Stakeholder Interviews: Dr Glenn Edwards, Alice Springs

Dr Glenn Edwards

The views, opinions, and other information expressed in these interviews are those of the participants and may not reflect the position of the Australian Feral Camel Management Project.

Transcript

Interview length: 17:31

I first got involved in the camel issues back in 2001 when anecdotal reports started filtering in to me, comments from my Regional Director for example, that he’d just done a trip through Western Australia and came back and said, “Gee there’s a lot of camels out there, maybe we should go and have another look at how many”. Because the Northern Territory had a history of doing aerial surveys in the southern Northern Territory going back to the mid-80s, and those aerial surveys had been spaced about 8 years apart so in 2001 we decided to have another look. So we did a formal aerial survey in the southern Northern Territory.

When we analysed the information from that survey and compared it to the previous surveys we had, we were alarmed to see that it looked like the camel population was doubling about every 8 years and that certainly there were significant numbers of feral camels in the NT in 2001.

So, we had good information for the NT but not for the rest of Australia, but going back to the mid-80s there was another very large aerial survey done which was looking at kangaroos but they’d also counted camels, and from that they’d done a breakdown of which jurisdictions had camels and what proportion of the camels were in each jurisdiction. So we could do a rough calculation, back-of-the-envelope sort of thing, which indicated that, there could be as many as half a million or as many as up to a million feral camels out there.

They were pretty rubbery figures, but nonetheless we thought there was cause for concern. And of course camels were, in terms of being an emerging pest issue, were on nobody’s radar. In fact, they were really out of sight, out of mind.

And of course from that time the camel population has continued to grow. It’s doubled in size again in the last decade and as that’s happened the camels have moved more out of the more remote parts of desert Australia and they’ve started to encroach onto pastoral leases, into more contact with tourism operations and are starting to impact now on Aboriginal, remote Aboriginal communities. So the thing has slowly, over the last decade, really come to a head.

You touched on it before, but what are some of those impacts of feral camels?

Oh look, there are a myriad of impacts that we’re worried about. From an environmental perspective camels have an enormous impact on arid wetlands. They’re able to deplete the water in some of these remote wetlands which are, some of them are merely small rock holes; once that water’s gone it’s not there for native wildlife. And they also actually have the ability to in-fill a lot of these sorts of wetlands so they actually disappear.

Camels also damage vegetation. Camels, like any herbivore, have preferred forage species and camels browse, so they eat trees and shrubs primarily, and camels do have the ability to actually drive some tree species, like the quandong, to local extinction because it is one of their preferred forage species.

Camels are also emitters of greenhouse gases, methane in particular, so there’s that angle to it as well.
A lot of the impacts that camels have on the environment also are of importance to Aboriginal people, because their cultural values are being impacted – things like wetlands, water holes, soaks and a lot of bush tucker species are heavily impacted by camels. And of course camels have an impact on economic values as well.

I mentioned camels coming onto to pastoral leases, where they damage fence lines, often over many tens of kilometres. They can destroy water points, infrastructure at water points and there is a wide-held belief that camels actually compete with cattle for forage and also for water, which is a scarce resource as well out there in the pastoral landscape. On top of that, camels are also now impacting on things like road accidents, people safety and so on.
So, there’s a whole broad spectrum of impacts in the negative sense. But of course camels have positive aspects about them as well: they’re potentially a resource, camel meat’s pretty good meat. So there’s an upside to the camel as well.

As we’ve spoken to pastoralists, and people out in the bush, a lot of people have told us that when you look at things like native species like quandongs, the impact is profound because not only is it immediate but some of these species may never recover.

Yeah, that’s probably true and with species like the quandong, yeah, I think the camels are able to stop the recruitment and once that happens then the species can go to local extinction. And certainly there’s been a marked decline in quandongs on central Australia. There is a linkage there to fire as well because fire does impact on quandongs but it’s hard to tease out the camel impact from the fire [impact] but camels certainly do have an effect.

I guess one of the positives of the project at the moment is that there’s been a huge body of research around camels particularly over the last few years. Now, as the co-author or author of much of that research, what’s that found? What’s the bottom line here?

Well that research attempted to draw together everything we knew about feral camels. It started I guess from the base of pulling together what that we knew about camel ecology. We pulled together all the information we had on camel distribution and population density and from that we were able to build up a profile of where the camels were, which we found they occur over more than three million square kilometres of arid Australia, across four jurisdictions, which are the Northern Territory, Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland.

The population, a conservative estimate back when we did that report, was around one million and we were able to confirm that yes, the population is doubling about every nine years. It is continuing to do so, with no sign of camels actually reaching any sort of carrying capacity or the population showing any sign of starting to plateau.

So that was one aspect of the research that we did. We looked at the management options for camels and the good thing is that we do have management options, ranging from aerial culling of camels, to mustering of camels to use them for meat, for pet meat, and so on. We looked at fencing of key assets to keep camels away from them. We evaluated all those options as management tools and made some recommendations around that. We also looked at the perceptions of people living out there with camels, what they thought about camels and how they should be managed. In particular, Aboriginal stakeholders and also people who are working in the pastoral industry, and that was interesting to get that human perspective on the camel issue.

There are a diversity of views out there but one thing is quite clear now, the impacts that camels are having on people and the landscape are now becoming quite apparent to a whole range of people who are living out there with the camels.

One of the big issues is the impact on the camel itself. So, if you don’t do anything it’s basically inhumane?

Well what will happen eventually is that the camel population will plateau. It will reach some sort of carrying capacity where the camels will be limited by the resources, whether they be food or water. Just over the last few years we’ve actually started to see the first signs of camels being stressed in Australia’s deserts, to do with water shortage. In particular, we’ve seen camels during dry summers move in large numbers into Aboriginal communities looking for water and when they do that they’re breaking taps, pulling evaporative air-conditioners off walls and damaging bores and all that sort of infrastructure.

