
When the charity Eucaluptus Australia formed in 2007 they nominated 23rd March as National Eucalyptus and published their three key priorities:
You can read more on the history of the day & how it came about here but for now we’d like to introduce you to our ‘Life Around A Gum Tree‘ educational resource & Bingo Cards which is full of local content & perfect for anyone who wants to learn more about these beautiful trees in a fun & interactive way!
About our ‘Life Around A Gum Tree’ Resource.

Life Around A Gum Tree is an immersive, multi-sensory teaching resource centred around a ‘bingo’ style game. We’ve provided 8 bingo cards, each featuring 8 living things you’d find around a gum tree.
In the teacher’s pack there are three converstation starters to stimulate discussion plus a set of 20 biology fact cards detailing information about the life you’ll find around a gum tree. These can be read out in any order with students marking off their living thing as it’s name is mentioned. First one to complete the card shouts ‘trees’ and is declared the winner.
The teacher cards contain links to further supporting resources including videos, audio recordings, Citizen Science apps and more.
Finally, and what we like best about this resource is that it was developed locally for our community and can be used to support local field trips, surveys and other such excursions.
For educators, the resource maps well to the primary science syllabus:
Early stage 1: Ste-3LW-ST
Explores the characteristics, needs and uses of living things.
Stage 1: ST1-4LW-S
Describes observable features of living things and their environments
Stage 2: ST2-4LW-S
Compares features and characteristics of living and non-living things
Stage 3: ST3-4LW-S
Examines how the environment affects the growth, survival and adaptation of living things.
Tip for those wanting to play the game with their class.
Print out then laminate your bingo cards so they can be wiped down and re-used. This also works well for anyone wanting to take the game outdoors in all weathers.
For the general public
We encourage you to download the PDF and spend an hour or so sitting under your favourite gum tree & contemplaiting the diversity of life it supports.
After successfully kayaking in the new year in 2025, we’ve decided to do it again!
Join us at Wyangala Dam on Thursday 29th January as we reflect on water management from our Landcare perspective while enjoying a paddle and float.
We’ll share an outline of what water-focused events we’ve got planned for the rest of the year (think enhancing farm dams, Carp musters, ecological planting etc) while encouraging reflection on the origins of World Wetland Day.
We look forward to spending a relaxing morning in nature with you in beautiful surrounds just 30 minutes from Cowra CBD

So what will the kayaking be like?
We plan to kayak only 2-3km return, following the banks of the dam out to a swimming spot before returning back to the shore for a picnic. The shore line is rocky in parts but there are plenty of areas along the stretch we’ll be visiting with easy access to the water.
Feel free to give Amanda a call if you want to talk through any questions before deciding whether to join. 0439 576 903
And what is World Wetlands Day?
World Wetlands Day is marked on 2nd Feb each year. The first World Wetlands Day was held in Ramsar, Iran in 1971 day 1971, a day that marked the anniversary of the Ramsar Convention.
It is essential to our survival as a species that we protect and conserve the worlds wetlands – something that we’ve often not prioritised as human populations have expanded across the world. It will be interesting to consider the role of water management (including the building of dams) in wetland conservation and spend some time thinking on our personal and community values, wants and needs.
Summer is a great time for bug spotting and this season, I’ve spotted a few interesting things while out and about, including these Helena Gum Moths – Austrocaligula helena.

My first sighting was of the adult moth resting on an Acacia shrub. The adult moths live for around 2 weeks during which time they focus all their energy on breeding. During this stage in their life-cycle, they can’t eat due to having no mouth parts. As such, while are most likely to be found on or around Eucalypt trees during their Caterpillar stage, as moths, they could be hanging out anywhere!
Here’s the Caterpillar I spotted – these are pretty big and chunky! I spotted this on the side of the road so I moved them into the leaf litter. Hopefully this one will make it to its next lifecycle stage – the cocoon which apparently they can remain in for up to 2 years. Wow!
Want more information? Here’s a short and informative video on gum moths.
These beautiful insects can be found across our Landcare region so keep your eyes peeled!
In September we worked with the Cowra Woodland Birds Program on an evening event for the Bird Interest Group Network (BIGnet) annual gathering occuring in Cowra. Titled ‘Caring for nature’s pest controllers’ the event featured a short film followed by panel discussion around second generation rodenticides (SGARs).
At that time we were all nervously awaiting a decision from the Australian government’s pesticide and veterinary medicines authority (APVMA) as to whether regulations around this family of rat and mice poisons would be tightened.
SGARs can have devastating impacts on non-target species such as owls, eagles and magpies due to the poison remaining active in the rodents body after death & accumulating in their natural predators. Not all rodenticides behave this way or pose these risks.
A decision, which was due any day, was finally published this week (December). The APVMA press release is available here.
The APVMA process includes a consultation period which is now open for your input. Submissions can be made until 16th March 2026.

