People would be forgiven to think some aliens had arrived in Boggabri recently as a team of 140 students from Boggabri Public School and Sacred Heart School donned their green shirts and green hats to plant 400 trees for Boggabri Coal.
Boggabri Coal’s environmental compliance superintendent, Alex Williams explained to the students and their teachers that Boggabri Coal has a requirement to plant trees on their biodiversity offset properties to offset the removal of vegetation to allow for the progression of the mine.
The aim for the day was to give the students an opportunity to get outside and take part in restoring native vegetation.
“We are required under state and Commonwealth government legislation to improve on existing habitat within the region on our offset properties,” Alex said.
“One of the ways we do this is by planting trees based off the species already within the area,” she said.
“This helps to create habitat for fauna local to the region and revegetate historically cleared areas.”
The trees were planted at ‘The Rock’, which is owned by Boggabri Coal and situated across the road from Cooloobindi which has the Namoi River running through it.
A mixture of eucalyptus including river red gum, yellow box and white box were planted.
After devouring a sausage sandwich for lunch, the students received their instructions on how to plant the trees.
Then armed with gloves they headed into the field where the trees were waiting to be planted.
A few of the trees were very hard to get out of the pots and it took some jumping up and down on the pots, banging them on the ground and then a bit of a tug-o-war to release them.
After planting the 400 trees, the students then grabbed watering cans and started watering each tree.
On a positive note, the trees shouldn’t need watering for a few days as it was only one and half hours before the storm struck and heavy rain descended on Boggabri delivering around 90mm on the Friday night.
