Document ID: chunk:federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L01095:body:0:p30
Version: federal_register_of_legislation:F2024L01095
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large areas involved makes them of considerable value to Malleefowl conservation.

Feral goats in Malleefowl habitat (AMPE monitoring camera), Vic.

4.2.6 Predation
Predation is a cause of mortality of Malleefowl. Foxes, in particular, prey on Malleefowl at all stages of the bird's life cycle. Foxes have been known to take over a third of eggs at some sites (Frith 1962a, Benshemesh and Burton 1999), but fox predation on eggs has usually been found to be negligible in large studies (Booth 1987b, Brickhill 1987, Benshemesh 1992, Priddel and Wheeler 2005, Ryan-Colton et al. 2011). The two detailed cases where foxes were shown to have taken a substantial proportion of eggs followed widespread rabbit reduction by introduced viruses (myxomatosis in the 1950s, and rabbit haemorrhagic disease in 1996). The subsequent loss of rabbits as food for foxes may have caused foxes to switch prey to Malleefowl eggs (Benshemesh and Burton 1999).

A recent comprehensive analysis of long-term mound monitoring data found little evidence that reducing fox abundance influenced Malleefowl breeding activity (Benshemesh and Southwell et al. 2020), which align with previous studies (Benshemesh et al. 2007, Walsh et al. 2012). Other factors, such as rainfall and time since fire, were more important predictors of Malleefowl breeding activity.  The lack of response of Malleefowl to fox reduction programs in these large-scale statistical studies is in accord with observations at local scales. For example, fox control failed to increase breeding densities after more than a decade of baiting at Bakara in SA (Gates 2004), Dryandra in WA (A Friend pers. comm. cited in Benshemesh 2007b) and Yathong in NSW (Wheeler and Priddel 2009). The Dryandra example is interesting in this regard as several species of medium-sized native mammals increased greatly after fox baiting, but Malleefowl numbers appear to have stayed the same or declined. In short, there is little evidence that Malleefowl populations increase following fox control operations, even though fox control is widely practised in areas where Malleefowl conservation is a concern. There is evidence that foxes and feral cats have compounding and complementary effects on native fauna (Stobo-Wilson et al. 2021a; Stobo-Wilson et al. 2021b) and that fox control can lead to increased cat numbers (Marlow et al. 2015), therefore the control of predation from both species may benefit Malleefowl. For example, six out of nine adult birds fitted with GPS trackers on the Eyre Peninsula died from cat and fox predation (three each; five within a year and one after 450 days of tracking) (Stenhouse and Moseby, 2023). For a long-lived bird this is a very high rate of mortality and suggests that reducing the rate of predation by cats and foxes increases population size.

Despite these studies being of sufficient