SUMMER READ: John Read – Australian ecologist and author whose conservation research has featured in more than 120 scientific articles – became obsessed with animals as a child and his journey since – around the world and back again to his home in outback South Australia – has brought exhilaration and despair.
An unexpected encounter with a bizarre primate at Adelaide Zoo inspired my passion for conservation.
I’d always been interested in butterflies and spiders, but my real passion as a kid was elephants. Willard Price’s Elephant Adventure fuelled this obsession. I collected elephant figurines, badgered my teachers into letting me write projects on elephants and convinced my mum to take me to the zoo to meet Adelaide’s famous old elephant, Samorn.
Despite my fervour to finally meet a real live elephant, Samorn was decidedly underwhelming, bordering on traumatising. Rather than engaging with a majestic, intelligent and powerful beast, I watched with horror as the demented old matriach rocked listlessly on the concrete-floor. Right then and there, I decided I hated zoos.
Purposefully striding from the zoo and its pathetic caged animals, I caught a flash of vivid orange. and excited high-pitched chirping. Moving closer, I saw at least three orange gargoyles making the bird-like calls. Seemingly interested in me, they agilely sidled through the branches towards me; tiny hominoid faces framed by brilliant orange locks. Forgetting Samorn, I was hooked.
If tasked with concocting a smoothie the same colour as these little monkeys, along with an orange and carrot juice base you would need to add deeper orange colours from loquats or blood orange, and probably a dash of beetroot or berry to replicate their deeper basal fur. But even the most adventurous smoothie would fall hopelessly short of capturing the truly golden shine of their coats in the shaft of sunlight that they sought out for maximum impact.
The teddy bear-sized monkeys oozed charisma and self-confidence, tilted their heads inquisitively and almost pouted, as if accustomed to adoring onlookers and zookeepers. After checking me out for an instant, the living toys leapt away again through the trees. Scanning their enclosure for their name, and their story, I became transfixed.
“In the early 1980’s it was estimated that less than 300 Golden Lion Tamarins were left in the wild. To save them, international conservation and breeding programs were begun...”
My new little friends were part of a zoo-led conservation program to breed and reintroduce one of the world’s smallest, rarest and spunkiest monkeys back to the wild.
Forty years later, after being inspired by my transformational zoo experience to study ecology and embark on a career in conservation, I achieved my life bucket list of visiting the main population of wild golden lion tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia), supplemented and saved by captive-bred individuals.
Through her international animal reintroduction contacts, my wife Katherine Moseby arranged a visit to Reserva Biológica Poço das Antas, two hours east of Rio de Janiero. I was even more excited than my first zoo visit to meet Samorn. Even the messages from the Reserves’ director, Luis Paulo Ferraz, whom we had made arrangements to share conservation reintroduction experiences, raised my heartbeat because his email suffix was “@micoleao”, the Portuguese name for golden lion tamarin.
Reserva Biológica Poço das Antas was the first biological reserve in Brazil, declared in 1974 to protect golden lion tamarins within the 2% fragment of lowland Atlantic forest which[JR2] had escaped clearing. Luis’ team was rightfully proud of replanting food trees in an old eucalypt plantation and developing corridors and wildlife bridges to help Mico leao access more of their forest remnants.
My first contact with wild tamarins was reminiscent of my initial transformational introduction at the Adelaide Zoo. Craning our necks to see the radio-tracked troop member that our guide, Professor Carlos Luiz, had located, I was alerted to loud bird-like cheeps.
“Can you hear Mico leao?” Carlos enquired eagerly in Portuguese-clipped English.
We couldn’t miss them. Carlos recognised a range of calls, the one initiated by the monkeys seeing a bird of prey sent them lower, the distinctive alarm of a ground predator spooked them up into the canopy. Their drawn-out call, reminiscent of a whistling kite, may have been a long-distance territorial call, presumably relearned by reintroduced individuals who wouldn’t have required such long-distance communication in the zoos where they were bred.
Then we finally saw our quest. Oh my goodness. Mico leao were even more stunning in the wild. Our daughters, who had had stoically consigned themselves to yet another day of searching for obscure jungle animals, were gobsmacked. Their youngest sister, Jarrah, who had just celebrated her tenth birthday in Rio, was particularly wowed, her open-mouthed expression possibly mirroring mine from Adelaide Zoo four decades before. The wild monkey’s golden lustre was rendered even more brilliant than zoo animals by the carotenoid pigments in their bush foods and supplemented by Vitamin D from the sun. The tiny monkeys radiated like sunsets. Their colour-defining smoothie ingredients would also have to include exotic orange tropical fruits like peach palm and papaya.
