Famished Australian emus invade drought - hit farms
Date: 16-Aug-02
Country: AUSTRALIA
Author: Marie McInerney
Farmers say hungry kangaroos are also on the move into farming country, but they say the ungainly emus, which look like ostriches and can grow up to 1.6 metres (5-foot-2) tall, are more destructive and compete head-on with stock.
"We put the grain out for the sheep and the emus literally leap on the sheep," outback farmer Brennan O'Keeffe told Reuters.
"They'll just tear around the feed ground till the sheep leave," he said from his property near Walgett, in western New South Wales state.
While floods are ravaging Europe and South Asia, drought is spreading across large swathes of Australia's hinterland, hitting the island continent's key grains and meat industries.
The periodic El Nino weather phenomenon has also returned, promising to aggravate the lack of rainfall in Australia.
Emaciated camels have been found dead and dying, stranded in parched desert regions along a 10,000 km (6,210 mile) dog fence designed to protect stocks from the native dingo, and there are reports of feral pigs attacking newborn lambs.
Even the outback Territory Wildlife Park near Darwin issued an appeal for donations of 320 kg (704 pounds) of fish a week, saying it was being inundated by wild pelicans unable to find food in rivers after an unusually dry wet season in Australia's tropical north.
"At the rate the birds are flying in, it is estimated that there will be over 100 pelicans requiring supplementary feeding in the month prior to the (next) wet season," said curator Kevin Langham, noting the park's pelicans normally number just 10.
CALLS FOR CULL
Farmers in South Australia state have called on officials to authorise a cull of emus, which are a protected species and appear, with the kangaroo, on Australia's coat of arms.
They say they are already struggling without rain to produce just enough crop to allow for seeding next year and the emus could be, for many, the final straw.
Australia's official commodity agency, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics has cut its forecast for the national wheat crop this year to a seven year low of 17.1 million tones and warned production could shrink further.
"Our crops are the first green thing the emus see on the edge of the pastoral lands and they're all swarming down," said farmer Kym Fromm from Orroroo, 255 km (160 miles) north of Adelaide.
"They come down and they're in big flocks of up to 100 each. There's one bloke up here with a 500 acre (200 hectare) block and that's been virtually wiped clean (of wheat)," he told Reuters.
There are similar calls for culls in New South Wales, where kangaroos have long been regarded by farmers as a pest.
"There'd be 100, 200 kangaroos left on a small patch of grass and then you'd go back a few days later and the only thing left would be kangaroo manure," said O'Keeffe
But emus added to the problem by being destructive.
"They tear into fences and knock them over, run right up and hit people riding on motorbikes..they're just plain stupid."
South Australian wildlife officer Brenton Arnold warned against a cull, saying the emu invasions were still patchy.
"It's not a plague of emus where you've got them pouring in their thousands out of the rangelands," he said.
But he noted there could be real problems for a host of wild species if the drought goes unbroken for much longer.
"If we don't get rain, it will be a serious situation for both wildlife and the farming community," he told Reuters.