Noisy mascot picked to make a point

MELBOURNE - The southeastern red-tailed black cockatoo is a big, loud, funny bird - exactly what you would expect Australians to pick as the mascot for the Commonwealth Games.

But Karak, the mascot named for the bird's distinctive call, was also selected to make a point.

Australia wants the world to know that it is taking biodiversity seriously, using the Games to promote its environmental credentials through a species on the verge of extinction and its claim that the 12-day event will be carbon neutral by lowering energy consumption, lifting use of public transport and planting trees.

Just last week federal and Victorian ministers launched a A$1.3 million project ($1.48 million) to encourage farmers to plant and protect pockets of the buloke and stringybark gums that the fewer than 1000 remaining red-tailed blacks need to survive.

This Wednesday - when the Queen opens the Games at the Melbourne Cricket Ground - the first southeastern red-tailed black cockatoo born in captivity for more than a decade will celebrate its second birthday.

But more than a showcase for the nation's green ambitions, Karak and its struggling real-life relatives are a marker of the increasingly parlous state of Australia's environment and the economic and political conflicts that continue to threaten it.

The Department of Environment and Heritage says Australia is home to more than a million species, with more than 80 per cent of flowering plants, mammals and inshore temperate-zone fish, and 45 per cent of its birds unique to the world's driest inhabited continent. Many now face extinction.

According to the Australian Academy of Science at least 41 bird and mammal species and more than 100 plant species have vanished since Captain James Cook sailed up the eastern seaboard 236 years ago.

The academy's list of endangered species now includes 10 fish, 12 frogs, 13 reptiles, 32 birds and 33 mammals. Many more are classed as vulnerable or rare.

Most have been put at risk by the relentless advance of agriculture, cities and towns, destroying forests and wetlands, pumping nitrates and other deadly wastes into rivers and oceans, and decimating vulnerable marine species with commercial fishing by-catches.

The red-tailed black cockatoo is a classic victim of agriculture and economic imperatives that mean land clearing remains one of Australia's biggest continuing environmental scars.

The bird feeds only on the seeds of stringybarks and bulokes, and nests in the hollows of gums that must be within 2km of its food. Since European settlement, two-thirds of stringy bark cover and 98 per cent of bulokes have been lost to farming, and vast tracts of eucalypts have disappeared.

The three-year habitat conservation project launched last week will, at best, protect about 3000ha of stringybark and buloke woodland a year.

Land clearing has far wider consequences as one of the key causes of salinity that is destroying massive swathes of Australia. Irrigation is accelerating the problem.

And while officials are pushing the Games as greenhouse-friendly, Australia remains the only industrial nation apart from the United States to refuse to sign the Kyoto Protocol, largely because of the damage Canberra predicts the protocols targets would inflict on its coal-fired economy.

If greenhouse warming cannot be halted or reversed, the impact will be directly felt by the Games mascot and other bird and animal species.