It was a beautiful warm sunny day at Long Reef, around 23 degrees, with just a slight light breeze, being slightly more on the western slope for which the Bitou clearer s were very grateful.  How lucky are we working in this area of beautiful scenery.  There were quite a few planes today and lots of para gliders were out.  We saw Osprey and the local Nankeen Kestrel spent the whole time around us – at morning tea it caught a feed about the size of a mouse on the lower western slope near the track, and later in the afternoon the Kestrel flew over two groups of us, not more than a metre – amazing!  thought I could put my hand up and touch this magnificent bird with these really beautiful colours.

The four Bitou workers on the far western slope – Julie cut and poisoned some Bitou on the top area of the western part of our site. Brad, Gen & Merrilyn worked below Julie continuing to move west and eliminating two big clumps of Bitou.  They also removed quite a lot of Burr Medic. The big success of the day was Brad finding Des’ previously lost knife!

Claire C. and Jayke worked on Burr Medic, Bromus and oat grass at the bottom, along the path – whilst Elaine was targeting the same weeds in the eastern flat area.

Ivana, Des and Lisa all tackled the Burr Medic on the western flat – where there were also quite a lot of thistles, which we managed to eliminate in this area.  There is so much of this, that even in this one area we only removed about 50%.  It is on the turn from green to brown burrs.  In some places we could have done with a dustpan and brush for all the burr seeds that have fallen.  The lot near the track have all seeded, we were too late for that.  We really could have done with 3 times the number this month, but due to COVID, NBC are still restricting us to 10 volunteers.  I am seriously worried about next year with this weed if NBC are unable to poison again.

Image 1: Group photo at morning tea

Image 2: Bitou clearers on the far western side of the side

Image 3: Clearing the burr medic- some of them are huge

Image 4: Our Weed bags at the end of the day