Corporate News

Villawood has gifted almost 1000 hectares to a South Australia conservation park to help safeguard the future of several rare, vulnerable and critically endangered fauna and flora species.

The land, in Warrenben Conservation Park on the Yorke Peninsula, will help protect the endangered Goldsack’s leek-orchid as well as the malleefowl, bush-stone curlew and mallee whipbird, which inhabit the park.

Villawood’s donation of 970 hectares, or 24,000 acres, expands on a biodiversity program that has already seen 600 hectares donated to forest reserves in Victoria.

The land expands the park to more than to 5000 hectares and is hoped to also pave the way for the reintroduction of the locally extinct brush-tailed bettong.

Warrenben Conservation Park, located on Narungga land on the south-east Yorke Peninsula, 12 km northeast of Marion Bay, is richly diverse in terms of its landscape while providing vital habitat for rare flora and fauna.

The donation will dovetail with the Northern and Yorke Peninsula Landscape Board’s ambitious Marna Banggara project looking to return locally extinct species and reinvigorate the bushland’s health.

This ecologically important land significantly increases the potential of Marna Banggara to apply re-wilding principles in a working landscape, where conservation, agriculture and the community exist side by side.

The critically endangered mallee whipbird lives in dense mallee shrub within Warrenben Conservation Park.

The bird is visibly elusive yet has a loud and distinctive call likened to a squeaky gate. Once abundant around South Australia, the mallee whipbird resides in just three small SA pockets: Yorke Peninsula, Eyre Peninsula and the Murray Mallee.

Image Credit: Sharon Cislowski Birdlife Australia