The mayor of Queensland’s Gold Coast has vigorously denied allegations a council worker beheaded a bird and stole its eggs, as part of a long-running dispute over an artificial lake.

Black Swan Lake in Bundall began life as a temporary pit and has since become a wellspring of local tension.

Many residents want it preserved as a home for wildlife, but the Gold Coast council is pushing ahead with plans to make it a carpark.

A grisly discovery on the banks of the lake on Tuesday has reignited the debate and set off an impassioned search for the culprit.



Caroline Sartori, a resident, found the headless body of a moorhen, a black water bird, floating in the water on Tuesday.



She told the Gold Coast Bulletin it had been killed with a “clean cut”, and three eggs were missing from a nearby swan’s nest.

Sartori referred the matter to the RSPCA on Wednesday, and another resident, Lynda Donato, reported the animal cruelty to the police and asked them to scour their CCTV footage.



“I can’t imagine how a bird could lose its head any other way [than being cut],” she told the Bulletin.

On Friday, the Gold Coast mayor, Tom Tate, spoke out against the notion that someone from the local council was responsible for the bird’s decapitation.

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“I saw today in the paper that allegedly a council worker has beheaded a black swan, stolen its eggs, trampled on Aboriginal history,” he told reporters at a news conference. “I don’t believe that any Gold Coasters would be capable of doing something ridiculous like that. I’m looking forward to seeing the evidence.”



Tate was responding to a text message published on the letters page of the paper addressed to “a person or local government body” responsible for stealing eggs and decapitating the bird.





“I know our entire workforce is impacted by this allegation. The hard working men and women employed by council would not tolerate this behaviour so I am urging the Bulletin to lead this investigation by attending the police station with the evidence, immediately.”



Tammy Hogan, another resident who wants to preserve the lake, denied that anybody had implicated the council.



“Nobody has accused the council, no one has mentioned it,” she said. “We found three of the eggs were missing and we can’t say whether this was human intervention.”

She added that residents had previously discovered a dead bird in February that had been thrown inside a bin.

“It died of blunt force trauma,” she said. “There’s been a number of things happening at the lake to do with animal cruelty, but nothing’s been done about it.

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“We’ve considered going down there and taking turn keeping watch, and taking it in to our hands. The cygnets are due this week. We don’t know if it was an animal or not, but we want the police to investigate it.”

Black Swan Lake was initially created in the 1970s as a “borrow pit”, with soil taken out to build the nearby Gold Coast Turf Club. Over the next decades it filled with water and became a home for birds and wildlife.

In February, the council’s first attempt to fill in the lake was picketed by 60 angry residents.

Tate is also under investigation by Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commissioner, and on Friday he criticised the watchdog for taking too long to investigate the complaints against him.

He said he was confident he would be cleared of any wrongdoing.