Resources
A PDF of the APVMA’s latest review can be downloaded from here.
Night Calling Short Film available to view for free on Youtube.
Birdlife Australia on Rat Poison.
A news article by the ABC covering response to the review can be found here.
Some councils around the world have developed ‘Owl Friendly’ policies. Margaret River Council is an example of that.
It’s been over a decade that we’ve been welcoming Brigidine College students from Randwick in Sydney to our region for their HSC field trips. Each year, in the words of the Pretenders, some things change, some stay the same.
This year’s students are here to enhance their Food Nutrition & Hospitality syllabi with a stay that spans three days out exploring our Mid Lachlan region.
Our theme for this year’s Hospitality students was ‘Food Builds Community‘ and included a trip to Montrose House in Canowindra, a shift at Canowindra Connections Food Basket & Community Kitchen plus a chance for students to cook for the group on one of our local organic farms.
The Food Technology students theme was ‘Good Soil, Good Food’ focusing on how our grain, beef, lamb, olive, fig and grape producers care for the soil and how their management decisions shape their foods nutritional content, taste and smell.
We started with a greeting from Cowra Deputy Mayor Nikki Kiss before going on to visit seven farm-based enterprises & four local food & community focused businesses before waving our goodbyes.
We’ve so many interesting and diverse farms out here in the Central West, it’s a great place to bring the syllabus to life.
Good luck with your HSC class of 2025/26 & hope to see some more students from Brigidine next year!
2025 has been a great year for on-ground working bee’s which, thanks to our Glossy Black Cockatoo planting project resulted in 60 volunteers (approximately 240 volunteer hours) across 6 planting events! Brilliant stuff, but that wasn’t enough for you apparently and we’ve been asked to provide MORE working bee’s which is totally amazing. So, we put on one last event for the year and that was at Will’s farm in Cudal – partly to thank Will for his work in looking after our tube-stock in between plantings but also because his place is just so beautiful & worthy of a helping hand.
Will runs a sheep agistment enterprise on part of his 274 hectare farm Lowanna with the rest comprising of paddocks, corridoors and other biodiversity plantings. Will & his wife Sue who sadly passed away last year, have been on a tree-growing mission since moving to the property in 2002, so much so that Will’s lost count of just how many have been planted and you can tell – the whole place is just beautiful.
Today our team of willing workers turned up to help Will straighten up some old tree guards that were still required while removing and collecting guards that had served their purpose & weeding around the edges. Before doing that we took a look at Will’s substantial veggie garden and got a tour of his growing native plant nursery – a labour of love and necessity – reducing both the costs and stock availability issues that can occur in large-scale revegetation initiatives like the one Will has taken on.
Our team of 10 made light work of the tree guard’s before downing tools and walking up to the farm’s high point where we could really appreciate the beauty that brought Will & Sue here. Sue wasn’t left behind, we paid our respects to her as we passed where her ashes were scattered and thanked her for leaving such a beautiful green-thumbed mark on this lucky piece of the world.
N.B: When we arrived, we were introduced to the resident Boobook owl (See slide show). This is what the owl would sound like should they call.
We’re always happy to have more volunteers on board for our Working Bee & project planting events so if this looks like something you’d like to participate in, do drop us an email or give us a call. We publish coming events in our monthly newsletter which is free to sign up to and also contains details of grants you can apply for plus other events in our region that we feel may be of interest.
Last year we received funding from the Biodiversity Conservation Trust to run a project looking at soil microbiology across our region. As lead of that project for Mid Lachlan Landcare, I chose to trial the Microbiometer, an in-paddock soil microbiology test that allows farmers and land managers to measure their total soil microbes and the soil fungi:bacteria ratio both quickly and cost effectively. While that project finished up in August 2024, I still had test strips remaining which, during the course of this year I’ve used while going about my general farm site visits & school excursious. By late November, with around 10 test strips left I headed out with Grazing Group leader Scott Hickman to a farm in Carcoar and to a farmer who’se been doing quite a bit of experimenting of his own in the soil biology space…

