Rebirth of Bangalow Wetlands – an environmental article written for the “Bangalow Heartbeat”
“The guys did a fantastic job! They have shown themselves to be conservationists, not just workers. And their efforts have helped bring the promise of better biodiversity to Bangalow.” This is how Dave Pont of Bangalow Landcare describes the team of council workers who helped bring together the redevelopment of the Bangalow wetlands.
The work is still continuing but the redevelopment of the Bangalow wetlands is nearly complete. It’s been ongoing since the beginning of August, when the team first came together. Mark, Ben, Troy and Greg made up the council works team. “Some people may just see big guys in fluoro jackets driving heavy machinery” jokes Dave. “But the reality is they’ve brought about some simple yet beautiful changes which promise some significant improvements in the delicate biodiversity of the wetlands area.”
What sort of changes can we expect? Well, the wetlands area is changing week by week as the planting of native aquatic plants continues and these plants grow and spread.
The team’s focus was to rebuild the area and maximise its biodiversity. Mark Gapps, the Works Supervisor, has a wealth of experience in this area, having worked for the council for 25 years on such projects. He focused the team’s efforts on developing the initial Council plans to ensure that the site was designed and constructed to optimise the wetlands’ ability to treat the storm water from Bangalow’s streets. The storm water enters the wetlands via a pipe. The team helped to design the wetlands area to ensure that as the water flows from the pipe through the wetlands, it spreads around the base of the plants, sediments settle to the bottom, water-treating bacteria establish themselves in the slow moving shallow water, and a natural, living filter is created to treat this polluted water.
The water flows slowly through the living filter created by the wetlands to a depth of about 200mm and ultimately flows into the creek. It was therefore also important to the team to ensure that the wetlands design helped improve the flow of clean water into the creek by limiting soil flow into the creek. It’s for this reason that they’ve put in place hay bales and silt fences and also rock fillways along the creek bank to support the new construction. All of this was under NSW Fisheries approval.
The team showed sensitivity to the environment, thinking through the potential positive impacts of the change and translating the Council’s plans on this basis. It’s envisaged that there will be an increase in the number of water dragons, as well as birds and frogs. And look out for more platypus! The females love to gather the leaves of the native aquatics that have been planted and then take them back to the burrow to use them as nesting material, so as the plants grow, we should see more and more native wildlife.
“We’re delighted with the result!” says Dave. And they’re not the only ones apparently – lots of local Bangalow residents have approached the team to thank them for their efforts. The plants are still only young and there is still some planting going on, but community members can already visualise how it will look when the plants are fully grown and the area is green and lush.
So, next time you see a big guy in a fluoro jacket down by the wetlands, go over and say hello! Thanks to their efforts, we can look forward to a greener, cleaner wetlands area for Bangalow.
