‘Cutest animal in Australia’: keeping watch over greater gliders in a forest targeted for logging
Greater glider spotting is a meditative thing, says Bulga local Steve Fredericks.
“A bad night of glider spotting is better than a good night of television.
“The excitement on people’s faces when they see one for the first time – it’s just priceless.”
Related: NSW government says state’s biodiversity ‘in crisis’ as it pledges first steps to reverse decline
It’s a Sunday in July, just after sunset. We’re sitting in the Bulga state forest, inland from Port Macquarie on the New South Wales mid-north coast, waiting for darkness to fall.
Six of us, including the independent MP for Mackellar, Sophie Scamps, are huddled, focused on a single tree.
About 200m away, the former federal Treasury secretary Ken Henry and a small group of Bulga residents are monitoring another patch.
Stationed further up a hill, towards the rough road that leads to the village of Elands, is Susie Russell, the vice-president of the North Coast Environment Council.
The groups talk over CB radios. Apart from the flashing of spotlights, the only activity is what Fredericks calls the meditative wait for endangered greater gliders to emerge from their dens in the hollows of tall eucalypts.
This environmental neighbourhood watch has become routine in the forest of the Bulga plateau.
It is how members of the group hope they might save the area from logging by the state-owned NSW Forestry Corporation, which is scheduled to recommence as soon as the first week of August.
Citizen scientists have spent many nights over the past year spotlighting in parts of the forest scheduled for logging. They register every greater glider den tree they observe on the state government’s biodiversity database, BioNet.
Logging is not permitted within 50 metres of known greater glider den trees.
“Every 50m exclusion zone that we save, that’s a win,” Fredericks says.
‘I cannot for the life of me see the sense’
In the black summer of 2019-20, fires approached the forest from the south, north and west.
But the area was saved, partly thanks to volunteer firefighters and Forestry Corporation workers.
Since that time, this unburnt forest – with its habitat for threatened species including the koala and glossy-black cockatoo, and critically endangered plants such as the rainforest tree Rhodamnia rubescens – has been a target for logging.
Related: Continued logging of NSW koala habitat is ‘a profound tragedy’, conservationist says
It is one of many across the NSW public forest estate where logging has either resumed or is scheduled, including in areas of the proposed great koala national park farther north.
Unlike Victoria and Western Australia, which have ended native forestry operations, the Minns government has not.
Late last year it suspended logging in high value koala habitat “hubs” in the proposed great koala national park. But that stopped forestry operations in only 5% of the 176,000 hectares the government will assess for potential protection within the promised park.
And it gave no protection to places such as Bulga state forest that fall outside the proposed park’s boundaries.
Before the 2023 state election, campaigners staged protests in areas including Yarratt state forest near Taree and Doubleduke state forest, north of Yamba.
Protests in Bulga, including a forest camp and tree sits, resulted in the Forestry Corporation suspending logging in late 2022.
Now the corporation plans to return, and Henry is bewildered.
“I cannot for the life of me see the sense in it,” he says.
He notes that the hardwood division of the government-owned forestry agency – which uses native timber – makes a loss.
In 2022-23 it lost $15m. In its half-yearly report for 2023-24, the division posted a loss of $10.2m.
“Why do they do it?” Henry asks. “If you’re going to log this you’d want to have something pretty amazing to show for it in 100 years’ time.
“And we know there’ll be nothing to show for it except that this would be buggered. It would be absolutely buggered.”
Henry and his wife, Naomi, own a property in nearby Comboyne. An economist on a spotlighting expedition may seem unusual but Henry has a background in wildlife care and strong family connections to the area.
He went to school in Taree and recalls his father, who worked for local sawmills and was involved in logging around Elands, describing the native forestry industry as unsustainable.
In 2023, Henry led a review of NSW’s environmental protection laws, which warned half of the threatened plants and animals in the state were on course to become extinct within 100 years.
He identified that native forest logging was damaging ecosystems and species and called for legislation related to biodiversity to be given primacy over other land management laws, including those that govern logging.
The Minns government delivered its response to that report on Wednesday with an admission that the state’s biodiversity was in “crisis”. Henry said this week the government’s response demonstrated a “serious attempt” to tackle the problem, but it stopped short of making biodiversity the top priority in government policy and legislation.
Earlier in the afternoon, Henry stops at a small camp forest campaigners have set up on the road into the forest.
“Surely the sensible use of a place like this is not to chop it down,” he says.
