By Faith Chen. The greater bilby (Macrotis lagotis) is an important ecosystem engineer. Their extensive burrows provide important shelter, foraging and hunting opportunities for a variety of other mammals, birds, reptiles, and invertebrates (Hofstede & Dziminski 2017; Dawson et al. 2019). Bilbies were once widely distributed across the Australian continent but are now restricted to…
Category: Feral cats
Do black-flanked rock-wallabies compete with kangaroos?
By Julia White. Paruna Sanctuary is privately managed by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) as a wildlife corridor between Avon Valley National Park and Walyunga National Park near Gidgegannup. It’s partial predator-proof fencing means that it serves as a refuge for some very special fauna, including the endangered black-flanked rock-wallaby. These little wallabies are reasonably…
Cat bells for biodiversity
By Natasha Harrison. Australia’s birds, reptiles, and mammals are increasingly becoming at risk of extinction [1]. Many of these species inhabit urban areas where one of the major threats to their survival and persistence is predation from domestic cats. It is estimated that the average pet cat kills close to 200 wildlife prey species per…
The great escape
By Natasha Tay. Australian animals get a bad rep for being a bit obtuse when it comes to predators, with more than half (73 of 124) of Australia’s Extinct, Threatened and Near Threatened terrestrial mammal species considered to be extremely susceptible to introduced red foxes and feral cats (Radford et al. 2018). For this reason,…
A fearsome predator — even small stray and feral cats take large and difficult-to-handle prey
By Trish Fleming, Heather Crawford, Clare Auckland and Mike Calver. Despite thousands of years of domestication, pet cats (Felis catus) retain a strong hunting drive. It is therefore easy for cats to survive independently of people. Today in Australia, it is estimated that there are 1.4–5.6 million feral cats in natural environments, and another 0.7…
westernWEB 