Baby boom helps bettongs bounce back from the brink

Australian Community Media

The brush-tailed bettong, a small marsupial extinct on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula for more than a century, is booming back after being reintroduced.

Transcript

00:00 [Music plays]

00:09 (Dr. Andrew Hulme) Mata Bunga is a very exciting and ambitious

00:13 ecological restoration project.

00:15 We're here today monitoring Yowgiri in Dilba Gawrinda Innes National Park

00:19 and we're here to see how they're going after we released them from WA

00:23 six months ago, how they're interacting with the other Yowgiri

00:27 that have settled here from other parts of WA and Wedge Island.

00:30 The animals are really healthy, they're carrying good body weight,

00:35 the females have got lots of pouch young

00:38 and we've got lots of new recruits into the population.

00:42 So that means that the young that they're producing

00:45 are surviving and breeding themselves.

00:48 [Music plays]

00:52 It was really exciting to capture a female today

00:56 that had a really large pouch young

00:58 and a young that was almost at foot and will be independent soon.

01:04 Unless we are monitoring these animals it's a bit of guesswork

01:08 so it's really important for us to get out there,

01:10 capture these animals, get them in hand

01:12 to look at their health and their condition.

01:15 Some of the animals have settled close to where we've released them

01:19 but we have recorded individuals up to five kilometres from the release site.

01:24 So this means that the animals are exploring their new home.

01:28 Their habitat is fantastic for them.

01:31 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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