Background
Campaign Groups
The current Issues
Karak, the Red-tailed Black Cockatoo, is the 2006 Commonwealth Games emblem. With fewer than 1000 left, the Cockatoo’s future is in the balance.
The Wilderness Society has called on the Bracks Government to announce the creation of a ‘Karak National Park’ by protecting all Red Tail habitat, in South-western Victoria, including the addition of Cobboboonee State Forest to the Lower Glenelg National Park, before the Commonwealth Games.
Write to our Premier Mr Bracks:
- More on saving Karak the Red-tailed Black Cockatoo on our Red-tailed Black Cockatoo page
- Join the Red-tailed Black Cockatoo Count weekend in April
- Use these materials in your Classroom
- All about Karak
- Karak the Mascot
- Karak's Story
- Contact Karak
- Karak Junior- visit the baby Red-tail ' at the Healesville Sanctuary .
- With fewer than 1000 left, the Cockatoo’s future is in the balance.
- Of the fifteen National Biodiversity Hotspots (i.e. areas rich in flora and fauna but now facing serious threats), two of these intersect in far south west Victoria. Karak's home .
- The Cobboboonee and other forests in the South-West are critical habitat for other rare and threatened animals including the Long-nosed Potoroo, Masked Owl and Spot-tailed Quoll.
- Tragically over 87% of south-west Victoria is cleared and most of what is left is in isolated pockets.
- Conservation of these Forests and pockets and linking of them throughout the cockatoo’s habitat would create a linked north–south landscape that, during global warming, will be a habitat ‘lifeline’, not only for the cockatoo, but for many of the other wild creatures and plants of the region.
- There is no impact on the logging industry by protecting the south-west forests, as your ‘Our Forests Our Future’ policy voluntarily purchased logging licenses in the region.
- Furthermore, an enormous plantation resource is coming on stream in the south-west from 2005, substantially larger than the native forest logging sector for the whole state! This resource can be used to meet local and state-wide wood needs as well as create job opportunities in plantation processing and new pulp mills proposed for the region.