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Strategic Red Fox control on bushfire affected public land in Victoria Black Saturday Victoria 2009 – Natural values fire recovery program

Authors:
  • Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research
  • Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research
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... Occasionally, the aim of fox control programs is short-term protection of conservation assets that are susceptible to fox predation at certain periods in their life history, e.g. freshwater turtles when nesting, Malleefowl when nesting, migratory seabirds when present (Kirkwood et al. 2000;Robley et al. 2016a), or ecosystems after significant fire events (Robley et al. 2012). While implementing fox control to protect conservation assets would seem logical, foxes are a highly mobile species (Larivière and Pasitschniak-Arts 1996;Hradsky et al. 2017) and will rapidly invade newly vacated territories following small isolated control efforts (Newsome et al. 2014). ...
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... Poison baiting for foxes is already being applied or recommended as an emergency post-fire protection response for numerous threatened species across Australia, including Gilbert's potoroo, Potorous gilbertii, southern brown bandicoot, mountain pygmy possum, Burramys parvus, and brush-tailed phascogale, Phascogale tapoatafa (DSE 2005;Robley et al. 2012;DPW 2016;DENR 2017). At present, however, these programs vary greatly in baited area, duration and post-fire timing, and few robust data about their effectiveness have been published. ...
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