<
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/aug/04/one-giant-leap-for-bettongs-released-into-sanctuary-as-wildlife-conservancy-aims-to-operate-on-5-of-australia>
"Like a ball of fur mounted on a spring, they leapt into the crisp night air
and on to a landscape of acacia scrub where they hadn’t roamed free for maybe a
100 years or more.
The Australian Wildlife Conservancy last month released 147 of the brush-tailed
bettongs on to its sanctuary at Mount Gibson, about a four-hour drive
north-east of Perth on the edge of the wheatbelt.
“When we open the bag, their first thought is just ‘we’re outta here’,” says Dr
Bryony Palmer, a wildlife ecologist at AWC.
“While they’re in the air they figure out where they are and then off they go.”
The bettongs had been taken from inside an 8,000-hectare fenced “safe haven”
within the sanctuary – away from the teeth of feral cats and foxes – where 162
of them released there in 2015 have now grown to about 1,000.
With cats and fox numbers being managed by the conservancy outside the fence,
the hope is the bettongs, also known as woylies, will survive and thrive as
they once did before Europeans introduced cats and foxes that are prodigious
native wildlife killers.
From bilbies and numbats to quolls and phascogales, eight threatened native
mammal species – all once locally extinct – have successfully been
reintroduced over the past decade since the conservancy bought the
130,000-hectare former sheep property in 2000."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
