Perth Voice Interactive

Poisons taking deadly toll on owls

VINCENT bird advocates are calling for a city-wide ban on rodent poisons that also kill other animals, with native owls at great risk if they consume a poisoned rat.

At the Vincent council electors’ AGM on February 2, Birdlife Australia member Betty Bryant said the group is sounding the warning “about the dangers of rodenticides… we’re killing our owls”.

Rats are a recurring problem around Vincent, and in ratty hotspots like West Perth it’s common to hear scuffling in the undergrowth from rats feasting on ubiquitous palm tree fruit. 

“We all hate rats, I get that, but the second generation rodenticides which are freely available through Bunnings are anticoagulants,” Ms Bryant said.

“If there’s a delay between when the mouse or rat eats the bait to when it dies, and if an owl or a cat or a dog eats those rats or mice, they are affected.

“My brother actually had his dog in the vet for a very expensive three days, having eaten one of these rats.

“The problem is the [anti] coagulants stay in the body where they don’t disseminate.

“Our pets, our owls, our raptors, tawny frogmouths, any of those are likely to be killed.”

The second generation poisons contains fast-acting super-anticoagulants which last longer and are up to 100 times stronger than the old warfarin-style anticoagulant poisons.

“Second generation rodenticides are actually banned or restricted in America, Europe, and the UK already,” Ms Bryant said.

Her motion to ban them in Vincent and “strongly discourage” other rodenticides was passed by a majority of electors present at the AGM, and councillors will now consider whether to make it policy at an upcoming meeting.

In 2018 a study by ECU researcher Michael Lohr found 72.6 per cent of dead southern boobook owls collected around Perth and south-west WA had some rodenticide in their system. 

Just over 50 per cent of the birds had dangerous levels of rat poison residue in their livers and would likely be experiencing blood problems (though a lot of them had been hit by cars before collection, so it was hard to tell how many would have died from rat poison).

Birdlife Australia recommends if people must use poisons as a last resort, they avoid anything containing the ingredients brodifacoum, bromadiolone, difethialone, difenacoum or flocoumafen, all indicating second generation status.

The group petitioned Bunnings to remove second generation poisons from sale; its website advises they are “the most humane option for eliminating rodents; however, they pose a greater risk of harm to non-target species… so it’s important to remove any dead rodents that you find”.

by DAVID BELL

PARKERS who overstay just a little bit would have a second chance to pay the extra parking fee and avoid a fine under a system proposed by Stirling councillor Joe Ferrante.

Cr Ferrante, who recently copped a parking fine himself, reckons they should drop the fine if the person overstays no more than 90 minutes, and if they pay for the extra time within 24 hours via a parking app. 

He says it’s fair enough because “this will allow for situations where a paid parking user who accidentally runs over time and would have genuinely paid for the additional time be exempted from the fine”.

Cr Ferrante says easing up on parking enforcement would help Stirling live up to its “City of Choice” motto, and the plan was an “opportunity for us as a council to look at this and be good supporters of the public”.

Cr Suzanne Migdale agreed: “I think it’s time that we all be very mindful this year especially with the economy being the way it is, that handing out speeding tickets left, right and centre is going to greatly affect businesses that have already been greatly affected.

“I received a parking ticket in a particular city – not Stirling, to be clear – recently during the holidays. And I haven’t been back there. I have not been back there to businesses I would normally go and spend money at. It turned me off completely.”

Cr Ferrante’s motion to investigate the idea was passed at the February 7 council meeting.

It’ll take a while to come to fruition: Council parking staff wrote a report saying “the request is complex and will require substantial investigation and a detailed review to determine the feasibility”. 

Three councillors – Felicity Farrelly, Bianca Sandri, and mayor Mark Irwin – thought the plan was too complex to bother with given how few tickets are issued to over-stayers. 

Generally the rangers fine people with no ticket at all, or who’ve parked in particularly egregious no-parking zones, on footpaths, or in accessible parking bays.

Stirling’s community safety manager Peter Mullins told councillors that his rangers very rarely fine over-stayers: “We do afford about a 10 to 15 minute grace period for people who might have an expired ticket… we don’t typically write a lot of infringement notices for that,” with only 47 expired ticket fines issued this financial year. 

Cr Sandri calculated that meant less than 0.03 per cent of the city’s population would cop a fine. 

“Which probably highlights that Cr Ferrante was one of the very few people in the city who got fined,” Mr Irwin chuckled.

by DAVID BELL

THE iconic Greens & Co cafe in Leederville is in line to become an Indian eatery and pub.

