Month: September 2025

In late April of 2016, a daring yet hopeful project in one of Australia’s most popular and iconic destinations, Kakadu National Park, kicked off. Despite the picturesque views of amazing waterfalls and giant rock escarpments, Kakadu and its unique biodiversity is under a great deal of pressure. Feral cats (Felis catus), the poisonous Cane Toad (Rhinella marinus) and poor bushfire management have made this natural wonderland almost completely inhospitable for some of our iconic native mammals, including the Northern Quoll (Dasyurus hallucatus).

The Northern Quoll, sometimes referred to as the ‘Northern Native Cat’, is a small carnivorous marsupial belonging to the same family as the Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) and is the smallest of the four Australian quoll species.

Once widespread across the Northern Territory’s Top-End, this species has been on a downward spiral over the past century, with the loss of intricate planned burning and the introduction of the feral cat, though it seems the arrival of the Cane Toad was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. As cane toads have spread across much of northern Australia, established populations of Northern Quolls have declined rapidly in recently invaded areas.

With the Northern Quoll officially listed as Critically Endangered in the Northern Territory and thought to be locally extinct in Kakadu National Park, it was time to do something drastic.

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in conjunction with The University of Melbourne, the Territory Wildlife Park, Kakadu National Park and the Northern Territory Government, began a project to reintroduce the quoll back into Kakadu.

Kakadu National Park – one of the largest national parks in Australia – is home to a range of rare and endemic plants and animals, including more than one-third of Australia’s bird species and one-quarter of its freshwater and estuarine fish species.

The idea of the project was to gather a large population of wild quolls, teach them to avoid toads, then release them into Kakadu and have researchers track there every movement over the following months. The project began with 30 quolls being taken from an insurance population on an island off the coast of northern Australia and being placed into care at the Territory Wildlife Park.  Over the following months these animals were taught a cutting-edge methodology known as ‘toad aversion’. This was achieved by injecting a non-lethal sized toad with an extreme nausea-inducing toxin and feeding it to the quoll, which would then hopefully associate eating the toad, with getting ill.

The Fauna Resources team, having been following this particular project closely during its lead up, were quick to offer their help. Two senior Fauna Resources staff, Lachlan Gilding and Max Jackson, were sent up from their Sunshine Coast base to the picturesque Kakadu, to aid in the monitoring and data gathering of the newly released quolls.

Lachlan and Max teamed up with researcher Dr Christopher Jolly, who at the time was undertaking his PhD studies at the University of Melbourne, and based themselves at a ranger’s station nearby to the reintroduction site. First light every morning would mark the commencement of the days tracking. The quolls were being tracked by the use of ‘radio telemetry’ – a well know and effective way of pinpointing the location of a particular target.

Tracking quolls may sound like an easy process, but in actual fact, it is anything but. The rocky terrain in which the quolls exist may be easy for these small and nimble animals to manoeuvre, but is not the same for humans. Stumbling up and down large rocky escarpments every morning following nothing but an inconsistent ‘BEEP, BEEP, BEEP’ from the receiver is hard work, but the feeling of satisfaction every time a quoll is found alive and well makes it all worth it.

By mid to late morning the quolls had usually been successfully located, captured and the relevant data been recorded, which meant it was time for the team jump in the nearby creek to cool down before heading back to base. The late afternoon was usually spent seeking out interesting and unique potential habitats in which the team would explore on foot each night to document the vast array of native species existing in the region.

Rock Ring-tailed possums (Petropseudes dahlia), Giant cave geckos (Pseudothecadactylus lindneri), aquatic File snakes (Acrochordus arafurae), Black-headed pythons (Aspidites melanocephalus), Boobook owls (Ninox boobook) and an assortment of stunning native frog species were amongst the night-time regulars.

