By AL HORT
For about twenty minutes today, I stood and watched a pair of Tasmanian Wedged Tailed Eagles play and hunt over our pastures and forest. I’ve been lucky and privileged to be able to do this regularly since we moved to our property over six years ago.
I’ve seen up to five Wedgies at once catching the updrafts on our farm’s steep slopes, playing, and watching for a stray wallaby or rabbit. I’ve been close by when they swoop on their prey and come within several metres of where I’m standing. The sound of the wind rushing over their wings has to be heard to be believed.
I’ve observed their keen focus from a tree limb, watching me intently while I drive a tractor, work the sheep with the dogs, or just walking in the pastures, hoping that I’ll flush a quick and tasty meal out of the grass for them. I’ve even witnessed them arrive within minutes of gunfire or the dogs barking, knowing that a free and effortless feed is afoot. I will place dead lambs or sheep on slopes with a good updraft in the belief it will keep them from pursuing roadkill and risking death by careless drivers.
I never tire of watching them and my heart is always filled with joy and hope to see such magnificent creatures in my own backyard. Joy to experience their aerial performance and hope that they will endure into the future.
We have several hectares of forest, and after observing numerous times the adult Wedgies and an obvious juvenile descend into our trees, I’m sure there’s a nest hidden within. It is too much of a coincidence to witness this regularly for there not to be a nest or roost amongst the dense, tall, Stringy Barks on a precipitous slope. It is the perfect location for them to rear young, hunt nearby pastures, and soar effortlessly on the constant updrafts from Gunns Plains. We have fenced off and excluded stock from the forest so as not to offend these regal guests on our land.
Today, however, while I once again watched the Wedgies above our farm I was saddened – saddened, as there were only two of them, whereas a few days ago there were three. I hope the missing Wedgie was just a juvenile sent to find his own territory. I despair to think the missing one has been killed on the road or amongst power lines.
As I looked across Gunns Plains to Riana, though, I knew the future of these endangered giants is threatened by a whole new menace and it breaks my heart to think how short-sighted, ignorant, greedy, selfish, and stupid my own species can be.
From where I was looking across to Riana, I saw the border of the proposed North West Renewable Energy Zone (REZ), and envisaged the ridge with its mass of Wedge Tailed Eagle killing, 300m tall turbines, and transmission lines dominating a landscape that has been the home and hunting ground of these special birds since creation.
If the 300km/h blade tips don’t slice and dice them, then the air pressure differentials caused by the blades’ speedy rotation will implode their lungs. That’s the upside for them, as it is a relatively quick death.
The alternative is the slow decay and agonising death the Wedgies will endure, due to the numerous toxins leached from the turbine blades. Epoxy and fibreglass and the leaked waste of the mechanical workings of the generators will contaminate the entire ecology upon which these majestic monarchs of the air depend. And don’t forget the quick boiling of their blood if they straddle a transmission line.
I know the pair of Wedgies that frequent our backyard also travel many kilometres around this area and no doubt hunt the opposite slopes and pastures of the proposed REZ as frequently as they do on our side of Gunns Plains.
How can any sane human with the least bit of a functioning brain believe that these birds are expendable in the name of “Climate Change” and the quest to dominate the surface of the planet with the false hope of “Renewables”?
It is an obscene ideology that can’t see the forest for the trees; that it can willingly push to destruction not just the Wedge Tailed Eagles but numerous other species that are endemic and vital to our ecology. The Wedgies are huge, magnificent, and bleeding obvious in flight, but what about other creatures who don’t claim the limelight in the same manner? Are we also to sacrifice these on the pyres of “climate alarmism”? This climate catastrophising is about control, greed, manipulation, and destruction for the benefit of a few at the cost of the many.
That cost includes the destruction of our ecology and environment.
I am minded of the Joni Mitchell song and how pertinent it is to the ideological fanaticism of the climate zealots…
“They paved paradise, put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin’ hot spot
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot
(Ooh, bop-bop-bop-bop, ooh, bop-bop-bop-bop)
They took all the trees put ’em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar an’ a half just to see ’em.”
Will our children and grandchildren be paying “a dollar and a half” to see the stuffed carcasses of Wedge Tailed Eagles amongst all the other exhibits of extinct wildlife?
Will our children and grandchildren be asking us, “Why did you destroy the ecology to supposedly save the planet?”
What will your answer be?
Great article Al. The Wedgies are magnificent birds under attack by Political and Corporate greed.
Mister Hort’s refusal to find out, let alone understand, what the scientific consensus of evidence shows us about our rapidly and dangerously changing climate, means that his views regarding renewable energy and REZ transmission lack reason, rationality and credibility.
There are indeed issues and environmental costs that renewables and transmission industries are currently refusing to address in Australia, especially here in Tasmania. The risks to raptors (and many other species) are real.
But because our state government is giving our wind resources to foreign investors, and allowing TasNetworks to gold-plate their assets by getting us to pay for a vast new High Voltage Overhead Transmission grid (to serve those same investors), bad decisions are being made that ignore environmental and economic damage. Worse, none of the new infrastructure benefits us.
The two major parties don’t care. They believe in ‘creating investment opportunities’ (on our dime) and taking a cut of the money being made.
The environmental costs of wind turbines and transmission lines are being downplayed, ignored or dismissed outright by both major parties. Meanwhile, bad plans like the proposed Robbins Island windfarm, and TasNetworks’ new grid (which we are being told to pay for) are being touted as ‘action on climate’, and will bring ‘jobs and growth’. When the environment is damaged by badly sited infrastructure, and we lose out economically with the energy being privately owned and shipped to the Mainland, we don’t get any benefits, only costs.
Yet despite all of this, the science and reality mandate the urgent need for genuine and rapid action on climate – and that includes renewable energy and new transmission.
Hopeless quandary? Not at all. If we ignore the conspiracy theorists who claim ‘climate change is a hoax’, and tell our politicians to work for us and the long term benefits for Tasmanians, we can regulate and control all new developments, site them properly, bury transmission, offshore or re-site transmission, and own our wind energy for our use, not for profiteering on the Mainland energy market. We can also listen to those who study all these issues (such as the Victorian Energy Policy Centre and the Energy Grid Alliance) to see there are environmentally better, cheaper and stageable renewable options (eg. solar) that don’t risk eagles and will provide for ordinary Tasmanians into the future.
When governments and political parties are in the pockets of the corporate sector, they’re not working for us, nor are they taking genuine action on climate, or protecting our rapidly dwindling numbers of threatened and endangered species like the Wedge-tailed eagles. It’s time to call out the half-truths and nonsense, vote for sensible independent and minor parties.
Pretending climate science is a hoax isn’t helpful to achieve anything positive, Mr Hort, least of all protecting the eagles we care about.