Researchers are celebrating the release of the once locally extinct burrowing bettong back into the NSW desert – with the aim of training them to survive alongside feral cats and foxes.
The burrowing bettong once thrived across Australia’s arid interior, but within a century of European settlement it had vanished from much of the mainland.
A small population of the kangaroo-like marsupial has just been released into a vast experimental landscape inside Sturt National Park as part of conservation project ‘Wild Deserts’ – though not in safety. The aim of the project is to help native animals relearn to survive alongside their predators.
“Burrowing bettongs do really well inside predator-free safe havens,” says Principal Ecologist Dr Rebecca West of the Wild Deserts Project, from the UNSW Centre for Ecosystem Science.
“The bettongs can even do too well, eating themselves out of house and home,” Dr West says.
Alongside two fenced ‘safe havens’, researchers have established a 100-square-kilometre ‘Wild Training Zone’, where invasive predators, like feral cats, are reduced to low levels, which gives native species a chance to adapt.
The release is the latest step in the project, a decade-long collaboration led by UNSW Sydney with Ecological Horizons, the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) and Taronga Conservation Society Australia – combining public funding with university research and philanthropic support.
Reintroducing danger
While wild populations of the bettong disappeared from mainland Australia, they survived, shielded from predators, mainly on offshore islands and then within safe havens.
Yet, while these safe havens are vital in preventing extinctions, they are also small, expensive and difficult to scale.
So, instead of total protection, the Wild Training Zone controls feral cats and foxes at low levels.
“At another site in South Australia, ‘Arid Recovery’, some of our team had bettongs alongside feral cats and documented good survival rates when the cats were at low densities,” says Dr West.
“They also saw incredibly rapid changes in the anti-predator behaviour of the bettongs, giving us great hope that in the much larger area of the Wild Training Zone, bettongs will be successful.”
The aim is to give native animals the space to learn survival skills in the face of the feral cat and fox predators which have spread across Australia.
“This will give them a chance to be trained to recognise feral predators and evade them,” Dr West says.
“We continue to be cautiously optimistic about their success in a natural habitat, with low numbers of cats and foxes.”
Why bettongs matter
Burrowing bettongs are ecosystem engineers.
In the process of digging for food and creating burrows, they turn over soil, spread nutrients and improve water infiltration. These are processes that once benefited plants and other animals across the Australian deserts.
Their disappearance left a gap in the ecology of inland Australia – but now, their return could help restore it.
More than 700 animals from four threatened species – including bilbies, golden bandicoots and western quolls – have already been released into the Wild Training Zone over the past two years. Many are surviving and breeding.
Feral cat numbers, the key threat, have been suppressed through intensive management, which includes new technologies like automated grooming traps.
“We can’t remove cats and foxes from the entire Australian landscape, so we need to find ways for native fauna to live with them,” says Wild Deserts Project Manager Dr Reece Pedler, also from the UNSW Centre for Ecosystem Science.
“We have supressed feral cats in the Wild Training Zone to around 10% of their numbers outside. This has been enough to allow the survival of bilbies, quolls and other species,” he says.
“Based on this, we think bettongs will also do well in the same area.”
He says the team are constantly monitoring cat numbers inside the Wild Training Zone and increasing or decreasing the feral predator control effort in response.
“It is adaptive management in real time, informed by a range of monitoring data sources.”
A landscape-scale experiment
The Wild Training Zone has two borders of the semi-permeable Dingo Barrier Fence and the other areas with feral predator proof fencing.
Unlike small sanctuaries, this landscape allows animals to roam, forage and interact over an extensive area – under the conditions closer to the ecosystems they once helped shape.
Deputy Director of UNSW Centre for Ecosystem Science, Professor Katherine Moseby, is part of the Wild Deserts leadership team. She has spent decades reintroducing native mammals.
“The concept of the Wild Training Zone relies on both individuals learning to avoid predators but also natural selection at the population level,” Prof. Moseby says.
“At Arid Recovery, we have documented natural selection in bettongs for certain physical traits after several years of exposure to low densities of cats,” she says.
“This suggests that long term exposure may accelerate natural selection and help prepare the animals for life beyond fences.”
Signs of success and caution
The team says there are small signs of progress. Road signs have just been installed along the nearby Dune Scenic Drive, warning motorists to watch for wildlife at night – an indication that animals are once again moving through parts of the landscape where they have long been absent.
Still, challenges remain.
Australia has one of the worst mammal extinction rates in the world, driven largely by introduced predators. Reversing that trend will require solutions that work beyond fences.
“This is a big experiment,” says Scientia Professor Richard Kingsford, Director of the UNSW Centre for Ecosystem Science and Wild Deserts Project leader.
“But we’re learning all the time.”
A future beyond fences
If the Wild Training Zone succeeds, it could reshape conservation across Australia.
Instead of isolated pockets of survival, threatened species might once again move across broader landscapes – coexisting, however precariously, with the realities of a changed world.
“With such a large complex conservation project, it is great to be working with people who have some of the best expertise in the country – but also to be partnering with NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service leading up to nearly a decade of achievement,” Prof. Kingsford says.
NPWS Area Manager for Broken Hill, Jaymie Norris, says the strength of the collaboration and achievements so far for Sturt National Park can be applied more widely.
“We have developed a strong team approach to tackling one of Australia’s most important problems – the conservation of small mammals, which have suffered the world’s worst extinction rate,” Norris says.
“The last ten years has seen enormous achievements for conservation.”
The Wild Deserts project is part of a major NSW Government initiative to protect threatened native mammals through the Feral Predator-free Area Partnership Program. It is delivered by NPWS, in partnership with the Wild Deserts team (UNSW Sydney and Ecological Horizons) and Taronga Conservation Society Australia. Funding is provided by the NSW Government, with matching support from UNSW, philanthropic sources and other partners. Taronga’s zoo-based breeding of quolls has also been supported through philanthropic contributions.
