Thalgarrah Environmental Education Centre

26/03/2026

Fun day exploring the Macintyre River at Yetman with students from Yetman and Bonshaw schools.

24/03/2026

A great day with a local stage 1 group studying “what is a river like?”

05/12/2025

This is our resident spider who loves playing with our big screen in the classroom.
Getting better every day!

03/12/2025

We have recently been involved with a Citizen Science project looking at local insectivorous bats. We were sent a couple of bat recorders which we installed in the forest and by the dam. After being out for 4 nights it’s time to send them back.
Looking forward to seeing the report of what was recorded! 🦇

27/11/2025

Young Australians are facing significant mental health challenges. One in five young people experiences mental illness, including anxiety, depression and substance abuse disorders.

A groundbreaking Victorian trial found that group-based ‘nature prescriptions’ – where health practitioners prescribe nature-based activities for patients – can deliver compelling results and value for money.

Conventional therapies can be costly and frequently involve long waiting periods. In contrast, spending time in nature offers an alternative that is affordable, widely accessible, and grounded in a long-standing truth: being in natural environments supports our well-being.

Tap through to read more → unimelb.me/3LZS7vc

18/11/2025

We’ve had an enthusiastic bunch of preschoolers this week becoming citizen scientists helping us with Invertebrates Australia’s “Bug Hunt Australia” project. We found loads of things including ants, spiders, millipedes, beetle larvae, cicadas and their shells, butterflies, pill bugs, cockroaches, mealy bug destroyers, grasshoppers and moths!

12/11/2025

It's a great time of year to get planting or sow seeds

One of the 'Meadow Argus' butterfly's favourite native Australian host-plants is growing in popularity...

The Australian ‘Fan-Flower’ (Scaevola aemula) has been cultivated to become a highlight of many flowerpots, planters, hanging-baskets and flowerbeds around the world! As it loves full sun, and flowers all summer long, and so profusely – it can sometimes be hard to see the leaves!

The ‘Meadow Argus’, once an extremely common and widespread Australian garden butterfly, has experienced a significant reduction of it’s broadleaf host-plants (native and introduced Plantains) that used to grow in older gardens and lawns. Without alternative host-plants to raise their caterpillars on they are only able to visit gardens temporarily.

By growing Fan-Flowers in your patch, or pot, you can have an extremely attractive native Australian plant – that will also provide leaves for the Meadow Argus.

Do you know someone who would like more Australian native plants and butterflies in their garden?

07/11/2025

17/08/2025

On the cold night of September 7, 1936, the last known thylacine, Tasmania’s iconic “tiger, died alone in its concrete enclosure at Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart.

For months, visitors had watched it pace restlessly behind bars, a silent specter in a world that no longer cared. Its species had been dubbed protected just two months before, but by then the damage was irreversible - hunting, habitat loss, disease had already driven it to the brink.

On that final evening, zoo keepers reportedly failed to secure the animal in its sheltered sleeping quarters. Despite plummeting temperatures, the thylacine was left exposed. It passed through the night, pacing its small cage, lethargic under the Tasmanian moonlight. By dawn, it lay still - victim not of a wild predator but of human neglect.

Captured from the wild in May 1936, the animal’s capture was never publicly announced; trapping wild thylacines had already been illegal. Some called it Benjamin, and later research confirmed the last captive thylacine was indeed male and later correctly identified by museum records only in 2022.

That creature, once the largest carnivorous marsupial, remembered only by old newsreels and a few motion-picture frames taken in 1933, spent its final days in restless pacing. The film shows it wandering its pen, yawning and sniffing the air.

Its death did not spark immediate regret, but decades later it became a symbol of environmental folly. Today, September 7 is observed in Australia as National Threatened Species Day - a day to mourn loss and vow to protect what remains.

08/08/2025

We recently put some trail cameras out in the bush around Thalgarrah EEC, and then the snow came! Which resulted in a few interesting shots.

04/08/2025

The snow was fabulous to see, but our local trees didn’t like it much - way too heavy!

02/08/2025

The snow is falling. ❄️