Initially I was perplexed by their dark markings. The first animal I saw closely had a dark band near the base of its tail, the second had black shoulders. Carlos dismissed my question about these dark markings being local or individual variation.
“We mark them so we can distinguish individuals”, he explained.
The Mico leao were also provided fruits to supplement their natural foods on feeding trays that doubled as convenient locations to assess their populations. At first, I felt slightly cheated. I’d long anticipated visiting a successful golden lion tamarin reintroduction site, where captive-bred animals and their progeny had reassimilated in their natural environment, indistinguishable from wild tamarins. Only later did I recognise the full value of the detailed study of reintroduced individuals, even if it did detract from the natural charm of completely wild and unconditioned animals.
Ongoing conservation research was still desperately needed.
Carlos explained that lack of food trees, predation, or even naïve captive bred tamarins falling to their death, had not proven to be their biggest threat. The Reserve’s population was decimated, literally, by a yellow fever outbreak in 2016-18 that reduced the population from a robust 400 down to an incredibly vulnerable 32 individuals. The impact of disease on an international conservation program was unexpected, but came back to haunt us years later. Fortunately, veterinary intervention with vaccinations had enabled Mico leao to bounce back from their second extinction precipice in recent years. Ever since this crisis, all visitors, including our family, needed to be vaccinated against yellow fever.
Even more so than the panda or condor, golden lion tamarins are an inspirational conservation success story. The rare but uplifting global collaboration between dozens of institutions, millions of dollars of fundraising, and engagement by custodians of their natural habitats, had ensured their survival, at least long enough for us and our daughters to thrill at their antics and bizarre appearance. Katherine and I had longed for similar engaging focal species to inspire conservation efforts back home in Australia.
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Largely through the efforts of the passionate Queensland ‘Bilby Brothers’ who founded ‘Save the Bilby Fund’ and supportive Easter Bilby chocolate makers, the ‘rabbit eared bandicoot’ was fast becoming Australia’s iconic desert conservation emblem. Back in the late 1990’s, both Katherine and I had only seen bilby’s distinctive tracks, scats and burrows in some remote deserts where we worked.
Again, ironically, I first met the endearing greater bilby (Macrotis lagotis) in a zoo, this time the Alice Springs Desert Park. Watching the bilby’s knock-kneed bumbling on long clawed feet, explained the distinctive tracks we had seen in the desert. However, the bilbies ambling around in the red light exhibited the slightly mothy dishevelment of many captive mammals. I wasn’t able to witness how they detected or dug out witchetty grubs or bulbs, or ran comically through the desert with their flag-like black and white tail held aloft. I was about to leave the nocturnal house when my attention was captured by a smaller enclosure, dominated by a dead tree. Like Samorn had been decades ago, my quest for a bucket-list animal was about to be upstaged by another little arboreal beast I had never heard of.
Long-tailed finch-sized marsupials were darting and leaping from branch to branch in a flurry of excited energy. Captivated by their antics I stopped to watch.
They resembled carnivorous kultarrs, (Antechinomys laniger) that I had chased at night across stony deserts plains., But unlike kultarrs these little acrobats were clearly adapted for life in trees. Their most distinctive feature was their long brush-tipped tail coloured a very Australian deep desert orange at its base.
Like most Australians, I’d never seen the kultarr’s cousin, the red-tailed phascogale , before my nocturnal house encounter. Most Australians, I’ve since learned, have never heard of them and struggle to pronounce their generic name, phoneticised as FAS-KO-GAIL. Ironically their difficult-to-spell Noongar name, kenngoor, was easier to pronounce. Unfortunately, most of their other indigenous names have been lost as the ruddy-tailed marsupials were rapidly eaten to extinction through 95% of their former range by feral cats and foxes spreading through the dry woodlands of southern Australian.
I was not the first wildlife enthusiast to be captivated by kenngoor. John Gould named them Phascogale calura, or “Beautiful-tailed Pouched-weasel”, high praise indeed from the famous taxonomist who described and illustrated many beautiful birds and mammals. Right then, admiring kenngoor in a zoo cage, I recognised that, like tamarins, they could make excellent ambassadors for conservation awareness and action in the Australian mallee.