When that occurs the camels are doing that, they’re short of water. They’ve depleted a lot of natural water that’s out there in the environment and we have documented camels dying around arid soakages and so on, where they’ve drunk all the water and there’s only mud left. The camels are getting bogged in the mud and dying, and so I expect that as time goes by and the camel population does continue to increase that will become more commonplace.

You’ve only got to look at what happens with kangaroo populations on the east coast where the kangaroo populations fluctuate markedly depending on good and bad conditions and when bad droughts hit there is massive mortality in the kangaroo population. The same will probably happen to camels when they start to reach that carrying capacity, and they’re taxing the environment to its maximum.

If you lived overseas I guess you would find it very difficult to appreciate when you get large populations of camels, feral camels, coming into a community. Now Docker River, that happened in December 2009, perhaps was an extreme case, but can you describe the sort of impact that has on a community?

Well what happened at Docker River, as I said, the camels were thirsty, they were coming in after water. Camels probably only need to drink let’s say once every 10 days but each day at Docker River there were up to 5000 camels coming into that community, which means the total population of camels coming into Docker River in total was up to 50,000 camels. So, a lot of camels in the immediate area around Docker River, and people feel very threatened in that situation. They are a large animal, large numbers of large animals in a small community, not really afraid of people.

People are worried about going outside, going out into the bush, worried about driving their vehicles and we are seeing increasing numbers of vehicle accidents involving camels and the Docker River situation was not an isolated occurrence. At the same time it occurred, other Aboriginal communities were experiencing exactly the same conditions. So it’s going to be a very real issue in the future.

Experiencing, as we can around us, experiencing these very unique wet and wonderful seasons I guess really what we’re doing is prolonging the issue with feral camels. There will come a time again when it’s not so wet, where it’s very dry and perhaps the problems will be worse?

Well, that’s right. At the moment the conditions are good, the camels are dispersed, there’s a lot of nice, green forage out there and camels are getting all of the water they need out of the vegetation. Of course they’ll be breeding so their survivorship under good conditions will be higher for the young and inevitably the drought will come again. When it does unless we act and start to actively reduce the camel population, if don’t do that, there will be more camels and more camels looking for water when it gets dry.

Dr Edwards, what’s the solution to this problem?

Well camels are always going to be with us. We will never eradicate camels and probably you can have the argument: Why should we want to anyway? So they’re always going to be there but at the moment we have a crisis and my belief is that, and it’s backed up by the impacts we’re seeing, that at the moment there are too many camels.

We need to immediately, over the next let’s say four to six years, we need to actually start to make inroads into reducing the number of camels and also the population density in key areas because in some areas now the population of camels is up to around 10 per square kilometre and that is unacceptably high and the impacts in those areas is unacceptably large.

So I think we’ve got a crisis and we need to deal with it. We need to reduce the camel population immediately and get it down to a more manageable level because at the moment a lot of pastoral landholders for example are frustrated by the fact that there are so many camels. They feel that they don’t actually have the ability to deal with it themselves because as fast as they manage camels on their land there’s more camels there to take their place.

So we need to have a concerted approach, a national approach to dealing with the current crisis. Once that’s happened then we can think about how we are going to manage camels in the longer term, which is I think is a slightly different proposition. Once we’ve got the population down I think it opens up a whole range of other management options that we can have there into the future.

Is there any part of the country, the Outback, that’s free of camels? Do they graze across all different country sides?

Look, camels are very mobile animals. They can access most of the arid landscape. The only areas they find it difficult to get to are very steep, rocky, hilly terrain, but having said that camels are pretty good at climbing up into hills and ranges looking for food and water but we do know of some areas and some key rock holes which camels can’t get to. But there’s not much of the landscape they can’t utilise.

So you would find them across Aboriginal lands, pastoral lands, find them in national parks?

Yes, they occur across all land tenures. There is I guess a perception out there that camels are only confined to Aboriginal land but that’s not true. As you said, national parks, crown land, pastoral land, and it’s an issue for a whole range of landowners and land managers out there across arid Australia.

I understand this project is a partnership; there are 19 different partners as I understand it. There’s been a lot of support for this from government?

Yes, there has been, I think from a platform of good research and a good understanding of what the camel issues are and how we should deal with them. Certainly, there’s been good support across government but also across industry and across the landholder base. In terms of wanting to work together to address the camel issue because given the size of the area that camels occur over and how mobile these animals are, we really do need to all be working together on it. It’s much different to managing rabbits for example, where a local landholder can manage rabbits quite effectively on their own piece of turf but you can’t do that with camels.

Look finally, the impact on Aboriginal communities. We’ve travelled to some of these places and the impact seems profound. There seems to be great sadness in those communities that they’re losing bush tucker, special places are just trashed, and water holes are trashed. Is that one of the things you’ve found as you’ve travelled around?

Yeah, indeed. Aboriginal people are in the firing line, people who are living out there in remote communities. There are lots of camels out there on their land. The camels are coming into their communities, as we’ve said and it is affecting the way Aboriginal people use country because people are frightened of camels. They are big animals and there are some real concerns, but you know, Aboriginal people also are accepting of the camel as well. They have a respect for the camel and a lot of Aboriginal people see the camel as an opportunity for economic gain, economic development.

So there are a lot of thoughts around how best to manage camels out there. A lot of people would like to make money if they could. As time goes by the impacts are becoming greater, people are seeing more and more camels. There is a realisation I think that something needs to be done now about getting the numbers of camels down.

Peoples’ perceptions do change through time.