Bouncing brush-tailed bettongs released into the wild

140 endangered Woylies (brush-tailed bettongs) have been released in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt region outside the feral-free ‘safe haven’.

Transcript

00:00Woyle is a macropod, so it looks like a kangaroo but quite a lot smaller, maybe

00:05about a metre high, knee high to you, and slightly more hunched over and a little

00:11bit rounder than the long elongated red kangaroo that you might think of. So

00:15they're quite small, quite cute, weighing in about a kilo or so. So this week's a

00:20pretty big week, we're translocating some of the Woyleys from inside the fence

00:24onto the outside. We're taking it out of just inside a safe haven with a feral

00:31predator free fence. We're now getting into landscape scale to helping

00:37establish these populations to help restore the ecosystem at a larger scale

00:42and they'll expand gradually as the population increases. Woyle or brush tail

00:47beton is endangered in all of Australia and listed as critically endangered in

00:53WA. So they had a huge range of attraction, mostly from land clearing as well as

00:59feral predators, so foxes and cats. They got brought over here after being locally

01:06extinct for probably about a hundred years. We brought in 162 individuals from

01:12three different sites, so we've got good genetic diversity. Back in 2015 that all

01:17started and now we're up to over a thousand individuals.

01:23It's out there in 183 individuals.

01:25So we've experienced a lot of different species because of the

01:26cross-t,…

01:27So we got developed benefits, in the past, near

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