Sam has been on this farm since 1983 and has been taking a soil-biology first approach since 1991. Prioritising soil biology has taken many forms including how livestock are managed, what crops are sown, how paddocks are treated & what & when any adjuvants are added. A common narrative that exists around farmers is that they are a conservative, risk-averse bunch who tend to stick to their own tried-and-tested ways of doing things. While that can be true and, given the mental, physical and even spiritual costs associated with getting things wrong in farm-world, understandable, I’d say most farmers I meet are deeply curious, experimental & up for a challenge. You could definitely say that about Sam.
I won’t share the soil microbiology results we collected here as I’ve not yet had a chance to discuss them with Sam but suffice to say his microbes seem happy and in good balance. What I will do though is explain a little more about what we did, just in case you were wanting to do the same at your place.
Soil Microbiology & General Health Check List.

One of the cheapest, fastest and most rewarding things you can do with soil is prod it! Just noticing how easy it is to get a fork in the ground tells you so much about compaction layering & soil composition.
2. Count the critters you can see.

I always conduct an informal count & characterisation of what we find in a clod of soil. Soil macrofauna includes worms, beetles, ants, termites and grubs. These play a vital role in cycling nutrients – the general rule-of-thumb being ‘the more (diversity & total number) the merrier’!
3. Soil structure

We note the colour & smell of the soil (you can smell life in the soil & get an idea if you’ve got a more bacteria or fungi dominant sample). Get a feel for soil texture (sant, silt, organic matter, clay & sand) & evaluate soil compaction.
4. Root depth & soil aggregates around plant roots

We have a look at how deep roots penetrate, how the soil adheres and aggregates around plant roots, whether the soil contains pores and other air spaces, how well it holds together & how heavy it feels.
5. Biodiversity.

We look at what species are growing, the variety of species and the condition of the paddocks – bare ground vs green growth vs brown material.
6. Site History

