Yahoo Finance Threatened Species Awareness Day sends a sweet message on Australia’s vulnerable natural heritage
This really is a great Australian bake off!
With national Threatened Species Awareness Day on Tuesday, crocodile cupcakes and edible echidnas are on the menu in locked-down kitchens across the country. Hundreds of house-bound Australians are baking cakes replicating everything from bandicoots to moths in a bid to win the hotly contested annual Threatened Species Bake Off.
“The idea is to raise awareness around the range of species that are threatened in Australia, by putting people’s baking to the test,” ecologist, Dr Rebecca West, said.
West is an ecologist with the Wild Deserts Ecosystem Restoration Project, and a judge of the competition. Each year, she joins the bake off with a cake to mark the occasion.
“I try to showcase a species my research involves,” she says. This year, her Shark Bay Bandicoot cake is a realistic replica of the vulnerable marsupial found in southern arid regions of Australia.
West judges the competition, and co-founded the bake off in 2017 with the then Threatened Species Commissioner, Gregory Andrews.
“Some might think it’s the worst possible baking competition to be involved in as a judge, because you don’t actually get to eat the cake,” West laughs. “But there’s so many things I enjoy.”
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“I always get the opportunity to learn about some new species, because someone’s baked them as a biscuit or cake,” she says.
“People put in a lot of time and effort. One year, an entrant built their own cookie cutter, because you can’t really buy a cookie cutter in the shape of a Tasmanian Devil.”
With the entry deadline on Wednesday, West says they’re anticipating entries to exceed last year’s record of 350.
“Social media means it is easy for people to be involved, and reaches across the nation.”
“We get to see a broad cross section of Australian species,” she says. “It really showcases the number and diversity of species there are.”
Helen Oakey, executive director of the Conservation Council ACT says, “sadly, Australia is the extinction capital of the world”.
In 1788, Australia was home to 320 land mammals. Now, more than 10% of those species are extinct. “And that’s just mammals,” Oakey says.
“Spare a thought for the numerous birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, invertebrates and plants that are already extinct, or are well on their way.”
Beyond the ACT’s gregarious and iconic gang-gang cockatoo, Oakey says all of the state’s threatened species are “precious and essential pieces of a much larger picture”.
The golden sun moth is one of them. The species live in natural temperate grasslands; an ecosystem already endangered by urban development.
“What little remains of the golden sun moth’s habitat” is “highly fragmented,” Oakey says.
The moth species’ plight inspired the ACT Conservation Council’s entry into this year’s Threatened Species Bake Off.
Office manager Fiona Smith had “never even heard of the golden sun moth” before working at the Conservation Council.
“I take every opportunity I can get to decorate cakes,” Smith says. “To do so for such a good cause was especially motivating.”
The golden sun moth cake has a chocolate base and hand-painted fondant icing.
Smith says she likes to “push the boundaries” in cake making. “So when I had the idea of making a cake that appeared to be suspended in mid-air, I just had to put my mind to it and find a way.”
The levitating moth cake is the centrepiece of the Conservation Council’s campaign for their national Threatened Species Day campaign educating people about the developing threat facing grasslands in ACT’s Lawson North.
Many other entrants take the Threatened Species Bake Off as an opportunity to express concern about the danger of Australian habitats and species, with one entrant on Twitter sharing a deceased greater glider in “a logging coupe cake”. “Threatened species need habitat, so why is it that federal and state laws enable endless logging,” they write with their tweet entry.
#TSBakeOff A greater glider, deceased in a logging #coupeCake. Threatened species need habitat, so why is it that fed & state laws, enable endless logging? @TSCommissioner where is the funding for meaningful action for threatened species? #sugarCoatedExtinction #LoggingIsCriminal pic.twitter.com/Vq7TlOhU4T
— Flick Law (@LawFelicity) September 4, 2021
Another Twitter user caught the attention of many, sharing their cake in the silhouette of an unidentified person; the “rarely seen, presumed extinct, Effective Environment Minister” cake.
West says the first step in conservation efforts is “having people know what species are out there, and what there is to lose if we don’t do anything”.
“This bake off is meant to get that conversation started.”
