Dark secret hidden beneath Aussie city’s housing estates
For decades, councils and developers allowed hibernating wildlife to be buried under their houses.
Australia’s population has grown by over 10 million people since 1990 creating an urgent need for new housing. Since then average house prices in Sydney have surged from $184,600 to $1.6 million, making development around population centres big business.
But in the rush to build, something truly gruesome occurred and it's been buried underneath hundreds of family homes along the city’s growth corridors. Lying dead beneath the concrete slabs are the bodies of thousands of turtles, fish and eels.
Many of the animals had been living in farm dams and wetlands which were filled in, then paved over by developers. The situation was worse during winter because that’s when turtles were hibernating underground, so they slowly suffocated beneath the construction.
Turtle expert Associate Professor Ricky Spencer doesn’t think most people realise that not all councils or developers relocate fish and reptiles when they drain wetlands.
“In the past, anything that wasn’t endangered was ignored. I’ve seen some wetlands where they’d just put the earth over the top,” the Western Sydney University ecologist told Yahoo News.
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There have been minor changes to environmental protections in NSW since turtles were regularly buried en masse. Spencer believes many developers have reformed their ways in recent years due to societal expectations about wildlife.
Some of the worst losses in wetlands historically occurred around Sydney’s west and southwest. And the problem of displacing turtles is far from over — the new western Sydney airport is being built on prime nesting grounds.
Related: 'Big error' discovered in Aussie city’s new housing plan
Today, Spencer believes councils are better at integrating wetlands into developments. A major influence has been pressure from communities, and the mapping of turtle habitat by advocacy group 1 Million Turtles project.
Which suburbs have turtles buried underneath them?
Researchers have documented the destruction of wetlands in Blacktown, Campbelltown, Casula, Liverpool and Penrith during the 2000s and 2010s. But Kane Durrant, the principal ecologist at WILD Conservation, told Yahoo the problem stretches back much further. He's heard horror stories of turtles regularly being buried alive in the 1970s and 1980s in areas closer to the city centre like Botany in the southeast.
“Sydney used to be rich with wildlife. When you go to the Royal National Park, you see echidnas and snakes and possums and owls – that used to be the whole Sydney basin,” he told Yahoo.
“Now it's just restricted to those fringe areas. But now we’re cutting into them, so it’s death by 1000 cuts for our wildlife.”
As farms across Sydney’s southwest and west are purchased by developers and rezoned by government, Durrant is regularly called in to collect turtles from dams and creeks as they're drained.
“Basically these animals are being displaced and it's our job to go in there and relocate them,” he said.
“Up until five or 10 years ago, they were regularly buried alive. It still happens from time to time. But now developers have to have an ecologist on site… and we can take the animals to a safer place.”
How Aussies can avoid having their homes built on turtles
Simply moving the turtles to new waterbodies is not a “sustainable” solution, according to Durrant.
“We regularly find anywhere from 25 to 50 turtles in a dam, and sometimes you get an outlier where we’ll pull out 200 in a single dam,” he said.
“If we keep removing them as we develop the Sydney Basin, where do those thousands of turtles go?”
Durrant believes the simple solution to the problem is retaining wetlands so they can continue to be enjoyed by wildlife, and make life more pleasant for the humans who move into the area.
“We always suggest they put in a barbeque and a bike track around it,” he said.
“We'd love to see some wetlands implemented into these new estates… so we can sort of see people in native wildlife living alongside each other.”
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