Although it has been a little while since we talked about our mainland forgotten fauna on the blogs, a valuable discussion last week with a couple of staff at the Glenelg Hopkins CMA has prompted me to kick this discussion off again. After our meeting,...
Back in September, I was lucky enough to be invited to present on one of the conference themes - 'Security' - at the SA State Landcare Conference in Clare. I was given a bit of creative licence, so it was a chance to explore some tricky ecological questions...
It's taken a little while to pull everything together, but the huge job of collecting digging abundance data in the field for the Southern Brown Bandicoot (completed by 2016 NGT graduate intern Andrea Fullagar) - has led to a major review of the species in the South...
You never quite know what you are going to come across when digging through old references, and in working through some historical material for the Tookayerta Catchment project I came across a real jem. In fact, although it has been a while since the last...
The demise of many of the medium sized ('critical weight range') small mammals across south-eastern Australia that followed the concurrent suppression or eradication of dingoes and the arrival of foxes - combined of course with the clearance, development and intensive grazing of land - was for the most part swift and...
I've been lucky enough to head across Bass Straight to visit Tasmania a few times over the past 15 years and, as someone who has surveyed small mammals in the wild on the mainland since the mid-90s, the first thing that I notice is...
We've now reached a point in this series where the stories told so far intertwine. The undeniable reality is that, without realising it, the early settlers had paved the way for the establishment and explosion of the fox population – by deliberately persecuting, suppressing and, successfully eradicating from many districts, the only...
Not long after 1893, when the stories shared in Part 1 of this series were recorded, the fox became seriously entrenched in the region and the environment started to undergo a significant transformation. But first, what can the records tell us about this period, and how that transformation...
In Part 1 of this series, we got a sense of what the wildlife was like in the region in the 1890s, just a short time before the arrival of foxes. But where was the Dingo? - Since its recent arrival in Australia (only about 4000...
A few recent events and discussions have got me thinking about how little today we think about what our ground-dwelling mammalian forest fauna was really like across south-eastern Australia; both before the arrival of Europeans (including, long before that, dingoes arriving in Australia), and then after...
