Camels take on Parkinsonia

FIVE years ago, John Lyons bought 60 camels as a way to contain the Parkinsonia invading the floodplains of his property. Wambiana is now home to around 100 camels, all happily munching the weed—and according to John, they are an enormous success.

"We’d done the chemical control, but unless you keep going back and back you lose the first investment," he explained. "The camels, however, just eat all the time—all the seedlings, the flowers as well as breaking the branches."

Wambiana’s use of the camels was also studied by John McKenzie at the Tropical Weeds Research Centre at Charters Towers, who looked mainly at the camels’ effect on the soil seed bank.

"The biggest effect is a reduction of the seed, so there is less seed going into the soil and therefore reducing the soil seed bank," explained John. "It makes it a very neat integrated management tool for Parkinsonia." Two other weeds camels graze successfully are prickly acacia and chinee apple.

Parkinsonia is capable of producing thousands of seed pods per year, but in the study Wambiana’s camels were found to reduce the pods to just one per shrub.

There are risks however. The weed can be spread through camel dung and camels also graze native vegetation. More research is needed in that area, but the many climatic zones and vegetation types of the savannas means that advice for one region is not going to necessarily apply to another. In central Australia, where the camel is a pest, studies have listed 200 species of native vegetation that camels will graze. But at Wambiana, Parkinsonia is the tipple of choice, edging out most of the native species.

Camels as weed control for Parkinsonia needs careful management, as they will put some pressure on grass stocks and they won’t be able to wipe out the weed completely. On the plus side however, they are excellent at controlling regrowth and as John Lyons points out, they work 24 hours a day.

"I haven’t been able to employ anyone else who works that way!" — by Kate O'Donnell.