Because we had just started a conservation project in the mallee at Secret Rocks, five hours north west of Adelaide, I impulsively decided that kenngoor would be one of our focal species.
Like Mico leao, a few kenngoor had been brought in from their last wild refuges in southern Western Australia to start captive-breeding colonies to save the species. They thrived in several zoos and joined other threatened Australian species like princess parrots and Wollemi pines that were safer in ‘captivity’ than the wild. Although they were technically less threatened with imminent extinction, captive-bred kenngoor (or princess parrots or golden lion tamarins for that matter) are not as important to the persistence of the species as wild living animals that can better adapt to changing climates and benefit from associations with fungi, bacteria, nutrients and, in some cases, even natural parasites.
In 2020 the Australian Government placed kenngoor on the priority list for species conservation to be reintroduced to predator free havens. Many other endangered animals had bred up in these large cat and fox proof paddocks in recent decades. Katherine had become one of the national experts on reintroducing threatened mammals, co-founding three large havens and reintroducing nine endangered mammals. Each new reintroduction posed particular challenges, like the risk of sudden stress-related deaths of captured stick-nest rats or crazy long-distance dispersal of quolls. We had already successfully protected malleefowl and endangered sandhill dunnarts and also reintroduced Shark-Bay bandicoots and numbats to our cat and fox free haven at Secret Rocks. Bandicoots and numbats were largely contained within our fences and had readily acclimatised to local conditions, but kenngoor were likely to pose their own reintroduction challenges, including hyper-dispersal outside our haven because they could pass through netting fences designed to keep cats out, but not kenngoor in.
Whilst planning the kenngoor reintroduction, we visited a successful reintroduction site within a fenced ex-water reserve mallee remnant at Wadderin in the Western Australian wheatbelt. Local farmer and chair of the Wadderin committee responsible for managing the safehaven, Brian Cusak, showed us around with his enthusiastic grandson., Brian pulled his old farm ute up next to a green wooden nest boxes nailed to a drooping sheoak tree.
“They are in here,” he exclaimed proudly, from the top of his stepladder. “Climb up quietly and have a look.”
Like they had been when they first saw Mico leao, our girls were instantly hooked.
Most reintroduced mammals were nearly impossible to find, especially during the day, without radiotrackers. Kenngoor’s use of nest boxes should make them easy to monitor. A couple of regional “Men’s Sheds” offered to make us boxes from recycled timber, with the entrance hole exactly the same as that designed by phascogale expert Jeff Short and used at Wadderin.
Twelve months later, we released kenngoor juveniles bred at the Alice Spring Desert Park to their new home at Secret Rocks. A November release was planned as males start fighting soon after weaning and captive facilities were unable to hold sufficient isolated animals over the summer months. Moths, crickets and spiders should be easy to find on warm summer nights, even for young captive-bred kenngoor accustomed to finding their meal in a dish. An early summer release would also give kenngoor time to establish territories and nest sites before their autumn breeding.
A team of biologists, including Katherine, and Tessa Manning who was studying kenngoor reintroductions for her PhD, carefully extracted the squirmy, bitey marsupials and fitted tiny radiocollars held together with silicon tubing and cotton thread to enable them to naturally drop off after a few weeks. We jammed into our mouse-proof bathroom, in case of near inevitable escapees. Our fingers were quickly bloodied by tenacious little teeth.
On the same evening that they had been flown from Alice Springs to Adelaide and driven to Secret Rocks, the adolescent kenngoor were released into their lavish new nest boxes, furnished with shredded paper and bark and a handful of mealworms and crickets. We lightly plugged the exit holes with wool to encourage our little founders to have a feed and then slowly let themselves out once we had left, rather than potentially getting ‘lost’ after a mad dash to freedom.
Every morning for the first month, and then twice weekly thereafter, Tessa and Katherine led a roster of keen kenngoor hunters to locate where each animal, conveniently named after our favourite lollies, was now residing. Every second evening we would head out with night-vision binoculars to attempt to record their activity and habitat use, for Tessa’s studies.
