Scat workshop

November 2018

Evelyn Osborne, Biosecurity Support Officer and Andrew Britton, Land Services Officer

The Feral Fighter Spring wild dog and fox campaign is well underway and as part of this year’s campaign the South Coast Local Land Services team recently ran a Scat Identification workshop with Georgeanna Story from Scats About.

The workshop attracted a diverse number of private and public land managers from Batemans Bay Aboriginal Land Council, NSW National Parks, Department of Defence and local private land managers who were keen to discover techniques to collect and identify scats and hair samples found on their land.

The workshop also provided summary results of the Predator Poo Patrol incentive drive, an opportunity for land managers to collect predator scats for analysis to find out what our local predators are eating.

A total of 60 scats were submitted for identification and analysis. The results were interesting with the majority of samples submitted positively identified as fox and dog scats (40) with the remaining samples submitted being native marsupial species.

Analysis of the wild dog and fox scats indicated a diet consisting predominantly of native animals including eastern grey kangaroo, swamp wallaby, long-nosed bandicoot, ringtail possum, echidna (ouch!) and wombats.

These results highlight the importance of all land managers to undertake a coordinated feral animal control program to help protect not only our domestic pets and livestock but also our native wildlife.

If you are interested in joining the next Feral Fighters Predator Poo Patrol in 2019 contact Evelyn Osborne, Biosecurity Support Officer on PH: 44646005 or E: evelyn.osborne@lls.nsw.gov.au for more information.