Explore Your Area on the Atlas of Living Australia reveal the following species within 1 km of the site:
Overall there are 233 animal species including:
15 Mammals – Ringtail possums, brushtail possums, foxes, swamp wallaby, cat, short-beaked echidna, feathertail gliders, Goulds Wattled bats, Grey-headed Flying Foxes, sugar gliders, eastern grey kangaroo, large bent-winged bat, brown rat, eastern horse-shoe bat, little forest bat.
14 Reptiles – red-bellied black snake, blue-tongue lizards, eastern water dragon, green tree snake, snaked necked turtle, bearded dragon and more.
8 Amphibians – common eastern froglet, leaf green tree frog, striped marsh frog, perons tree frog, red-crowned toadlet, eastern dwarf tree frog and more.
133 Birds – Sulphur-crested cockatoo, noisy miner, kookaburra, grey butcher bird, australian magpie, king parrot, eastern whip-bird, pied currawong, crested pigeon, Australian raven, crimson rossella, brush turkey, galah, eastern koel, eastern spinebill, grey fantail, eastern wattlebird, red wattlebird, glossy black cockatoo and many many more.
4 Molluscs – chocolate-streaked pinwheel snail, dural land snail, hydrobiid snail, leopard slug.
44 Insects – redeye cicada, punctate flower chafer Beetle, green grocer cicada, fiddler beetle, long-tailed blue butterfly, bronze orange bug, jumping ant and many, many more.
Although there are some 946 known species in the area, that number that could stretch to as many as 5,000 if it was possible to catalogue all microscopic, but essential, organisms such as bacteria. The mammals, of which we are part, represent less than one percent. We bear a large responsibility for the extraordinary influence our lives have on all those living things around us.
Biodiversity
Biodiversity is biological variation at all levels, including the genetic variation between individuals in a population, among the populations that comprise a species, among the species that make up communities and between the communities scattered across the landscape.
Genetic Diversity found in a population enables it to adapt to local conditions. Also, as each population in a species is genetically slightly different from the others, populations together form a store of genetic information that allows the species to cope with a variety of conditions.
The area is home or hunting grounds for the following threatened species:
- Powerful Owl (Vulnerable BC Act)
- Glossy Black Cockatoo (Vulnerable EPBC Act, BC Act)
- Square-tailed Kite (Vulnerable BC Act)
- Grey-headed Flying Fox (Vulnerable EPBC Act, BC Act)
- Red-Crowned Toadlet (Vulnerable BC Act)
- Dural Land Snail (Endangered EPBC Act, BC Act)
Not that long ago, in the Westleigh Park bushland you would have noticed a richer diversity of plants and animals.
Slowly, systematically this is being destroyed.
Mountain bike tracks have a lot of negatives for the greater community. They remove all of those complex elements in these rare ecological communities. As the plant complexity is simplified so is the wildlife.
They are also one-directional so that mountain bikers can move safely at speed. There is no safe scope for shared use of a track, walkers are in the way. If the issue was tracks for kids then the few tracks that already existed would have sufficed.
This issue is much greater than Westleigh Park as it highlights the removal in 2016 of any protection of endangered species. Short-sighted people decided that you can put a monetary value on our threatened plants and animals and pay some money into a fund. However this fund cannot offset the damaged to critically endangered species because they cannot be found else where.