RECOVERY FOR MOST threatened Australian mammal species is rarely about just rebuilding numbers. It’s also about reclaiming the range they formerly occupied. And that’s more true for the numbat – Western Australia’s faunal emblem – than for most species.
Indigenous knowledge and other evidence indicate that before European colonisation, the numbat was found across a truly huge area of arid and semi-arid woodland habitat, with probably extensive populations in WA, South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, and the Northern Territory. By 1985, however, just two tiny and isolated remnant populations of the species were known to remain, at Dryandra and Perup in south-western WA. Although habitat loss has had an impact, it’s predation by feral species that has been the main cause of the decline: the species has been decimated by foxes and cats.
Twice last century, surviving numbers of numbats in the wild dropped so low – to less than a few hundred – that the species teetered very close to the edge of extinction.
But now, although the species’ total population size is
