Photography provided by Tobias Titz

In recent years the Mt Korong precinct has become a lively hub of revegetation, restoration and environmental community.

In 2008 a visionary private conservation company, Biolinking Australia, bought the land comprising Korong Ridge to the east of the mount together with other retired farmlands in the immediate neighbourhood of Mt Korong (including a 320 acre property adjoining Burrabungle Park). This amounted to a total area in excess of 2400 acres/970 ha. These areas were direct seeded for carbon credits or, where remnant bushland existed, protected under biodiversity offset agreements, and then the entire area was sub-divided into a number of environmental estates that were subsequently covenanted with Trust for Nature and on-sold to private covenanters.

A committed community of conservationists is now actively managing this privately held land. As one of the densest clusters of covenanted properties in Victoria, the Mt Korong precinct is a site of private conservation on a landscape scale. An incorporated conservation group, Mt Korong Eco-Watch (MtKEW), was formed in 2010 to bring together land holders with an interest in protecting and exploring the ecology of the mount. This now thriving group is currently involved in a number of exciting conservation and community projects.

 

These projects include

  • A community walk from Mt Korong to Mt Kooyoora, to be held in October 2015
  • The identification, monitoring and protection of rare spring soaks that occur around the mount, including at Burrabungle.
  • The construction and furbishing of a propagation shed on Korong Ridge for the use of members of the group.
 


Several of the MtKEW projects are supported by the Wedderburn Conservation Management Network, a well-resourced regional conservation organization that has been revegetating and managing large areas of private land in the Loddon shire over the last 15 years. WCMN currently has major funding (the Kooyoora Connections project) to establish ecological corridors between Mt Korong and Mt Kooyoora and between Mt Kooyoora and the Wychitella Nature Conservation Reserve to the north of Wedderburn. Bush Heritage also has significant holdings to the north of Wedderburn that fall within the proposed corridors.

There is strong interest amongst some members of the MtKEW group in rewilding the entire Mt Korong conservation estate, where this would involve, inter alia, setting up feral animal proof enclosures for the holding and captive breeding of smaller marsupials, such as bettongs, bandicoots and rock wallabies, currently entirely missing from the local ecology.