Ella Magee-Carr and Andrew Wong, Wilderness Australia
Proposed native forest logging could devastate Glenbog State Forest, one of the last true strongholds of the endangered Southern Greater Glider on the NSW South Coast.
Over the past year, a large citizen science project has been unfolding in Glenbog State Forest. United by a common goal, National Parks Association of NSW, Wilderness Australia, Jarake Wildlife Sanctuary, Birdlife Southern NSW, Bob Brown Foundation and South East Forest Rescue have so far protected over 800 habitat features from logging. This joint effort is an attempt to use the very rules that permit native forest logging to occur in NSW, as a way to protect this critical forest and the wildlife that depend on it.
Perched at the top of the Great Eastern Escarpment, Glenbog is a rare temperate cloud forest. The constant fog and cloud, generated by coastal winds rising up the escarpment, douse the area in regular rain and fog largely unrelated to regional weather patterns. Combined with its high elevation of around 1,100 metres, Glenbog remains relatively cool and moist regardless of droughts, heatwaves and climate change. As a result, it is filled with giant Brown Barrels (Eucalyptus fastigata), some exceeding four metres in diameter, which tower over patches of cool-temperate rainforest dominated by Southern Sassafras and Black Olive Berry. This creates the perfect environment for an ecological ‘refugia’ where breeding populations of many species can find safety. However, ‘safety’ in a NSW state forest – perpetually threatened with native forest logging – is a loose term.
NSW logging rules define protections for a number of species and ecological features, including the den trees (home trees) of the greater glider and yellow-bellied glider. Under these rules, Forestry Corporation of NSW (FCNSW) are required to search for and protect glider den trees with a 50-metre radius logging exclusion zone (approximately 0.78 hectares). In practice, however, FCNSW does the bare-minimum when it comes to protecting threatened species and as a result finds almost none of these features are identified and protected before logging commences. In the operation scheduled in Glenbog, FCNSW recorded just four greater glider den trees in 500 hectares of forest.
Of course, the more exclusion zones created, the smaller the loggable area becomes. This is a fact that FCNSW is acutely aware of, as are we.
We had been working in Glenbog on and off for about a year, knowing that the area would eventually be scheduled for logging and it would be up to citizen scientists to fill in the gaps left by FCNSW. This work consisted mostly of finding den trees, which involves spotlighting for greater gliders night after night, in all kinds of weather, including the bitter winters experienced by this extension of the Snowy Mountains plateau. Up until November 2025, we had found 26 greater glider den trees, along with one very rare yellow-bellied glider den tree recorded by Kate Carroll from NPA NSW.
Kate Carroll and David Gallan (NPANSW) in Glenbog State Forest. Photo: Wilderness Australia
At the start of December, we learned that logging was scheduled to start in early January, and our survey efforts went into overdrive. Over the next month we worked day and night, right through the Christmas and New Year period, to find as many greater gliders as possible. While FCNSW were on holiday, we recorded a further 76 den trees, bringing our total to 102.
But this time we weren’t just looking for gliders. NSW logging rules also require the protection of the nests and roosts of several threatened bird species like the Powerful Owl, Sooty Owl, Gang-gang Cockatoo, and Flame Robin. After partnering with Birdlife Southern NSW, we found multiple threatened bird species, along with clear signs of breeding. Additionally, FCNSW’s own voluntary protocol requires all wombat burrows in Glenbog to be protected. Through a large-scale survey effort led by Jarake Wildlife Sanctuary, nearly 700 wombat burrows have been recorded across the operation so far.
More than a month after it was due to begin, the scheduled logging operation has not yet commenced. We will continue to search for threatened native wildlife in the hopes to further blanket the area in exclusion zones. Although we are not out of the woods yet, both literally and figuratively speaking, we are hopeful that we can stop or significantly reduce the destruction of Glenbog.