Stand quietly in the scrub of the Clarence Valley, on the north coast of New South Wales, and you may see them: a tall male emu, with his bright blue neck and careful feet, escorting three chicks.
The chicks, their small bodies striped like humbugs, are a sign of hope. While national emu numbers are stable, this family belongs to a small endangered population of coastal emus. There are fewer than 50 left in the wild.
Reece Luxton, the natural resource coordinator with Clarence Valley council, is delighted. “That’s a plus three to the population!”
The coastal emu, or yugaamgan in the local Yaegl language, is genetically distinct from its western cousins. It was once widespread along the NSW north coast, but habitat loss through development, bushfires and floods, as well as predation by wild dogs and pigs and a devastating number of roadkill, has seen its numbers and range shrink to the Yuraygir national park and surrounds between Minnie Water and Brooms Head, as well as a small group in the Bungwalbin area.
At the last coastal emu count, in 2016, there were just 46. Organisers are hoping for a better result in the next count, scheduled for 14 and 15 October.
Protecting and counting the emus has become a community project.
The Yaegl elder Aunty Elizabeth Smith says the change in the emu’s fortunes is “a blessing … with permission from the ancestors”.
Reducing the roadkill
The farmer, family therapist and animal lover Barbara Linley moved to Brooms Head in the Clarence Valley six years ago. She bought 40 hectares of high conservation value land at Taloumbi on Brooms Head Road.
“I was driving to and fro, I was seeing the roadkill, especially the emus … I started feeling really annoyed,” Linley says.
“These creatures are on our coat of arms, and to think people are running over them. I could see this was a place where the emus regularly crossed – apparently it has long been a wildlife corridor and here were the emus contending with speeding cars and fences.”
Linley campaigned to reduce the speed limit on that section of Brooms Head Road, without success. She then founded the Lions Club of Clarence – Environmental in an effort to highlight the biodiversity of the area, and specifically the need to protect the emus from speeding cars.
“I knew that community ownership of the emus was the key to helping them, so I set about finding a way to do that,” she says.
The NSW Department of Planning and Environment had also been turning its attention to the coastal emu, through the Save our Species program. The threatened species officer Lia Hooper says the program and community efforts gained momentum after the devastating fires in 2019 that destroyed huge swathes of the emus’ habitat.
“The emu has a generalist diet and an important role in seed dispersal – it is one of the last of our megafauna and is critical for ecosystem connectivity,” Hooper says.
Then, in 2021, a male emu was hit and killed by a vehicle while crossing the road with his five chicks. Linley and other emu supporters stepped up their campaign to install road signs and reduce the speed limit along a 7km stretch of Brooms Head Road that had become a hotspot for emu crossings.
The group conducted speed surveys, gathered donations at local markets, sold emu Easter eggs, held a surf club fundraiser and managed to raise $8,000.
Clarence Valley council became involved, as did Transport for NSW and traditional owners from the Yaegl, Bundjalung and Gumbaynggirr nations. The initiative, called the Caring for our Coastal Emu project, has become a community-wide cause.
In late 2021, two patches of the road were painted bright green to designate them as an Emu Zone, and the speed limit was reduced to 80km/h. Yellow signs warning that emus were present were installed in 2022.
The campaign won the council a Local Government NSW Excellence in the Environment award last year.
“It was certainly a challenge bringing everyone together but thanks to the collaborative effort we finally got the speed reduction and signs over the line,” Luxton says.
The council also maintains an interactive map, with local people encouraged to register their coastal emu sightings. It is actively contributed to by Linley and others, who are also providing educational resources about the endangered population to local schools and providing brochures to landowners about which plants the birds prefer to eat.
The environment department, is piloting a captive breeding program using eggs collected from wild nests. It is also assisting landholders to install special emu-friendly gates, which will allow the birds to range more widely. It is also ramping up efforts to control wild pigs, after numbers exploded following the recent wet season. Unhatched eggs and emu chicks are favourite foods.
Hooper says the coastal emu count in October will help threatened species officers to better understand what further interventions may be required.
“We are calling on citizen scientists to get involved to help us get an accurate snapshot of the population,” she says.
