Mainland Forgotten Fauna: Part 8 – The concept of “Shifting Baselines” helps explain why we have forgotten our mainland fauna

Posted on 19 Jan 2018 at 00:10h in News, Threatened mainland fauna 3 Comments

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,...

Mainland Forgotten Fauna: Part 7 – Bilbies, Malleefowl and other Forgotten Fauna of the Fleurieu Peninsula

Posted on 06 Dec 2016 at 12:14h in News, Threatened mainland fauna 1 Comment

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...

Mainland Forgotten Fauna: Part 6 – The demise of our forgotten fauna… and what do the Fox and Cane Toad have in common?

Posted on 14 Sep 2016 at 00:02h in News, Threatened mainland fauna 2 Comments

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...

Mainland Forgotten Fauna: Part 5 – So, just how unique is Tasmania’s wildlife?

Posted on 22 Aug 2016 at 02:08h in News, Threatened mainland fauna 4 Comments

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… you guessed it...

Mainland Forgotten Fauna: Part 4 – Remembering the last Dingo at Mt Richmond… and, why did the fox run rampant?

Posted on 06 Aug 2016 at 19:35h in News, Threatened mainland fauna 2 Comments

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...

Mainland Forgotten Fauna: Part 3 – The event that changes everything – foxes establish in the region

Posted on 23 Jul 2016 at 03:38h in News, Threatened mainland fauna 1 Comment

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...

Mainland Forgotten Fauna: Part 2 – Where have the dingoes gone?

Posted on 12 Jul 2016 at 14:49h in News, Threatened mainland fauna 3 Comments

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...

Mainland Forgotten Fauna: Part 1 – It’s 1893 and time to go hunting at Strathdownie

Posted on 28 Jun 2016 at 11:47h in News, Threatened mainland fauna 2 Comments

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...

First Nations participate in burn to manage Themeda Grasslands of Limestone Coast

Posted on 31 Aug 2021 at 16:11h in News 0 Comments

Native grasslands and grassy woodlands once sprawled across large areas of the South East of South Australia and western Victoria, generally on heavier soils and maintained by regular burning by First Nations people. After European colonisation of the region, these open grassy areas were immediately...

Finding the forgotten grasslands of South East SA

Posted on 17 Dec 2020 at 14:36h in News 1 Comment

When you think of pre-European vegetation in south-east SA, what do you see? An old Red Gum standing guard over a waterhole, a carpet of flowers and sedges spreading from its feet? Brown Stringybarks twisting toward the sky from heathy sandhills? Or a dense landscape...

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