They took time out to help secure a better environment

Being covered in burrs and planting tiny trees in rock-hard desiccated soil doesn't sound like much fun, but some people love it. Saturday May 6 was the 18th tree planting in the Capertee Valley to save an endangered bird, the regent honeyeater.

• Click Here for the Photo Album or read on for the whole story.
• Read the story of last year's planting

This time, the volunteers planted 4000 trees, divided between two sites. The first site, owned by Iven Chrebtiw, had good sandy soil but was full of burrs. Old hands know enough to wear gators but first-timer Dan Riley from Mudgee didn't. After a few hours, his socks were so stuffed with hooked burrs that he said, "I'm going to burn them after this." And he did.

The other site, owned by Dominic Della Libera, was o要 a limestone ridge. "We love wildlife and the people that love wildlife," Della Libera said. "We have 100 acres, split into two 50s. "We're giving over the back 50 to the plantings, and hopefully make a living out of the front 50." For this site, forester Dick Turner designed a mix of white box, yellow box, some ironbark and kurrajong. Dominic's partner Kerry raised the seedlings o­n their property from Capertee Valley seeds.

The other batch of seeds was raised at the Lithgow Community Nursery. A good seedling is a balance between root and shoot. When you take the container away, the roots should hold a cylinder of soil. The event gets better every year. People come from Kandos, Mudgee, Newcastle, the Blue Mountains and Sydney. We even had a chemical engineer from Colombia, South America. Why don't some more of you locals come along? More trees mean less salinity, and ultimately more productive soil for everyone.

A vital part of the project is the Land Rover Owners' Club (LROC). About 10 members donate their time and vehicles to haul seedlings from nursery to site, and to carry the water bladders between the rows as volunteers madly rush along watering each plant. The club also does the logistics, and keeps the work o要 track by radio. Noel Lonergan from the LROC said, "My ambition in life is to get the responsible members of the 4WD fraternity to offer their services to people like birdwatchers. "It's a win-win situation."

As usual there were some mishaps. o­ne site fell through at the last minute, so the Regent Honeyeater Recovery Committee had twice the amount of work organising seedlings, volunteers and watering for sites 20 km apart. The key for Jane Miller's ute, which held a 1000-litre water tank, snapped in the door of her vehicle. It was 9 am Sunday morning and eight volunteers were waiting o要 site to finish the watering. Luckily Orlando Murray (my son) was there with his ute, so we were able to transfer the tank, fill it up and take it to Della Libera's land.

Normally we aim to finish everything o­n the first day, but there is invariably some final planting or watering o­n Sunday. This time we were all finished by noon, and raced down to a spot o­n Crown Station Road where we saw 20 regent honeyeaters. The luminous black and yellow birds dangled from strips of bark and feasted o要 lerps (small sap-sucking insects) o要 the leaves. To see thes rare, endangered birds was a perfect ending for people who had been planting trees for them that weekend.