Sunday October 14th was the 12th Annual Beach clean up organised by Tangaroa Blue. A big thanks to Helen for liaising with Tangaroa and for her big efforts to bring us all together for a beach clean and marine creatures I.D session.
Whoopee! Planting is finished for 2016. It has been a very busy patch getting 4000 local provenance seedlings in the ground over 7 weeks. This past week we had an excellent Green Army team – a team of young people sign up for a 6 month period to work and to learn all sorts of skills at the same time.
On May 11th 2016 Town of Cottesloe held the annual ‘Volunteers Sundowner’at the War Memorial Hall. The event was scheduled during National Volunteer Week. The Town of Cottesloe Mayor, Jo Dawkins, said the Sundowner is a thank you to community volunteers. She mentioned that there are more than 6 million Australians who volunteer!
This year we have 4000 seedlings all grown from local provenance seed (which was collected and cleaned by our volunteers). Two nurseries have grown the plants for us and Town of Cottesloe have paid for the plants.
By spending many hours in the marquees selling catalogues, Cottesloe Coastcarers are part of the dozens of volunteers from all over Perth who contribute to the annual open-air sculpture exhibition of local, national and international artists.
Today was a beautiful Sunday and a fantastic team of 17 people gathered to water plants and collect seed at Cottesloe Native Garden. A monoculture of weedy Victorian teatree had been cleared from the site a year ago.
Malte and Leander from a rural area in Northern Germany concentrated on spotting and removing some very invasive Euphorbia species from our Dutch Inn site.
During October 2006 I did a plant survey at Cottesloe Native Garden with the naturalist Robert Powell. We found only one silky scaevola (Scaevola anchusifolia) whereas several plants had been recorded approximately 15 years earlier.
Between 2009 – 2011 I led CCA’s campaign to have the weedy seadragon (Phyllopteryx taeniolatus) protected in Western Australia. During this time I often corresponded with Dr Nerida Wilson, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in California.
Friday 14 November was another good working bee on the dunes. Pricewaterhouse Coopers have given us lots of help over the years with planting and weeding. We are very grateful for this on-going support.
I am very grateful to Lotterywest for sponsoring me to attend two days of the recent conference. It was held over 5 days at various venues around the Mandurah Performing Arts Centre. The first Australian Coast to Coast conference was held back in 1994.
CCA had a very productive three day ‘weedathon’ in late October. We are very grateful to Woodside who sponsored two small work teams from Conservation Volunteers Australia (CVA) for the first two days.