Living with wildlife

One of the great things about Mount Gnomon Farm is that it borders natural bush that extends from the seaside town of Penguin through to the central plateau. In fact, if one of our pigs decided to go for a walk, they could follow the Penguin to Cradle trail to Cradle Mountain and if they had enough energy they could then do the overland track all the way through to Lake St Clair.

Not only does the farm’s location allow us to go on fantastic bush walks from our back door, it also results in some of Tasmania’s magnificent wildlife visiting our farm. This week we were woken by a different sound in the orchard. After turning on the flood light we watched a Tasmanian Devil as it surveyed the orchard to see if any of our poultry had failed to find a secure and safe place to sleep.

The devil looked healthy and seemed free of any facial tumours - the symptom of the lethal disease that has just spread to devils in our area. While normally a scavenger, devils will take poultry. Fortunately we had shut up all the chooks and ducks, which is a nightly job to protect them from devils and the two native quolls: the eastern quoll and the spotted tail quoll, which are also well-known for taking poultry.

At the moment we’re using our future garden shed to shut up the chooks, but in the future we intend to build a quoll-proof chook house that the chooks can fly in and out of, but quolls and devils can’t enter. There’s a great design on the parks website.

But in the meantime, our ducks have to be herded into a covered pen at night. Fortunately our Indian Runners are very easy to train. If they’re not already in the shelter, at the sight of us at dusk they quickly waddle in. The Indian Runner has more of a herding mentality than any other species - it's the reason they're used at sheep dog trials.

In South East Asia, where they originate, large flocks are kept for integrated pest management in rice fields. At dawn the ducks are released from their shelters and follow their master to the rice paddies. When he puts up a flag the ducks know it’s time to go to work and they have to keep within eyesight of the flag. At the end of the day when their master takes down the flag they know it’s time to go home.

Our ducks aren’t quite at the same level, but one day when we get some spare time, Guy has dreams of training one of our Wessex pigs to herd our ducks - Babe style. Guy is convinced our pigs would be capable of negotiating a new password with the ducks, something a bit more ducky than ‘baa ram ewe’.