A few weeks ago, I was fortunate to participate in a DELWP-hosted discussion about the future of quolls in Victoria. The discussion was prompted by several Indigenous groups around the state who are concerned about the loss of quoll species - and our native predators...
The topic of our missing mainland fauna is never far from my thoughts, and a few things have happened recently that have really brought it back into focus. But before I go through those things, let's recap a couple ideas from recent blogs that we'll also...
Bush-stone Curlew near Stawell. Photo courtesy of Jake Goodes, Parks Victoria Last week a couple of things happened that got me thinking again about our forgotten mainland fauna - so let's pick up where we left off last time in Part 8, when we talked about...
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,...
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...
