"It has been more than a century since bilbies, bandicoots and burrowing bettongs roamed freely across outback New South Wales."
"Their local extinction here and throughout most of Australia’s mainland was due to cats, foxes and rabbits."
"Killer cats - The biggest threat to introduced species is feral cats, which kill more than a billion Australian native animals a year. We’ve got the worst extinction record of any country in the world...The combination of cats, foxes and too many rabbits basically obliterated many of these species from this landscape."
“All these skills sound like things they should innately know how to do, but they didn’t evolve with cats and cats have different hunting strategies.There’s a whole range of feral-free safe havens across Australia, but there are only a few places where there’s this work going on trying to expose native animals to feral predators and to train them."
And while Reece acknowledges Australia will never be rid of feral predators, their goal is a landscape where natives can survive
... show more"It has been more than a century since bilbies, bandicoots and burrowing bettongs roamed freely across outback New South Wales."
"Their local extinction here and throughout most of Australia’s mainland was due to cats, foxes and rabbits."
"Killer cats - The biggest threat to introduced species is feral cats, which kill more than a billion Australian native animals a year. We’ve got the worst extinction record of any country in the world...The combination of cats, foxes and too many rabbits basically obliterated many of these species from this landscape."
“All these skills sound like things they should innately know how to do, but they didn’t evolve with cats and cats have different hunting strategies.There’s a whole range of feral-free safe havens across Australia, but there are only a few places where there’s this work going on trying to expose native animals to feral predators and to train them."
And while Reece acknowledges Australia will never be rid of feral predators, their goal is a landscape where natives can survive their threat." >>
abc.net.au/news/2026-09-08/wil…
#restoration #ecology #wildlife #EcosystemEngineers #pests #cats
Once locally extinct across outback NSW, bilbies, bandicoots and bettongs are now back and breeding. The desert's revival has been led by a young couple who moved their lives way out west a decade ago.
Bill Ormonde (ABC News)
