The Impact of Land Clearing
Land clearing, or deforestation, is the single most important impact affecting Australia’s birds. It is largely driven by large agri-business corporations seeking to maximise profits at the expense of our environment, wildlife and climate.
We often hear that birds displaced by clearing can simply fly somewhere else. This claim takes no account of the sedentary nature or limited flight capacity of some species, their often highly specific habitat requirements, ecological carrying capacity, territorial behaviour, the fact that other habitat may be fully occupied, and that there is a decreasing amount of other habitat to which some birds might be able to fly. In any case, most birds and other animals in every hectare cleared die or suffer fatal injuries, and those displaced mostly perish in the resulting hostile environment. At recent land-clearing rates in Queensland and New South Wales (tens to hundreds of thousands of hectares per year), approvals to clear are approvals to kill, maim, traumatise and starve tens of millions of native animals per year, and are thus an animal welfare as well as a conservation issue.
An increasing cause of deforestation is renewable energy developments (windfarms and solar farms) in wooded areas. There is a clear need for diligent survey and planning for renewables to avoid conflict with biodiversity. Otherwise, removal of mature trees (storers of carbon) and their destruction (i.e. creation of emissions) in order to reduce future emissions seems counterproductive, and can hardly be called ecologically sustainable unless developments are placed on historically cleared land.
Removal of mature trees is a major cause of the more immediate deaths and suffering through the felling of mature and old-growth forest and woodland containing hollow trees. Birds and other animals, and their young, inside hollows get killed, injured or entombed during clearing, logging, windrowing and mulching operations, and if they escape that process they have nowhere to go, live, feed or avoid predators. Land clearing is the main factor affecting our most threatened forest and woodland birds.
Australia leads the developed world in deforestation rates, thus equating us with third-world countries. It is estimated that 50 million mammals, birds and reptiles die annually, and that their deaths occur over a prolonged period as animals attempt to survive in the harsh and unsuitable environment of the cleared area or in the environments they are displaced to. Land clearing/deforestation in New South Wales exceeds 297,000 ha per year on the basis of current clearing rates. To give that clearing rate some perspective, it would take about 2 years to clear Kosciuszko National Park (690,000 ha), or 3.4 years to clear all of the Blue Mountains World Heritage area (1 million ha).
We recommend reading an in-depth article on this topic entitled “The invisible harm: Land clearing is an issue of animal welfare” which was published in the Wildlife Research journal in June 2017 which can be accessed via the NSWBA website using the link below:
https://www.nswbirdatlassers.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Finn-Stephens-2017-Land-clearing-issue-of-animal-welfare.pdf
Stephen Debus & Dick Cooper