It’s been a strange August. From my blog entries you’d think that it has been a very wet winter, but the reality is that it has been very little rain and the bush is very dry – almost crispy. It has has a tremendous impact on the wildflowers – there aren’t as many as the previous few years. This is causing problems for the tourist industry with some interstate and overseas tourists getting upset.

Locally it has been very strange. Some species of orchid didn’t flower at all while some flowered 6-8 weeks earlier than normal as the winter as well as being dry has been warmer than normal. This last month I’ve been concentrating on the bush reserves around York and particularly those I’ve never been to. It’s quite boggling to think that after almost 20 years of living in the area I still haven’t visited all the reserves. The pictures accompanying this piece are some of the ones I’ve taken in August.

One of the most disturbing things this year is the impact of orchid tourism. Usually the reserves around York receive a fraction of the visitors that other orchid hotspots do, but with high petrol prices more and more people are now restricting their days out to those areas an hours drive from Perth. Having more visitors isn’t bad in and of itself. What is bad is the deterioration in people’s behaviour. The amount of litter left in some spots is huge. Another thing is that people aren’t prepared to walk to sites and so drive off the tracks to look for flowers causing a lot of damage. The worst thing is that people are now digging up the orchids. On Friday 25th August I went out to photograph Curly Locks orchids in the Wandoo National Park. I found six in three separate clumps. The flowers hadn’t fully opened so I decided to go back in a couple of days time. The following Tuesday I went back and all three clumps had been dug up. I tried to report it but was told it was a kangaroo that did it, but in my experience kangaroos don’t dig perfectly square holes with spades, and nor do they smoke cigarettes while they do it and leave behind their water bottle.

Orchid poaching is a big problem. Earlier this year Kings Park in Perth had nine hundred rare species of Western Australian orchids stolen. It seems that there people afflicted by orchidelirium a kind of flower-driven madness where people just have to own the rarest of the orchid species. It is a growing problem and only the other day I was approached by a man in his early 70’s claiming to be a friend of a noted Western Australian expert and that he was prepared to sell me orchid tubers for $40 a tuber. I told him in no uncertain terms where to go. The frustrating thing about this is that a lot of the orchid species are very specialised requiring certain other plants and pollinating insects to survive. Without these they die. In the case of the Curly Locks I know of only three sites where they can be found round York and at best there are only half a dozen flowering plants at each site per year. Wiping out one locations population like that means that is one less place where they can be found, which means extinction is even closer.

 

I’m sorry for the rant but the whole thing was a little upsetting and I’m not sure what was worse, the theft, the indifference of the authorities, or the brazenness of people trying to sell the orchids.