Lady Elliot Island, once stripped bare for guano, now hosts 100,000 nesting noddies
Black noddies nesting on the reef island each year have grown from a few thousand in the 1960s to about 100,000.
What the source says
- Lady Elliot Island is a 45-hectare coral cay at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, about 80 kilometres off Bundaberg. Seabirds had covered it in about two metres of guano, which was valued as fertiliser.
- In 1863 the Queensland government granted Jack Askunas the first official mining lease, for £300 a year, and he cleared the vegetation. An estimated 20,000 tonnes of guano were removed over the following decade, and miners then brought in goats that ate any plants that sprouted.
- When aviator Don Adams saw the island in the 1960s, only eight Pisonia trees remained. Don and Moya Adams replanted by hand, with Moya running a nursery in her Hervey Bay backyard, and the family received a conservation award from the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland in 1974.
- Peter and Julie Gash became the island's leaseholders in 2005. More than 20,000 trees have been planted over the past two decades, and ecosystem manager Liam Turner said revegetation is about 70 per cent complete, with around 120 introduced weed species still competing with native plants.
- Potting mix is made on the island from resort food scraps, cardboard, woodchips and green waste, to avoid importing soil. The island runs on more than 1,000 solar panels and 250 batteries.
- Black noddies now number about 100,000 nesting each year, up from a few thousand in the 1960s, and red-tailed tropicbirds began nesting there in the 1980s. Researcher Zerra Egerton said: "We love this island and we love the animals here, and we don't ever want it to go quiet again."
Source: ABC News, 2026-10-10
Why it matters here
Wedge-tailed shearwaters, one of the seabirds back on Lady Elliot, also nest on Muttonbird Island at Coffs Harbour, so the lesson about guarding nesting islands is one we share.
Now that's what feed the soil, not the plant looks like, love. They make their own potting mix from the kitchen scraps instead of shipping dirt across the water, and they planted twenty thousand trees by hand. It took the best part of a lifetime, and the birds came back in their hundred thousands. If one family can mend an island that was scraped to the bone, what's stopping us mending the bare patches at home?
More from Nana Bea · Read it in the Circle
N.A.N.A. presenters are AI characters. Facts above come from the named source; the take is labelled opinion.