On my first night shift I put myself in the position of a naïve, teenage, city-bred kenngoor, dropped off in the country. Despite assuming our protected old growth mallee scrub would be full of kenngoor prey, I was struck by how little food was evident. Instead of swarms of moths around my headtorch or the sparkle of spider’s eyes and the relentless buzz of crickets or cicadas that create soundscape for productive Australian deserts on warm nights, all I saw was my breath misting in the unseasonably cold evening air. Growing phascogales need to consume approximately 39% of their bodyweight a night to fuel their supercharged metabolisms. That’s the equivalent of me eating 88 loaves of my staple field-trip raisin bread loaves every day! Whilst that statistic both excites and alarms me; we were now concerned how the young kenngoor could possibly find the equivalent of just one slice of cinnamon and raisin-infused bread.
Not only were we now sceptical they could find enough food during the unexpected cold spell after their release, foraging desperation would place young Gobstopper who I was watching, at increased risk of predation by the tawny frogmouths and boobooks calling around the release site. High numbers of hopping mice that had bred up in the cat-free haven had also attracted barn owls. My heart skipped a beat when one such white-faced ghost silently glided past me and alighted on a branch, not ten metres from where my radio receiver indicated Gobstopper was foraging, or hopefully hiding.
On the fourth morning after the release, Tessa returned with sad news. She had tracked Cobber to a shallow burrow on the ground, not in a safe nest box or hollow mallee like the others. Young marsupials are particularly susceptible to stress and cold, especially when they are hungry. Cobber was clearly hungry, and had lost 15% of his release weight. So, Tessa warmed him up and brought him back to our house in a nest box with a heat lamp and plentiful fatty mealworms and crickets. Immediately concerned about how the others were faring in the cool nights, we spent two days installing butcherbird-proof feeding boxes and erecting them near nest boxes and other locations where the kenngoor had moved. Our first of many orders of bulk mealworms, woodies, crickets, frozen pinky mice, kangaroo mince and insectivore mix was evidence that kenngoor would not follow the hands-off release strategies of bandicoots and numbats that were now thriving right where we had released the kenngoor.
Every morning after radiotracking, Katherine and Tessa meticulously analysed the footage from food-box cameras. Not only could they establish how many kenngoor were supplementing their wild caught diets, but the camera footage also provided a glimpse into their behaviour.
A psychiatrist observing kenngoor, would likely quickly assign them to a ‘spectrum’ – the marsupial definition of hyperactive.
Although I had been mesmerised by their acrobatic antics at the Desert Park, careful observation of our reintroduced animals revealed how jerky, perhaps nervous, their movements were. Kenngoor appeared hyper-stimulated and wired.
At the same time they were battling food issues, as expected, the young male kenngoor started dispersing several kilometres through our cat-proof fence. Male kenngoor are driven to disperse. Coming from litters as large as eight, it’s important that sons move away from their mothers and sisters to reduce chances of interbreeding. Despite being advantageous for widespread wild populations, natal (birth-place) dispersal was initially our greatest perceived challenge in establishing a breeding population from few founders. If all our adventurous teenagers moved several kilometres in random directions, they would likely live out their lives as bachelors. Our reintroduction would be doomed.
Brian’s population at Wadderin was effectively contained within an island of native vegetation surrounded by cleared wheatfields, so dispersing animals would presumably have quickly returned to safety. Ironically, kenngoor appear to be a rare example of an animal that is easier to reintroduce to a small ‘island’ reserve rather than the hundreds of square kilometres of habitat they could get lost in – around Secret Rocks.
As soon as they were recorded outside the fence, we headed out in the evening to catch and return the fearless escapees to our cat-proof exclosure. Trapping was seldom successful, even with a dozen traps placed in and around their den tree. So, armed with large dab nets, torches and a radio-tracker, we scrabbled, climbed, and leapt around like sugar-plum fairies to safely capture the absconders. Smartie was particularly elusive and took us three nights to catch. Weight checks indicated which kenngoor could be released back near feed boxes, and who needed to be taken back to the heat lamp and endless smorgasbord to regain weight before release.
Poor Whiz Fizz didn’t even last a night outside the exclosure. I had a soft spot for Whizzy, who had found some great shelter hollows away from his released siblings and cousins. He had increased in weight and seemed destined to be one of our successful breeders. One Monday morning after 4mm of light rain, I couldn’t find his signal within the exclosure but eventually picked up a faint beep more than a kilometre outside the fence.