Projects such as this are of critical importance in today’s conservation battle. With the threat of extinction to Australia’s native fauna at an all-time high, we strongly believe it’s time to start thinking outside the box and utilising methodologies not yet instigated or even imagined. The Fauna Resources team were proud to be a part of this project and are looking forward to providing ongoing support to similar projects in the future.

Without doubt there is still a long way to go for Northern quolls in the Kakadu National Park but with more animals due to be added to the existing population, and monitoring due to continue for many years to come, the future is looking bright for this quintessential and iconic Australian species.

The year 2024 marks 10 years since we first sent a field team over to Bangladesh to partner with the Bangladesh Python Project. Over the months of June & July in 2014, we provided the project with much needed monitoring equipment to assist with vital research of wild populations of Burmese python and the gorgeous Elongated tortoise.

The Burmese python (Python bivittatus), although a prolific pest species in places such as the Florida Everglades in the USA, is listed as a Vulnerable species in much of their home range. This decline in population numbers is what is being monitored and studied by the team, as they are in a constant battle of exploitation by humans and ongoing habitat loss which wreaks havoc on wild populations, putting immense pressure on both target species.

The project team employed a radio-telemetry study of Burmese python individuals in Lawachara National Park to help better understand their habitat use, home range, activity patterns and the effects of their relocation in a human-modified ecosystem.

To further assist with human-wildlife conflict, the team provides an outreach program to the local villages in order to educate them on the importance of this species survival. The program offers free snake removals & relocations to all of the local villages and helps to minimise financial loss due to stock predation, whether through compensation or prevention.

The Elongated tortoise (Indotestudo elongata) is now listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List, which makes conserving this species of utmost importance to the project. The team have initiated an intensive radio-telemetry monitoring study of released Elongated tortoises, tracking both resident and translocated individuals in Lawachara National Park to understand their home range, habitat use, survivorship and movement & activity patterns.

These slow-moving tortoises become easy targets for subsistence hunting, as locals easily capture them to sustain their families, and ultimately become a much needed, easily accessible food source. Population density levels of these tortoises in most of Bangladesh are now low enough that local extinctions are imminent, without much needed intervention and population reinforcement by organisations such as these.

While in Bangladesh, our field team assisted in finding and tagging a new python for the project, provided venomous snake handling training to the project’s staff members and undertook a number of snake calls from the surrounding villages. They also helped facilitate veterinary checks and the fitment of telemetry devices on captured individuals.

In the two weeks they lived within the confines of the Lawachara National Park, they helped document a number of significant species range extensions and even discovered 3 new reptile and amphibian species, sending the collected field data and specimens off to the National University of Bangladesh to be formally recorded and described.

We recently received an update with the organisation’s CEO Shahriar Caesar Rahman via LinkedIn, who shared an exciting update on the progress of the organisation and the further development of their vital research projects across the country.

Since our team made the trek to Bangladesh in 2014, the project has evolved into a fully-fledged conservation organisation, now known as the Creative Conservation Alliance, dedicated to ongoing, meaningful conservation of at risk species throughout South East Asia.

To date, the team have tagged and tracked 10 individual pythons within the study area, which will help to yield recommendations for python habitat protection and restoration, and contribute to the basic biological knowledge of the Burmese python species as a whole.

They have also successfully established the country’s first tortoise conservation breeding facility and initiated the first ever reintroduction of the critically endangered Asian Giant Tortoise (Manouria emys). They are also planning to initiate the first ever radio tracking study of the Russell’s viper (Daboia russelii) in human settlements. The information gained from this study will help mitigate human-snake conflict. This species was declared extinct in Bangladesh back in 2002, but has since come back from the brink, as populations recover across the country.

We are proud to have contributed to this organisation in some meaningful capacity and are excited to see what further conservation milestones are achieved by the team over the coming months. We are committed to finding ways to support this wonderful organisation long into the future.

For more information about the Creative Conservation Alliance and to help support the amazing work they do, please visit their website at www.conservationalliance.org.

Your help is greatly appreciated.