Baby boom helps bettongs bounce back from the brink
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.
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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]