It is as beautiful as any animal you will ever see in Victoria. It’s a tiny possum  that fits in the palm of your hand, very active, very friendly and clearly deserves the right as Victoria's  faunal emblem . This tiny marsupials name is the Leadbeaters Possum . Who would have thought that its fate rests with  the “opinions” of staff at VicForests  who organise the logging  of its home?

The Healesville Sanctuary  has had great success breeding  the Leadbeaters Possum in captivity but the breeding program recently stopped due to a lack of funding  to perform work on figuring out how to re introduce this little critter back into the wild. The last two  remaining possums in captivity died  in April 2006 . Their passing was fairly un-noticed by most Victorians.

In the wild the Leadbeter possums lives in old, living hollow bearing trees (zone 1A)  or dead trees with hollows (Zone 1B)  and exclusively feed on wattles and other species only a few hundred meters from their homes. They are very territorial  and they don’t like to share their habitat with others.

Despite our admiration of this little critter it is now critically endangered  due to loss of habitat  from clear fell logging . Most of the trees are chipped to make woodchips . Scientists estimate that there are less than 1000 Leadbeaters Possums left .

There are laws in place which protect this tiny possum from industrial logging, these laws are called “The Central Highlands Forest Management Plan” (CHFMP) and “The Code of Forest Practice”.  In practice however, these laws recently allowed VicForests to legally bulldoze roads  through perfect Leadbeaters habitat called “Zone 1A” to access clear fell logging coupes .

This photo shows a road that was bulldozed through proposed Zone 1A Leadbeaters Possum habitat in the Royston.

After VicForests and the Victorian Labor Government allowed this road to be bulldozed through a Proposed Zone 1A habitat with plans to destroy more of their homes in Zone 1B habitat in the clear fell logging area a University Student , studying environmental science, decided to lock herself onto the bulldozer to prevent the driver from destroying more Leadbeaters homes.

Whilst trying to protect a “possum safety zone ” this University student was arrested  and has been charged for being in a “public safety zone ”.

The law says that in forests that are going to be clear felled by bulldozers a plan on how the bulldozers will operate needs to be in place.

For this particular logging area called a “coupe” the plan said that “retained trees” had to be marked so that the bulldozer drivers didn’t accidentally push them over.

According to the Code of Forest Practices:

The coupe plan states that “retained trees will be marked in red tape”

In this coupe there were several dead habitat trees verified as perfect for Leadbeaters homes by members or “Friends of the Leadbeaters” and by scientists from the Department of Sustainability and Environment. They were dead trees with hollows which means that they were classed as zone 1B habitat.

Unfortunately for the Leadbeaters and in contradiction to the law referenced above, several of these zone 1B habitat trees didn’t have any red marks on them to indicate that they should be retained such as the dead tree in the photo below on the left.

This photo comes from page 16 of TCHA’s report on potential breaches of the law

When we alerted the government about this potential breach of the law which would result in several of the endangered possum being killed we got the following response from VicForests who were the ones that didn’t mark the trees in the first place:

Simply put, when the Forest Operations Manager states above that “It is likely that you will continue to differ on matters of interpretation” he means that his interpretation of “retained trees” are only living not dead and therefore they don’t need to be marked with red tape despite dead habitat trees being defined as zone 1B habitat. This animals are endangered, and the forest operations manager from VicForests was able to find a loophole to destroy their habitat based on his interpretation of the law.

What Mr Mc Tavish fails to mention is that if the dead zone 1B habitat trees with the endangered possums living in them get knocked over during this clear fell logging operation then it means that the next time the coupe is ready for logging there won’t be as many restrictions because it wont be Zone 1B habitat anymore.

The logging contractor said that he "did not believe that the Leadbeaters Possum was endangered because he sees so many running along the ground when he pushes over the dead trees that there must be many more left."

Following this response from VicForests we contacted the State Ombudsmen who told us that they could not act because a government minister had given a direction.

We wrote another letter to the Bracks Government. The following is an excerpt from a letter to the Victorian Minister for the Environment the Hon. Mr John Thwaites

Although Hon. Mr John Thwaites would not respond to this letter directly his response to Mr Ben Hardman MP a local member who we asked to forward the letter was as follows:

The Bracks Government then reviewed the code of forest practices but broke the law because it did not follow the prescribed gazetted procedures  for doing so. From our review of the proposed changes the fate of the possum will still be in the hands of VicForests and their differing “interpretation” of the law.

The possum was thought to once be extinct and when found to still be surviving the Victorian Government set up a Leadbeaters recovery team (largely unpaid volunteer based) however, over the last 10 years the population has declined by over 50% and there has been no revision of the prescriptions for its protection.

Scientists in the Department of Sustainability and Environment admit that several possums may have died in the coupe in the zone 1B habitat.

The court case against the University student found in favor of the logging operation and she was ordered to pay court costs of approximately $20,000

An independent Environmental Consultancy called BIOSIS Research were commissioned by the University student to conduct a review of the logging operation and the alleged breaches the conclusion of the report can be seen below;