably thinks that all human habitation in Australia ends at the Gladesville Bridge.

I’m with shalmaneser. We need to keep firearms our of national parks. Better that feral cats, foxes and wild dogs continue to overwhelm government funded efforts to control them. Feral cats alone are estimated to be killing over 36 million small native mammals a year in the Northern Territory. No worries! What you don't see don't matter.
http://www.marsupialsociety.org/02wi03.html
Best this carnage is left hidden, from public view. What idiot would want someone with a firearm in these remote parks that actually has the means to get rid of some ferals?