When radiotracking beeps are really loud, you can typically identify a likely mallee to check for hollows, but my heart sank when his signal was getting stronger in a natural clearing. We found his little grey body, uninjured and inexplicably dead on the ground, by a knee-high bluebush daisy. Inspection revealed no obvious injuries, however, subsequent autopsy by vets from Adelaide Zoo revealed puncture marks consistent with a feral cat bite, which DNA swabs of traces of cat saliva on his fur confirmed. My little favourite had been killed on his first adventure into the cat zone. My initial shock quickly transitioned to an uncomfortable blend of frustration, sadness and anger.
A week later, on Mother’s Day, one of our would-be mother kenngoor, Columbine, couldn’t be located at either of her typical nest boxes, where our biggest male, Humbug, was paying very close attention to several females. Maybe Columbine had been mated and had moved away from her sisters and cousins to find her own nest site, away from competition?
Most of the dispersers were male, as expected. But occasionally females also move. After Whizzy’s rapid predation, we were determined to bring Columbine back to safety. After a couple of days of searching we eventually detected her faint signal from a hill at night, when she had presumably emerged from a hollow and was more detectable. We then walked out several kilometres to her new home three times before we eventually caught her. To circumvent her wanderlust, we placed Columbine in a lavishly furnished aviary within the refuge area, complete with a choice of two nest boxes, natural hollows, flowering mallees, plenty of climbing substrate and more food than she could possibly eat. Two weeks later we opened the aviary, hoping Columbine would keep using her safe nest box or at least would return regularly for the insects we continued to place there. After a couple of nights, she found another nest and food box, more than 1km from her aviary and we figured she would now settle-down to raise her joeys, safe from cats.
Three days later she was dead. Her autopsy revealed organ failure associated with toxoplasmosis infection.
Toxoplasmosis is the disease caused by the microscopic Toxoplasma parasite, which can only breed in cat’s digestive system. There had been no cats inside the reserve for several years, so we assumed Columbine had eaten an infected mouse during her foray out in the cat zone. So now two of our kenngoor, released into a cat free exclosure, had died through exposure to cats. And neither had even been eaten!
On a hunch we tested the other kenngoor who had died earlier, presumably because they had not been able to find enough food. Two others, who had never to our knowledge ventured outside the exclosure, also tested positive for toxo. Not only could toxoplasmosis explain animals that got sick and died from acute infection, recently discovered chronic mental health challenges might even be making infected kenngoor more vulnerable to predation. Laboratory experiments confirmed that rodents infected with toxoplasmosis lose their innate fear of cats and instead, inexplicably, move towards urine from toxo-positive cats.
The Toxoplasma parasite has co-evolved with cats, benefiting from having a ready ally in which to complete its life cycle. Tens of thousands of Toxoplasma oocysts, small enough to blow in the wind and be inhaled or eaten by unsuspecting kenngoor (or humans) are expelled in a single infected cat’s faeces. Cats, which are not affected by the disease, also benefit from easier hunting of stupefied prey.
The influence of the parasite is not limited to effects on traditional cat prey of mice and rats. Otters and dolphins die of toxoplasmosis infection, from cat faeces washed into the ocean. A higher percentage of roadkill bandicoots test positive to toxoplasmosis than the general population, presumably because they are less wary of traffic. Alarmingly these psychological switches also occur in humans, a significant concern for us all given that in many countries over half of the population has been exposed to toxoplasmosis.
Some infected humans display uncharacteristically risky or dangerous behaviours. Recent estimates of the cost to the Australian health sector from managing toxoplasmosis-related mental health disorders like Schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s amount to a mind-boggling six billion dollars a year. Six billion dollars! From a cat-borne parasite!
It dawned on us that high energy, high stress kenngoor might be especially prone to toxoplasmosis. Stress hormones slow down the production of interferons that defend against viruses. Comfortable captive-bred animals, accustomed to uniform temperature and diet and not distracted by the temptation to run out of sight in a night, could be stressed by even the most careful translocation. Rather than being the wired partygoers at a Friday night rave, once infected by toxoplasmosis we were observing destitutes on Sunday mornings, barely able to get of the footpath.
Their susceptibility to cat predation and toxoplasmosis were not the only challenges facing our kenngoor. Kenngoor are semelparous. Put that word in your memory bank for quiz nights. The Wordle abbreviation for semelparous could be RISKY or even CRAZY. Males typically die before their first birthday after a frenzied mating session. Some biologists believe they die from exhaustion after repeated prolonged mating episodes with as many promiscuous females as they can find. Others attribute organ failure, precipitated by their super-charged stress hormones. This cavalier strategy maximises breeding success, by removing hungry males from the environment during the period the females suckle their young.
