REMAKING WETLANDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 233

would appeal to ducks, much like the 'wildlife-friendly' farm dams that have been
encouraged by a range of organisations and by the NSW Government over the last
decade and a half (see, for example, Rawton, 1999). While these do not seem to
have been widely taken up by farmers, perhaps because of water shortages during
the drought, in mid-2012 there were signs of 'wildlife-friendly' dams that ducks
were clearly enjoying. There are a range of problems with these dams, such as the
dams being on private land and subject to private interests. Further, ducks may still
go to rice fields as well as the dams. However, these dams also represent more
hopeful possibilities for sharing these water landscapes, and ones that perhaps both
Kinghorn and Frith would have liked.
Conclusion
In this region, ducks have occupied a space at the interface of wildlife and
agriculture. The multiple, sometimes conflicting, roles in which ducks have been
cast reflect some of the complexity at this interface: as pests, game, economically
beneficial, and protected native wildlife. Each role carries a particular legacy and
set of interests about how ducks can and cannot be accommodated in these land-
scapes, and all need to be considered together. Kinghorn and Frith have provided
focal points in tracing these controversies. Their work and professional contexts
reveal some of the wider issues that have been at stake in these controversies,
changing ideas about pests and conservation at this interface, and the shifting
approaches in government biological sciences, from zoology and the economic
conservation of species, to ecology and conservation science. All of these relation-
ships and interests have been, and continue to be, negotiated within a changed and
changing water landscape.
Perhaps one of the most striking features of this case is that there has never been
a definite consensus among farmers, or between farmers and biologists about
whether ducks significantly damage crops. These ongoing controversies show some
of the inherited relationships between particular crops, farmers, and ducks. They
perhaps also reflect the persistence of different ideas about what has constituted
acceptable damage to a rice crop and the continuation of the view by some farmers
that ducks should be eliminated from rice growing areas. In the case of Kinghorn
and Frith, some farmers may have seen their recommendations as 'top-down'
science, which reflected only a portion of the views of the farming community, so
that Kinghorn and Frith may have unwittingly entered into regional politics. In
recent years rice farmers have started to accommodate water birds in various ways,
which connects with growing scientific and popular concerns about the loss of
wetlands from agricultural water use as well as with ideas about the ecological
relationships between farms and what lies beyond. In many ways this ability to think
about the interconnections between watery landscapes in Australia is a legacy of
work undertaken by Kinghorn, Frith and their contemporaries.