“If you leave it alone for a couple of hundred years, it could be fantastic.”
‘The definition of insanity’
The first sign of a greater glider is its eyes. The NSW Greens upper house MP Sue Higginson calls them “sparkling stars”, tiny pieces of glistening magic against the night sky.
The first sighting for the evening is down the hill from the tree Fredericks has been monitoring. By the time we get there, it has scurried high to reach its meal of eucalyptus leaves. We see its eyes under the glow of the spotlight then catch a flash of the white fur on its chest and belly.
Mitra Ellis, a Bulga local and Save Bulga Forest member, calls greater gliders the “rock stars” of the forest.
“They can glide for 100m and do a 90-degree turn,” he says.
In the two forest compartments citizen scientists have monitored at Bulga over the past year, Ellis says he has observed single gliders emerging from dens in small trees, other trees that he describes as “den hotels”, and “ridiculously cute” pairs of gliders cuddling up to each other.
Fredericks jumps in: “They’re the cutest animal in the country and most people don’t know they exist.”
Since the black summer fires, efforts to protect the greater glider (Petauroides volans), the largest gliding possum in eastern Australia, have become more urgent.
Its population is estimated to have halved in little more than 20 years, and it was listed under national environmental laws as endangered in 2022.
Greater gliders rely on older trees with hollows for their habitat. To avoid predation by owls, a single glider may use up to 20 trees in a small area.
The greater glider is one of 174 mammal, bird, reptile and frog species in northern NSW that need hollow trees in order to survive.
“No tree hollows – no owls, no gliders, no black cockatoos, no bats,” Russell says.
“A hollow can take 150 to 200 years to form.”
Russell has been campaigning for the forests since moving to the Bulga plateau in the 1990s. She compares the logging of habitat to removing essential services from a suburban neighbourhood.
“If someone took out your shop, your business, your petrol station – you’d be stuffed,” she says.
Under Australia’s environmental laws, logging covered by a regional forest agreement (RFA) is exempt from requiring an assessment for its impact on national listed threatened species such as the koala.
Scamps has been leading a push, joined by several former environment ministers, for native forest logging to be phased out in all states and for governments to provide a support package for affected workers.
She has also proposed an amendment to the federal government’s legislation for a proposed new environment protection agency that would end the exemption for RFAs.
On the road from Ellenborough earlier on Sunday, Scamps says there is a “big job ahead of us – I think every one of us”.
“Because we’re concerned about what we’re leaving for future generations.”
She describes the plans for logging in the Bulga forest as “the definition of insanity”.
“Where we went is very beautiful forest with a lot of threatened species. And there are quite obviously greater gliders living there.”
The Forestry Corporation says harvesting takes just 1-2% of state forests each year, about 0.2% of the entire public forest estate, and claims housing and infrastructure projects need “ongoing sustainable forestry in regrowth forests”.
“All of Forestry Corporation of NSW’s timber harvesting operations comply and align with strict regulatory environmental conditions, with only some trees harvested, large areas permanently protected, and the entire area regrown,” a spokesperson said.
They said that includes complying with requirements for the protection of greater glider den trees under the NSW coastal forestry agreement.
“Bulga state forest contains areas set aside for conservation, native forest available for timber production, and timber plantations,” they said.
“Timber harvesting is proposed for what are classified as compartments 41 and 43, that equate to just 0.7% of Bulga state forest.
“These locations have been harvested and regrown many times before, with forestry operations taking place in every decade from the 1950s to the 1990s.”
‘Like doing the census’
Forest campaigners say in the absence of action on native forest logging by the state or federal government, registering known greater gilder den trees is one of the few levers they have to pull.
These activities have gained prominence since last year after a dead greater glider was found near a logging operation in Tallaganda state forest on the south coast, and it emerged that forestry surveys for the nocturnal glider’s den trees had occurred during the day.
Back at the tree that has the lowest known den in these two compartments of the forest, Fredericks admits surveying for gliders is imperfect.
You have to be positioned at the right tree, at the right time, to spot a glider emerging or returning.
“It’s like doing the census and only counting the people standing at the doorway to their house,” he says.
Because gliders make use of multiple dens, there is no guarantee you will have success on any given night.
We wait about two hours, but on this night the forest works in our favour.
We hear the soft sound of claws against the inside of the tree first, then the eyes appear and a we get a glimpse of a tiny face with white trimmed ears and nose watching from above.
