A CONGESTED aerial baiting calendar has prompted the Blackall-Tambo Wild Dog Advisory Group to seek out the services of an alternative operator after years of having only one person undertaking the campaign for the whole of Queensland.
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Group president Andrew Martin said it had nothing to do with the current operator on a personal or professional basis and all to do with availability.
"If the man doing it now were to break a leg, or if there was inclement weather or something, you can't get him back because the schedule is too tight," he said.
For the first time, 14 Queensland shires took part in a coordinated aerial baiting campaign earlier this year, moving from the north to the south of the state in a sequence.
The roll-out was organised by AgForce/AWI Wild Dog coordinator Brett Carlsson in conjunction with wild dog committees and shire council personnel in response to a call for shires to work in with each other to make baiting more effective.
He said the feedback he had gotten was that several shires had not been able to bait at key times.
"The biggest problem was that some were far too early and others were far too late but to their credit they all stuck to the process," he said.
"Blackall-Tambo has now engaged a new pilot, which should lessen the time it takes to get the work done.
"Once again it will be a matter of keeping to a schedule."
Andrew said that baiting in the Blackall-Tambo region should have been done three or four weeks earlier than the allocated time of early May, but dead dogs were being noticed.
"It's not the dogs that are unpredictable or impossible to manage, it's the people on whose places the dogs are," he said.
He was a firm advocate of the value of coordinated baiting, saying he had seen its effectiveness at Rocklands Station on the Barkly Tableland when he worked there as head stockman.
"There were 57 bores plus Brunette Lakes and we were seeing 10 to 15 dogs on each water, every day.
"We were losing foals and calves and couldn't sleep at night for the howling.
"It was in the throes of the BTEC campaign so we shot something like 300 beasts and had half-a-dozen planes to bait east to west in a coordinated fashion, and that fixed them up. I have no doubt that if you put any sort of poison out in a coordinated fashion, it will work."
Brett said that in his ideal world he would like to have three planes operating at the same time across north, central and south Queensland and have the area from the Gulf to the Paroo baited within three weeks, especially as new regions come on board.
Mt Isa is the latest council to join the aerial campaign, in time for the September/October baiting round.
Brett added that in the past such a dream would have been unrealistic but now councils have meat storage facilities installed. A follow-up meeting is now being planned for Longreach in July to plan the campaign for the second half of the year.
