Trapped
and Lucky!
Kirsty
Greengrass, Department of Sustainability and Environment
Victoria, Australia
I
work with the Department of Sustainability and Environment
(DSE) in the Biodiversity Group as a Senior Flora and Fauna
Officer. April 12th was a very busy day for me because I was
in the middle of a monitoring program where we were
trapping for Brushed-tailed Phascogales, a threatened
species listed as vulnerable in Victoria. The monitoring
program involved trapping for the little critters up in Kinglake
National Park over the period of a week.
My day began by having to wake up at 5am
to get up to Kinglake National Park by 6:30am to begin the
monitoring. The work involved driving through the National
Park along the trapping route with a group of DSE and Parks
Victoria staff and jumping out at each trap site (40 sites
in total with 2 traps at each site) and checking the traps
to see if we’d caught anything.
Trap 15 was the lucky one
today – we caught a big, healthy male Brush-tailed
Phascogale! After weighing him, recording his sex and taking
a tiny sample of skin tissue for DNA analysis, the little
guy was released back up into the tree he was caught next
to. The rest of the trap run unfortunately didn’t catch any
more phascogales, but we did trap some Agile Antechinus and
Sugar Gliders, which is always fun! At about 12pm, we finished
up and headed back to the office.
Back in the office at about 1:30pm, I worked on a couple of
statutory planning cases that had been referred to DSE by
council. One case involved a property owner who wanted a planning
permit to build a house and carport on his property, and the
proposed development involved the removal of native vegetation.
Assessment of the case involved looking up GIS data on the
property, looking at the significance of the vegetation, if
there are any threatened flora and fauna on the site, and
how the property owner plans to protect some of the habitat
values of the property via long term management. I also contacted
council and the property owner to arrange a site visit
for the following day.
I ended the day by finalising a permit I had been working
on. The permit was for a landcare worker who was planning
on doing a revegetation project in their local area. The plants
they wanted to collect seeds from were listed under the Protected
Flora list in the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988; therefore
the landcare worker needed to apply for permission to DSE
via a permit. After completing this, I finished up the day.
My role as a Senior Flora and Fauna Officer is to work on
a mix of Statutory Planning cases as well as to manage the
monitoring and management of a number of threatened species.
It is an excellent job with a mix
of office and fieldwork.
The variety in the workload really keeps me interested and
busy!
In high school, I found it hard to
decide what I wanted to do as a career. I knew that
I loved biology and wanted to work with animals. So I enrolled
in a science degree at Monash University and took Biology
in first year, then majored in Zoology and
Environmental Conservation.
My uni studies opened my eyes to environmental management
for which I developed a strong passion. During my final years
at uni, my honours year and my first year
out of uni, I undertook a number of volunteer and paid work
opportunities in related fields, and gradually made my way
into this exciting position.
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