A critically endangered orchid has received a late reprieve after a local environmental group threatened legal action against the Victorian government, prompting officials to cancel a planned burn of its habitat.
The bald-tip beard orchid – a species with fewer than 10 plants remaining in the Australian wild – was thought extinct until rediscovered in 1968 at a site near Whroo, in central Victoria, where the last surviving wild population has persisted.
That site was included in a 183 hectare area scheduled for controlled burns by state government agency Forest Fire Management Victoria, along with two further burns nearby in areas designated as potential orchid habitat.
But on Tuesday – after questions from Guardian Australia and a legal letter from a local conservation group – a planned fuel reduction burn at the site containing the orchids was officially removed from the schedule.
When asked, Forest Fire Management Victoria did not explain why burns were originally planned in an area containing the last known population of a critically endangered orchid.
Instead, a spokesperson for the agency said specialist staff assessed biodiversity values at each potential burn site and developed plans to protect them.
“We have experts in both fire ecology and threatened species working together to inform how and when we conduct planned burns to minimise any unintended impacts and maximise the benefit to precious threatened species,” they said.
Sue McKinnon, the president of Kinglake Friends of the Forest, said the group’s lawyer had sent a letter on Friday, asking the Victorian environment department to cancel burns in the orchid’s habitat. It stated the group’s intention to seek an urgent interim injunction under the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
“We’re determined to save this orchid,” she said, which included taking legal action if required. The orchid’s federal recovery plan said prescribed burning had been excluded from the immediate area of the orchid population since 1980.
The species, listed as critically endangered in Victoria and endangered federally, produced flowers with reddish-brown stripes and a “beard” atop a ruler-length stem.
The consultant ecologist Karl Just, who surveyed the area near Whroo, said the planned burns would have had a “high likelihood of causing a species extinction”.
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The two other locations – including areas mapped as potential orchid habitat – remained part of the fuel management program, scheduled for autumn 2025.
Curtin University’s Prof Kingsley Dixon, who has studied native orchids for about 45 years, said beard orchids were particularly sensitive to disturbance and could vanish quickly.
A precautionary approach and careful science should be applied when dealing with critically endangered orchids, including in relation to planned burns, he said.
Dixon said orchids were the “most treasured and most charismatic” plant family in Australia with the “highest number of threatened species”.
“Excessive clearing, fragmentation, weeds, pests, disease, fire, put them all together and we’ve essentially corralled orchids into ever smaller areas.”