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The numbat, one of the most charming of mammals, is a partial conservation success story. Like most medium-sized marsupials in Australia (100 g up to a few kilograms), they suffer very heavily from predation by foxes and cats. In a few reserves, fox control has been attained via baiting with the poison 1080 (sodium fluoroacetate). 1080 is a very nasty toxin, but many of the plants in Western Australia secrete it naturally. Therefore the native herbivores, and their predators, have a natural immunity, and a dose of 1080 that will kill a fox is harmless to native mammals. Baiting with 1080 is especially useful to protect numbats, which eat nothing but termites and have no interest in bits of dried meat containing 1080. I took these photos in one such protected area, the Dryandra Woodlands Reserve, a bit southeast of Perth. Even here, numbats are hard to see: we found only two in three days of intense searching. Local wildlife officers told us that the population peaked in the early 1990s, but since then the reserve has had increasing populations of feral cats -- which are much harder to control than foxes because they aren't interested in dried meat baits. I had time for only a few quick photos with a hand-held long lens, so these images aren't great, but hopefully they convey some of the appeal of this unique little marsupial. |
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