The plains-wanderer is a small, critically-endangered bird with a tawny marking on its chest that can only be found in south-eastern Australia’s arid grasslands. It is estimated that only 250 to 1,000 of these speckled birds are left in the wild, according to Bush Heritage Australia. The plains-wanderer is at risk of impending extinction and […]
Tag: feral cats
Australia’s Adorable Bilby Is Being Turned Into A Biological Weapon
In the last 200 years, Australia has lost 31 known species, the most of any country in the world, MSN reports. One of the latest to face the threat of extinction is the adorable bilby. The Bilby is a small defenseless animal, easy prey for invasive predators and classified as Vulnerable by the Australian Wildlife […]
It’s time cats were recognized as a major environmental issue
The Macquarie Island parakeet was, by all accounts, an elegant parrot endemic to the island off southern Tasmania that shared its name. We will never really know, because the last of its species was seen in the 1880s. The lesser bilby inhabited warmer climes – it was found predominantly in the sandy deserts of central […]
From 300,000 rabbits to none: a Southern Ocean island is reborn
On a world map, Macquarie Island is a speck in the Southern Ocean, but for ecologists it is a beacon, illuminating a future for grand-scale environmental recovery projects. Melissa Houghton first set foot on the 34km-long green streak as a dog handler in late 2011. Rabbits, cats, rats and mice had been introduced by sealers […]
Feral cats are killing millions of birds each year. Should they be culled?
Cats have long held a special place in the life of ex-breeder and conservationist, Julie Boyd, providing colour and companionship, as well as being keen rodent hunters. On her sprawling rural New Zealand property in the upper North Island town of Kaipara Flats, the cats roam free. “I have an elderly cat- Padme – who […]
‘Dingoes were here first’: the landowners who say letting ‘wild dogs’ live pays dividends
By their own admission, John Knight and Caroline Thomas are blow-ins to the cattle country in South Australia’s far north. An Adelaide cardiac surgeon and a clinical researcher respectively, they bought Evelyn Downs, a cattle station near the Painted Desert about 150km north of Coober Pedy, in 2006 and moved north a decade later. From […]
Australia confirms extinction of 13 more species, including first reptile since colonisation
The Australian government has officially acknowledged the extinction of 13 endemic species, including 12 mammals and the first reptile known to have been lost since European colonisation. The addition of the dozen mammal species confirms Australia’s unenviable position as the world’s capital for mammal extinction, lifting the total number of mammals known to have died […]
‘Glum future for the platypus’: why the elusive mammal is disappearing under our noses
It is dusk beside a creek and we are instructed to look for a trail of bubbles, under which could be one of the world’s weirdest mammals. When you’re desperate to see a platypus in the fading light, everything looks like one. Floating logs from bank-side paperbark trees, gyrating leaves caught in a dance with the […]