Readers may be interested in the way Mr Barry Traill of the NSW Conservation Council attempted, in 2000, to blame the woodland thickenning phenomena on forestry activities, despite the fact that much of the thickenning is found on non-forestry tenures and locations where the original vegetation was very sparsely treed. He said;

"Forestry practices in the woodlands have been particularly destructive because they have resulted in the systematic conversion of large areas of ‘mixed’ forests of eucalypts and native cypress into monocultures of dense regrowth cypress (Traill 1999). Other threatening processes which continue to affect woodland diversity and condition on public and private tenures include mineral exploration and exploitation, grazing, inappropriate fire regimes, weed invasions, feral animals, altered hydrological regimes and the affects of fragmentation (Robinson & Traill 1996, Traill & Duncan 2000)."
http://www.racac.nsw.gov.au/pdf/preliminary%20fauna%20BBS.pdf

This also provides hard evidence that Mr Traill recognised the existence of the regrowth problem and it's impact on habitat values at least as far back as the year 2000. Yet, Mr Traill is also on record for responding to recent publicity on this issue with the claim that regrowth was not present and did not constitute an ecological problem.

Mr Traill has blatantly tried to put most blame on forestry activities while covering his butt by mentioning a number of other activities that contribute to regrowth thickenning.

He should be particularly condemned for listing "inappropriate fire regimes" while failing to point out that the "inappropriate" part of the fire regimes is the Green/EPA policy of excluding fire, avoiding hazzard reduction burning, and negligent responses to hot summer wildfires.

The "appropriate" fire regimes are those normally practiced on forestry tenures, including cool burns to reduce fuel loads and actually showing up when a summer wildfire is destroying habitat on a scale and intensity never experienced through land clearing.

Presumable, Mr Traill will be at the beach this summer break while farmers and foresters risk their lives to protect both habitats and community from Green/EPA negligence

The CFA in Victoria were shocked in the recent bushfires when places previously burnt in 2002/03 fires burnt again, how often would you have fuel reduction burns? yearly, bi yearly or tri yearly.
If you go to the mountains you would see how ridculous this fuel reduction nonsense is.
The heaviest fuel load is in steep wet gullies, if you wanted to burn these out by the time they were dry enough to burn, the surrounds would be tinder dry, and as these areas are inaccesable and dangerous it would be impossible to control.
One of the problems with fuel reductions are that that they promote growth, and you can't burn all the bush, decisions on where to burn are subjective, and as a lot of fires are arson these ratbags will soon find somewhere else to burn.
I am not against "cool burns" I just think they are overrated, and used as a weapon by rabid right wing ratbags with an idealogical axe to grind.
Alan Hunter

Alan Hunter obviously doesn't live anywhere near a forest. The point about hazard reduction burns is that you conduct them in the places that are most likely to burn with high intensity. That is why steep south facing slopes can be left. They are usually in the shadow of hot northerly winds.

The reason the current fires have returned to the same areas that burned in 2003 is that 2003 was not a mild hazard reduction burn. It was a habitat destroying, stand replacing conflagration in mid-summer. And this means that the scale of the regeneration is commensurate to the scale of the original damage.

In this case the regeneration has involved a lot of epicormic growth (numerous sprouts from the tree trunks) and mass germination of young seedlings which connected the understorey fuel to the canopy fuel. And this mass of young growth is exactly what should have been thinned out with a cool winter burn in 2004 or 2005.

This oversupply of leaf area produced excessive competition for soil moisture which, in turn, produced a dryer forest, sooner, between each rainfall event. So when the big dry kicked in this time, the forest was not only dryer than it would have been in similar conditions prior to 2003, but it was also far more combustible.

When will these urban ignoroids get it through their heads that there are no hard and fast prescriptions in forest management. An extreme fire produces extreme regeneration which, if not fixed by proper management, will only create a continuous cycle of more extreme fire events.

The only "rabid ideology" at play in our forests is rabid green ignorance and a breathtaking capacity for simplistic analysis avoiding the consequences of their negligence.

"Surprisingly, despite the “doom and gloom” text, the reporting rate of the majority of woodland-grassland birds had actually remained unchanged or increased over the 20- year period (for all woodland-grassland species: 48 per cent increased, 38 per cent did not change, and 13 per cent decreased). However the results were very different for grassland-dependent and ground-feeding woodland-grassland birds. These species showed much higher rates of decline over the 20-year period than the species that feed in the canopy layer."
That's a really interesting finding. It does support the landholder contention that the problem is not disapearing trees, but rather disapearing grassland.

I was out in the sticks about half way between Cobar and Ivanhoe in July after the area had a couple of months of reasonable rain. The whole place was alive with feral goats which had presumably migrated from the drier country to the north. My hosts had rounded up around 1500 of these animals in the previous week without making any serious inroads into the number. The majority of them seemed to be eating grass which at that time was growing profusely. This applied also to the flocks of goats I passed on the 150 km drive back into Cobar. Incidentally, there was also an abundance of Grey kangaroos, definitely not a threatened species.

I am no botanist, but on a previous visit at Easter, flying very low across the country mustering goats, I was amazed at the diversity of tree species.

Yes Jennifer. The full report is available on the web at "The State of Australia's Birds 2005: Woodland birds" http://www.deh.gov.au/biodiversity/publications/birds-05/index.html#download. No real explanation is given of the surprising finding of stable or increasing woodland bird populations, other than the possible influence of wetter climatic conditions in 1998-2001 than in 1977-80