Shire of Harvey ‘gives a hoot' becoming the newest South West shire to join the Owl Friendly movement
The move will see the shire eliminating the use of Second Generation Anti-Coagulant Rodenticides within shire-owned buildings and pushing to inform the community of the dangers of the insidious and lethal poison.
The Owl Friendly movement initially stated in Margaret River when researchers looking at the elusive masked owl saw the impact SGARs were having on the native owl population.
Since then, the movement has grown to cover shires and cities across the State, with the City of Cockburn, City of Geraldton and most recently the City of Stirling among just some of the Local governments across WA to adopt an Owl Friendly status.
The movement specifically targets SGARs — often advertised as one dose, one kill poisons — which can take up to a week to kill an animal after ingesting and take a significant amount of time to break down once in the environment.
Due to the poison's longevity and its delay in causing death, rodents which have ingested the poison can be caught and devoured by other animals — such as owls, snakes or even pet dogs and cats — delivering the deadly dose intended to the rodent its devourer instead.
The poison has proved so pervasive it has been found in possums across Australia and has been found at lethal levels within a critically endangered Carnaby's black-cockatoo.
In an even more recent Edith Cowan University-led
research paper
SGARs were found in five of Australia's large native carnivores from WA's chuditch to the critically endangered Tasmanian devil.
SGARs have been banned in the United Kingdom and California, but still are able to be purchased on the shelf in most Australian stores.
The move to make the Shire of Harvey Owl Friendly came from shire president Michelle Campbell who said it was a simple act the shire could adopt, and came at an apt time with the shire also voting to adopt its first biodiversity strategy earlier in the meeting.
'We are not the first local government to consider this and hopefully not the last moving forward,' she said.
'Second generation rodenticides are indiscriminate and the eradication of its use will not only be beneficial to owls and birds, but also to many other native animals and our domestic pets.'
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