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| Lansdowne’s surviving lamb flock watch on as trapper Matt Wilson displays last week’s haul – seven pups and a bitch – caught as part of the ongoing fight to save the Tambo property’s sheep business. |
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| Lansdowne manager Hume Turnbull with one of the scalps collected in recent days on the property. – Picture: JONATHAN CROFT. |
A CENTURY-and-a-half of Merino breeding tradition is teetering on the edge at Tambo this year, thanks to the scourge of wild dogs.
On June 30, when manager Hume Turnbull tallied up stock numbers at Lansdowne for his end-of-financial-year reconciliation, his ledger showed 8660 lambs marked and 7070 lamb deaths. The year before tells a similar story – 7820 lambs marked and 6449 of them dead. Mr Turnbull and his trapper Matt Wilson killed 31 wild dogs on or near Lansdowne in 2012, but this year the number has risen to 77. With pups already on the move from dens and being sighted and killed, that number could reach 100 or more by the end of the year. The killing spree leaves the property with virtually no maiden ewes to join, and within a few years, no sheep at all. Mr Turnbull said that with deaths almost the same as lambings, there was very little future in breeding and possibly in sheep at all. Lansdowne Station was founded in 1863, and up until a dozen years ago was virtually untroubled by wild dogs. Long-time manager GW Lilley’s Story of Lansdowne notes that dingoes were not troublesome on the property, thanks to the buffer areas of other properties and dog-netting fences, as well as the “open nature of the country”. Mr Turnbull said they started seeing dogs in 2000 and have been responding to the increasing threat ever since – baiting, trapping and erecting 14km of feral fencing in the past 12 months – but nothing is stemming the tide at the moment. His station hand/mechanic Matt Wilson devotes 70 hours a week or more to hunting down the pests, lying in wait in patches of scrub at 4.30am to surprise dogs that run off when station motorbikes are started up for work at the start of the day. Their aim is to keep the animals on the move and not let them get established and knowledgable of the landscape. It’s a strategy that is becoming a major expense in time and money, and there are paddocks that they can’t run ewes and lambs in anymore, particularly close to the Ward River, which dogs are using as a highway. Mr Turnbull said that one of the things in their favour at present was the shortage of water. The last time it was dry local people were reporting packs of up to 16 dogs coming in to dams, which they were able to pick off by looking for tracks and waiting in trees at certain times of the day. He said that Lansdowne couldn’t manage its dog problem just within its own boundaries, but were spreading control measures to neighbouring properties with their permission. Possibly his last hope is the cluster-fencing project being auspiced by South West NRM. “We’ll wait and see what happens when that goes up, but we hope it will alleviate a few of our problems,” he said. “You’ve still got to kill what’s left inside but hopefully they’re not getting replaced, as they are now.”
http://www.queenslandcountrylife.com.au/news/agriculture/livestock/sheep-wool/lansdownes-dog-threat/2668685.aspx?storypage=0
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