Several other small carnivorous Australian mammals and dragon lizards also die after their first breeding, before even having the chance to meet their offspring. Salmon famously die after their epic upstream return to their breeding grounds, their corpses fertilising the forests and waterways that sustain the hatchlings that emerge after their death.
Males of other species are even more altruistic, with the corpses of some male spiders sustaining their mate straight after sex – enabling her to produce more, fitter spiderlings.
Kenngoor males’ dispersal and premeditated redundancy has obviously served them well in the past, but it makes them an exceptionally challenging species to reintroduce. Poor Tessa, who thought she would follow the previous success of most mammal reintroductions into havens where cats and foxes were excluded, was dealt a challenging hand. But challenges often provide the most inciteful learnings.
Gradually through trial and error, which is now termed ‘adaptive management’, Tessa and Katherine started seeing signs of success. Although Humbug and his shagged-out competitor Gobstopper, were not seen after July, Katherine excitedly spotted tell-tale pouch bulges in Chiko and Jube. Other uncollared females were still visiting nest boxes and a new family of released kenngoor quickly established inside, then outside, meticulously-equipped aviaries. Tiny house-moused sized juveniles followed their mums to feeders, and weeks later independently visited other camera stations. Even after feeding was cut back to once a week, they seemed to be finding enough insects on flowering teatrees, grevillias or mallees throughout the year. Katherine assumed they were using torpor, or brief hibernation, to sleep off the coldest nights without burning too much energy.
So, it appears that kenngoor could find enough hollows and food in our cat free exclosure at Secret Rocks to breed and raise their young. What we don’t know is whether enough males will hang around, or come back in breeding season, to counteract their risky, semelparous lifestyle. Eventually, hopefully, we will have a large enough pool of locally-adapted kenngoor to offset natal dispersal, disease and cat attack. Like Carlos demonstrated with the distinctly marked Mico leao, the kenngoor trials and tribulations confirmed the importance of closely following the fate of reintroduced animals. Without daily attention, it’s unlikely Tessa would have recognised the inability of recently-weaned kenngoor to find enough food on cool nights, especially away from the warmth their mother may have still provided in the nest. Their alarming vulnerability to cat predation, whilst already accepted as a threat, was highlighted by following Whiz Fizz every day. Their unexpectedly high susceptibility to toxoplasmosis, even in cat free areas, was a curveball only detected through intensive study and collaboration with Zoos SA vets at Adeliade Zoo, the same place I first met golden lion tamarins. Toxoplasmosis was potentially as debilitating as the yellow fever outbreak in Mico leao, and a challenge that science has yet to solve. Similarly, the best strategy for keeping sufficient rufous-tailed rascals within core zones for long enough for them to find partners to breed with is still unknown.
Spoiler alert! Unfortunately for Tessa, and kenngoor, Tessa won’t be writing the definitive guide to kenngoor reintroductions for her PhD dissertation.
“We’ve got more questions now than when I started!”, she exclaimed with equal measures of frustration and intrigue.
Ironically, the challenges that kenngoor have exposed are probably even more important for informing and inspiring conservation than if they had mirrored the success of the bandicoots that were thriving.
“But what we do know is that releasing captive bred juveniles into a cat free ‘haven’ with plentiful natural hollows and nest boxes is not enough”, Tessa acknowledged.
Until we are able to sustainably reduce feral cat populations and their associated parasites outside fenced areas, kenngoor and other sensitive wildlife are not safe from extinction.
Despite these unknowns, kenngoor have become a charismatic focal species and a barometer for conservation management in southern Australia’s dry woodlands. If we conservationists can create conditions for successful return of kenngoor, many other less alluring but equally important animals will also benefit.
John Read (www.johnlread.com) is an ecologist and cofounder of 3 rewilding projects (Arid Recovery, Wild Deserts and Mallee Refuge), chair of the Warru Recovery Team and CEO of conservation innovation group, Thylation.
His last item examined how work with six species is trying to answer the question: Can rewilding save Australia’s most vulnerable wildlife?” in Issue 104 of Cosmos magazine, which you can read here: ‘Wild places, wild species‘.
