WWF camera trap captures rare little long-tailed dunnart footage

WWF field staff working in Australia’s only biodiversity hotspot, the Southwest Australia Ecoregion, recently collected some exciting and rare footage of a tiny native marsupial.

Using an infra-red camera trap, project officer Phil Lewis captured footage of a little long-tailed dunnart, a small mouse-like animal found in parts of Western Australia and South Australia.The rarely seen footage was taken in bushland in Korrelocking and shows the dunnart furtively surveying its territory at night. Korrelocking is located in the Western Australian Wheatbelt, an area which has undergone large-scale land clearing over the past 100 years.

“This widespread clearing for farming has caused the bushland in this region to become seriously fragmented,” Phil explained. “This has resulted in the remaining bush forming ‘islands’ cut off from each other by farmland.”

Native animals, like the dunnart, rely on these bushland islands for their survival. This footage was captured in one of these islands containing rare eucalypt woodland.

“Unfortunately, even with their habitat intact inside these woodland island remnants, these tiny carnivorous marsupials still face many threats including wildfire and introduced predators such as the red fox and feral cats,” said Phil.

Footage of the European red fox, a major predator and threat to the little long-tailed dunnart was also captured by Phil in the same location. It shows the fox on the prowl for anything that might provide a tasty morsel.

Phil Lewis works on WWF’s Healthy Ecosystems, a project that spans nearly 10 years and works with farmers to get better conservation outcomes for the remaining privately-owned bush in the Southwest Australia Ecoregion.

Most of the important vegetation types that currently remain on private land across the Wheatbelt are vastly under-represented in Western Australia’s conservation estate. The project encourages and supports private land managers to undertake conservation management in their patches of bush to help protect this important habitat and increase the chances of survival of the unique and amazing animals that inhabit it.