The quirky and chaotic Greens & Co, often stylised “Greens & Cock” due to frequent additions of a painted CK to their sign, closed in April 2021 leaving a large, solemn shopfront in the middle of the Oxford Street strip.

The new tenants want to open a 200-patron Indian gastro pub called Jagga Daku where Indian style craft beers are served alongside yoghurt-based lassis and the owner’s traditional recipe for masala chai. 

Company director restaurateur Rohit Kaushal has previously managed Boba Bites and Bollywood Lounge in Karatha. 

The place is named for a Punjab rebel hero who lived circa 1901-1932 and who became known as a Robin Hood figure for his charitable banditry during British colonial rule. 

It needs Vincent council approval to changed the use to tavern, with officers recommending approval given it’ll “reactivate a vacant, large and prominent tenancy in the Leederville town centre”. There were no public objections during consultation.

It’s proposed to stay open til midnight, in line with other nearby bars. 

Greens & Co closed in April 2021, but a painstaking recreation of the famed “Greens & Cock” sign persisted long after the doors were shut. 

A BID to restore free infant immunisation clinics has been voted down by a slim majority of Bayswater councillors.

The free clinic days used to immunise about 750 to 1000 kids a year and cost the council around $120,000, until a split council voted to end the clinics to save money in 2022.

Councillor Dan Bull, the former mayor and one of five who’d wanted to keep the clinics last year, moved at the January 31 council meeting that they look into restoring the clinics when preparing this year’s budget.

“This is local. It supports people who are unable to access the state service,” Cr Bull said. 

“The easier it is to access the service the greater the chance people will get their children vaccinated. Right here and now there are a bunch of people who can’t access immunisation services … as a consequence of the last budget decision.”

Cr Lorna Clarke agreed the service wasn’t simply a double-up and she’d had a lot of correspondence from people who’d found it more accessible than a GP. 

“I think for the sake of what is $120,000, we can sit down and look at our budget line-by-line, which we do most years, and I think we should do again, we can find $120,000.

Drinks

“We can find it in things like reducing the drinks that get served at the councillor bar behind me, reducing a range of different costs or underspends where the money is not spent and we roll it over year on year, because we have huge rollovers.”

Those opposed mainly argued that vaccination wasn’t the business of councils.

Mayor Filomena Piffaretti, voted against the clinic spending each time.

“When I was elected mayor I promised change and that change extends to financial reform, where we are a council that spends ratepayer moneys with the utmost thought and consideration in a responsible and sustainable way, and on services which are the remit to local government.

“Until this council is in a position where we are financially sustainable, it would be irresponsible for me to support funding a service with ratepayer money, effectively taxing them twice, for a service which is the primary responsibility of other levels of government,” Cr Pifferetti said.

Cr Bull’s motion was backed by councillors Clarke, Sally Palmer, Elli Petersen-Pik, and Giorgia Johnson. 

But they were outnumbered by those who voted to cut the funding last time whose stances remained unchanged: councillors Piffaretti, Assunta Meleca, Steven Ostaszewskyj, Josh Eveson, Michelle Sutherland, and Catherine Ehrhardt. 

by DAVID BELL

AFTER five years of efforts there’s finally a safe pedestrian crossing in front of the main entrance to Maylands Peninsula Primary School.

Bayswater councillor Elli Petersen-Pik originally raised the issue before he became a councillor and long before his kids started school, and parents later collected a petition in 2019 calling for a crossing.

“On a daily basis you’ll see kids in precarious situations,” parent Kate Brill told us in 2019. 

Cr Petersen-Pik said the lengthy campaign has highlighted why the council needed to get serious and take concrete actions to implement the Safe Routes to Schools plan (“Petition gets action,” Voice, February 4 2023). That’ll give them a firmer standing to convince Main Roads to make all the needed changes to improve safety, since it’s that state body which has power over crossings.

“With much persistence, and taking this case as a personal trial to see how long it takes to implement a zebra crossing in our city, I eventually succeeded in getting the support from Main Roads, only after I explained that there are children with disabilities crossing that road,” Cr Petersen-Pik reflected on his councillor’s social media profile this week.

“My conclusion is simple: If it has taken years to get an approval and implement a zebra crossing before the second biggest public primary school in Perth … you can imagine how hard it would be to get zebra crossings installed in other suitable locations, to encourage more people to walk and ride,” including those wanting to get to town centres. 

“As we can see again, our WA state government obviously doesn’t regard pedestrians and cyclists as important enough.”

Bayswater staff are currently thinking up an implementation plan to address the many footpath hazards that discourage walking, as pointed out by the public during the Safe Route to School plan’s consultation last year.

It goes to councillors in May.

by DAVID BELL