We get a thorough history of each paddock including when it was last grazed (if relevant), any spraying that’s occured and crop rotations.
Testing Soil Microbiology
I then took samples from the top 5cm of soil and evaluated them using the Microbiometer. Soil microbiology generally follows a couple of general patterns with soils more likely to be fungi dominant in woody, undisturbed areas and more likely bacteria dominant in cropping systems when new crops are emerging and in boggier areas – fungi preferring slow systems and bacteria preferring fast. The total number of microbes present vary based on how much action there is at the site and the sites underlying potential (which is related to the underlying geology).
I also measure soil pH and do a rough soil moisture reading as moisture levels do affect total microbe numbers.
All of this data, plus consideration of the site geography (weather impacts, slope, wind speeds etc) helps us come up with a narrative description explaining the farms current soil health.
Soil health in a farming system is largely subjective and relative in as much as the aim is to get as much productivity out of the soil as possible while maintaining system health. Farming soils are not ‘natural’ in the sense that an undisturbed Box Gum Grassy Woodland may be thought of as natural but that doesn’t mean they are inferior – it means they are different. For example, a healthy and productive farmed soil in a Box Gum Grassy Woodland area will likely support a diverse range of grasses, sedges and forbes while lacking orchid diversity. This being because many orchids prefer the soil types found on unimproved pastures – free draining, more sandy surface with light to no grazing pressure. So, improving pasture for grazing can create soil conditions over time that disadvantage orchids or advantage grasses and/or improving pasture so you can graze more results in more chance any orchids that grow will be preferentially grazed out. It’s likely all manageable but it’s definitely not simple and involves the land manager being clear-eyed on what success will look like for them so they can manage for that.
Scott and I had a great day out at Sam’s place and while we’ve now run out of test strips, let us know if this is something you’d be interested in and we’ll see if we can get funding for some more on-ground activity. Also keep your eyes out for a Soil-Microbiology-On-Farms event with our Grazing Group in 2026.
A new Citizen Science project led by the Invastive Species Council & Invertebrates Australia launched on iNaturalist this year. Bugs in My Backyard Week ran from 17 – 23 November 2025 creating the first springtime snapshot of bugs across Australia. I joined the project as an individual this year to get a feel for the nuances and challenges around recording bug life. My big-picture goal was to be able to promote this as an initiative across our community next time the count runs and integrate it into our community engagement/ empowerment program for 2026 and beyond.
Before I dive into my experience I’m sharing a link to the project introduction webinar. This gives a thorough overview of the aims of the project, how to take part and some tips on how best to record sightings.
How my week counting bugs went.
My first thought was ‘boy, that was a little trickier than recording plants but it was also a whole lot of fun!’
I live with a sensory processing disorder which means I experience a lag-like delay in brain-body information gathering. My delay is sometimes so slight, I don’t really notice but at other times is quite pronounced, leading me to be noticably clumsy, clunky and otherwise uncoordinated. Bug hunting, at least the way I was doing it, brought out this vulnerability & made it all feel a little difficult for a while. For example, I’d spot a bug, get my phone on camera setting then be too slow to get the thing focused before the bug flew off. Or I’d spot something, focus on it then be so focused that I’d lose my balance and get all wobbly or start to feel sick (vestibular issues feel like sea sickness). There were the times when everything was going well but then my hair or a bug would land on my face – immediately discombobulating. Finally there when I knew there was something there but I just couldn’t get my eyes to focus enough to find it in my viewfinder. Eugh!
While some of the practical issues I experienced are exacerbated by me being me, most could be experienced by anyone and everyone while doing this type of activity and because of this, I wanted to find a way for bug hunting to be a little more comfortable in general. More on that later…
Pressing On
Despite my difficulties I kept doing the same thing each day, namely, going out in my ‘backyard’ and staring intensely at every bush, bloom and branchlet I came across. Doing that got me a total of 81 observations of 61 species across the week which put me into the top 100 observers (I’m quite competitive with these things – if you’re going to do something, you may as well give it your all) which, given there was 38,707 observers across the project was, I felt, impressive!
Making Bug Hunting Easier & More Accessible
During the week my daughter ran a bug observation activity with her primary school students. She opted for the sheet-collection method where you pop a light coloured piece of fabric under your target shrub before giving it a bit of a shake. The fabric collects the bugs which can then be further ‘caught’ if needs be, using a bug-friendly magnifying device or clear sample box that gives you more time to make your observation. I tried this after my week of doing-it-tough as, while it sounds like an obvious no-brainer way to proceed, one never really appreciates either the impact of making something easier or the consequences of making something hard until you’ve experienced it and this sure did make things a bit easier, especially for spiders, ladybeetles & the other little bugs that don’t tend to fly away quickly.

Capturing the more flighty bugs – especially while pollinating flowers
One trick mentioned in the Bug Week introduction video I’ve linked to that I tried out was to video, rather than take a photo of the bugs. I found my phone camera remained focused on the bugs for longer while in video mode, allowing me to re-wind at a later date and capture still images for uploading.
Videoing bugs can be quite rewarding in its own right. Here are two nectar scarabs that I came across this morning. They made me smile at just how much they were throwing their whole selves into the task of nectar hunting.
Other things I noted while bug hunting were as follows. I plan to use these observations to inform how I organise any Bug Hunting we do as a Landcare group in future.

Here’s some of what I captured during my week of bug-hunting.
A final note on bugs and safety
Mozzies are both part of the rich and varied tapestry of bug like and also a potential problem while bug hunting. Our local council area (Cowra) is listed as being a high risk for Japanese Encephalitis, a disease carried by Mosquitoes and as such, a vaccine, which is heavily subsidised, is recommended for outdoor workers. I got mine the week after the Bug hunt which, while not ideal was, I suppose, better than nothing given my new hobby. Oh and it didn’t sting nearly as much as the assassin fly that landed on me during Bug hunt week!

Take care out there and keep your eyes peeled for a Mid Lachlan Bug Hunt Extravaganza in 2026.
Cowra and Cabbonne Shire Councils sit on top of some of the most fascinating geology in the Central West. Pair that with our rich and diverse farmland & ancient Box Gum Grassy Woodlands and you’ve a recipe for an interesting & engaging field trip.

This month we welcomed Shoalhaven High School’s Earth & Environmental Science Students for an immersive day of observing, testing & experiencing how the earth’s cycles happen and, more importantly, how human management decisions impact them.
Topics covered on the day included: Salinity, Dryland Farming, Erosion, Site hydrology, Land Use Change & Reading the Landscape. Drop us an email if you’d like your students to have this experience.