00:00It may be as small as a mouse, but the Antichinus is anything but a rodent.
00:09Its closest relative is Tasmanian tiger, Tasmanian devils, the native crawl cats.
00:15Under attack from foxes and feral cats, there were fears the species would be lost for good.
00:21What are you doing today?
00:22So today we're doing a monitoring.
00:24That was until scientists discovered two colonies living peacefully on islands off the coast
00:29of Wilson's Promontory.
00:31Those offshore islands have been a place where the cats and foxes haven't reached and they're
00:35doing really well.
00:36Timothy Schwinghammer was one of 11 scientists who recently ventured across Bass Strait to
00:42check in on the isolated colonies.
00:45We're checking the traps three times a day, up at dawn, down at dusk.
00:51Teams battled huge waves and ferocious winds to collect vital data.
00:57It's rough and dirty and windy, sleep's not always the best thing.
01:02Thankfully, the mission was a success.
01:05We got 38 samples from across the islands, it's nice, peaceful, no introduced predators
01:12on the islands, no people, it's their own little hideaway.
01:16Wilson's Promontory has long been considered the perfect environment for endangered wildlife.
01:22Surrounded by Bass Strait, the temperature here is always about 5 to 10 degrees cooler
01:27than mainland Australia.
01:29And soon there will even be a fence to keep unwanted predators out.
01:35Across the narrow entrance to Wilson's Promontory, we're building a 10 kilometre wide fence and
01:41that's to stop foxes, feral cats and deer moving down from Gippsland into the prom all
01:47the time.
01:48Giving tiny marsupials like this a fighting chance.
Comments