Mr Bilby can take you

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The sign “Bilby Command Centre”, in capital letters, greets visitors to the Charleville, Queensland, National Parks and Wildlife service.  As the sign suggests, this outback outpost represents the almost extinct bilby’s last stand.

Security is tight here.  The enclosure is surrounded by a two-metre-high, solar-powered electric fence.

For this is the place where Mr Peter McRae, senior zoologist with the Queensland National Parks and Wildlife, and fellow ranger Mr Frank Manthey hope to save the bilby (otherwise known as the long-eared bandicoot) from an ecological tragedy.

The bilby has blue-grey fur, a long nose and large, kangaroo-like back legs. It is extremely cute – and extremely rare.

What remains of the bilby population, which once occupied 70 percent of mainland Australia, has been forced into a tiny portion of some of the nation’s harshest country, where it lives two metres underground for protection from the 60-degrees-plus heat.

Mr McRae estimates there are 600 to 700 bilbies living in Queensland today. In Western Australia and the Northern Territory, the bilby’s other habitats, numbers are very low.

Since European settlement, bilbies have been victims of the practice of earth clearing and the activities of introduced animals such as the feral cat, the rabbit and the fox.

At Charleville Mr McRae 47, plays mother to a small precious family of 30 breeding bilbies that will be cautiously returned to the wild.

Mr McRae has studied the lifestyle of the bilby for 10 years.

He has monitored the elusive, subterranean, nocturnal creature with a combination of radio-collar tracking, helicopter surveillance and enduring patience.
He knows enough abut the bilby to be breeding it. But saving Australian wildlife doesn’t come cheap. Already the Queensland Government has sunk $1.8 million into the project and Coles-Myer has contributed $50 000 via its Easter Bilby initiative.  Now Mr McRae is asking for help from fellow Australians.

To reintroduce a colony into the wild, a 25 square kilometre,  two metre high protective fence must be constructed, at a cost of $300 000, in the Currawinya National Park in western Queensland. Mr McRae and Mr Manthey hope that the bilby will breed to sufficient numbers there to be released to fend for themselves.

“The bilby has been around for at least 100 000 years,” says Mr McRae. “Its not going to cost us that much to give them that chance.”
 

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