The Tarrangower Cactus Control Group has recently completed a project aimed at increasing awareness and knowledge about Wheel Cactus. One of the valuable outcomes from this project is the construction a new map showing the distribution of Wheel Cactus infestations in Victoria.
The ever enthusiastic, young, local environmentalist Max Schlachter was employed as our project officer, and has collated 345 recorded sites of Wheel Cactus within our state. These sites covered 105 different localities around Victoria, mostly in a band from the northwest to Melbourne, but including some surprising outliers elsewhere. The majority of the sites (69%) were new records, and the rest were existing records taken from current government maps, such as the Victorian Biodiversity Atlas.
Some alarming realisations from this mapping exercise were that within some of these localities, for example ‘Maldon’, there are too many infestations to record, plus there are very likely many infestations that we did not capture. Thankyou Max for your wonderful work, and thanks also to the Norman Wettenhall Foundation for funding the project.
Want to know more about Wheel Cactus and how to deal with it, then please come to our next Community Field Day on Sunday 30th July, starting at 10:30am. We’ll meet just inside the entrance to the Lakeshore Olive farm in Greenhill Bridge Rd., a few kms south of Maldon, off Whitlocks Rd. These events are family friendly, but we ask that all children be accompanied by a parent at all times.
And don’t forget, if you have any old injector guns that are no longer working, please bring them back to us and we’ll swap then for working models. If you can’t make it to our next field day, call or text Jan on 0400 973 528 and she’ll organise a drop-off or pick-up.
