Sixty Years of Regrowth

In a previous post I referred to some aerial photos I had of our beaut little property going back to 1949. I obtained these through the great folks at Mapland and their historical search service. There's even an interactive search now that you can run yourself to locate old photos. And it's good value for money too, if you can find the right photos.

Here's what Wirra Birra looked like in 1949, presumably just after the woodcutters had been in for a bit of pillaging. (you can click the map to enlarge it)


And here's what it looks like around 2002 (again, click to enlarge)




We seem to have been very lucky, in that the stringbarks were felled for their timber, but the stumps left to re-shoot. While it's evident that things were a real mess back in the 40's, with the property denuded, and criss-crossed with snig tracks, things seem to have been left to regenerate naturally.

And for that we're extremely thankful.

Back in the 40's there wasn't the same weed pressure on a cleared bit of ground, and most of the native plants could re-establish themselves, without too much competition from the ferals. Today it would be a vastly different story. One of my longer term projects is to take some GPS co-ordinates off the 1949 map, and see if I can locate some of the cleared features or tracks, on the ground. My thesis is that some of the weed outbreaks we do have (notably the erica) will correlate to the areas that were hit hardest.

But that's for another day.