A heartfelt cry from the Kununurra Community to the Nation now fighting to stop the cane toad from crossing into WA since Sept. 2004. We will Stop the Cane Toads getting into WA! |
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KTBs National Finalists! Banksia Environment Awards Friends of KTBs Media Release 6 june 2007 Banksia Awards Committee announces KTBs are finalists in two categories of the 2007 awards:
Winners announced 19–20 July Sydney Exhibition and Convention Centre Reaching the dizzing height of finalist in these prestigious national environment awards is recognition of a job well done!! to the indigenous and non-indigenous men, women, teenagers and children of Kununurra and surrounds; and increasingly our tourists and travellers who all – as VOLUNTEERS – brave the wilderness in some of the harshest conditions to seek and destroy the colonising cane toad as it decimates its way across the top end. Over 30% of the Kununurra community – and even the Wyndham Prison camp - is now signed up for toadbusting and we now have over 200 trained KTB leaders and educators based in Kununurra and Perth. Being a finalist amounts to national recognition of the remarkable achievements of the KTBs over the last 2 years. It is a fitting postscript to the recognition of the KTBs by the WA State government in 2006, when the KTBs won the WA State government Environment Award of Community of The Year. Every weekend - since September 2005 - you will find KTB volunteers at the colonising front, hand catching cane toads up to 450kms from their Kununurra homes. This unique effort - of taking out to date over 113,000 mature toads - is slowing the tide, and also taking cane toad biomass – around 50,000 kgs - out of the ecosystem so that its impact on our native fauna is mitigated, as it makes its decimating path across the landscape killing - in its multiple corridors - eagles, snakes, frogs and crocodiles; and polluting our billabongs. Almost everyone in Kununurra now knows the dangers of the cane toad and can recognise one at 40 paces, long before it even arrives, so Kununurra is prepared and ready if they reach the Ord River catchment. Lee still is, “Hoping against hope that the scientists find an effective response to the cane toad before it invades and decimates the biodiversity of our beloved OrdRiver ecosystem”. Contacts: Lee Scott-Virtue 0429 406 935 or 08 9168 2576; Sandy Boulter at Friends of the Kimberley Toad Busters on 0427 508 582. If everyone was a toad buster, the toads would be busted! ALL DONATIONS ARE TAX DEDUCTIBLE |
