On Australia’s Kangaroo Island, cat-proof fencing is protecting native species from predation following a devastating wildfire and allowing them to recover in numbers that are shocking biologists.
The third-largest island controlled by Australia, Kangaroo Island saw a large fire burn through much of its scrub habitat in 2020, and conservationists knew this would leave native animals extremely vulnerable to attack from feral cats.
As soon as a week after the fires receded, employees of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy got to work surveying the landscape to see how feasible it would be to build a fence around the burned areas.
Their work immediately saw them come into contact with the impact of the cats on the native Kangaroo Island dunnart, a mouse-sized marsupial with no natural defense against them.
Erecting the fence around the Western River Refuge, however, has seen the number of dunnarts increase between 90 and 100%, shocking the conservancy staff and the traditional Ngarrindjeri owners who run cultural tours on the island.
“So the dunnart has fared a lot better than I think a lot of people thought [they would] … especially me, six years ago,” Australian Wildlife Conservancy principal ecologist Pat Hodgens told ABC News AU, adding that another shock came from the reappearance of native birds.
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“The western whipbird and also the Bassian thrush … these birds are also really predated upon by feral cats. We didn’t have any of those birds living within the feral cat exclusion fence at the time of construction, but they’ve found their way back there.”
Australia has in the past had some of the highest rates of extinction of native species seen anywhere on Earth, but this has slowed dramatically over recent years, such that even mainstream media doom and gloomsters have had to admit that anything which could even remotely be called a ‘6th mass extinction’ isn’t happening by any stretch of the imagination.
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Kangaroo Island, its cats, dunnarts, and shiny new fence, is something of a microcosm of the phenomenon. Animals native to isolated islands go extinct from invasive species, and if averaged year-over-year seem to indicate that the planet is losing species far faster than in previous periods of its history.
But small determined changes, such as eliminating invasive species and creating conservation areas have dramatically slowed even this very specific form of species loss.
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