A group that supports the heritage listing of Snowy brumbies says an aerial survey it has done shows brumby numbers are almost 5000 less than those estimated by the National Parks and Wildlife Service.
High brumby numbers have been critical to the move to cull the horses as the NPWS says the brumbies pose an unacceptable environmental risk to the world biosphere-listed Kosciuszko National Park. A new Kosciuszko management plan that is expected to approve a large cull of the brumbies, is yet to be released by the State Government.
National Parks has previously said there are between 2700 and 5900 brumbies in the northern part of the park.
The Snowy Mountain Brumby Sustainability and Management Group (SMBSMG) says it conducted an aerial survey this month of the northern area of the park, and says it spotted only about 700 brumbies.
The SMBSMG aerial survey covered about 1600 square kilometres of the northern part of the park.
“We covered all those areas and came up with 91 clusters of horses ranging from 1 to 30 horses, total number counted was 688 snowy brumbies,” the SMBSMG said.
“SMBSMG concede that there may be some inaccuracy in this total but, but even if an error allowance margin of 50 per cent is applied the total is still, 1032 snowy brumbies, that means, if you believe NPWS, that somewhere in the bush there is another 3,215 snowy brumbies.
“Pretty easy now to see why there is so much resistance to an independent, unbiased population survey.
“The results of SMBSMG's survey supports SMBSMG's view that the population survey results are a gross misrepresentation of fact and also undermine the carefully crafted media release of 6,000 snowy brumbies as the population of snowy brumbies across KNP that NPWS so fervently sprout as justification for the elimination of the snowy brumby.”
The SMBSMG, headed by Alan Lanyon, is planning a more thorough survey in the future.
A separate brumby supporters group, the Snowy Mountains Bush Users Group (SMBUG), headed by former Cooma mayor and former nationals MP Peter Cochran, says the survey is on the “right track”, but there needed to be better methodology to give a more accurate picture of brumby numbers.
Mr Cochran said “you need an approved methodology”. “The NPWS’s method has failed, but what SMBSMG has done is good and I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen.”
Mr Cochran runs horse treks through the park and has also claimed brumby numbers are far lower than NPWS estimates.
He believes the draft management plan has been basically “knocked on the head” by the government as there is a push to heritage-list brumbies, supported by Nationals MPs. He has been the major supporter of heritage-listing of brumbies, which has the support of Nationals leader John Barilaro.
