Richard Musgrove
Dr Richard Musgrove is a zoologist and science journalist. He writes for Cosmos and Double Helix.
Ecologists aren’t too concerned for the survival of native bilbies in outback Queensland, which has experienced record breaking rains and flooding since Cyclone Alfred formed on February 20 this year.
Severe Tropical Cyclone Alfred was a powerful, long-lived, and erratic tropical cyclone which eventually crossed the coast in south eastern Queensland on March 8. It dumped widespread rain across most of the state, including areas where the vulnerable native is scratching out its existence.
Flooding closed Currawinya National Park in south-western Queensland’s mulga country and fears were held for the resident bilby population. Cyclone Alfred sent 2m of water through the park, but bilbies are doing well, Kevin Bradley, Chair of the Greater Bilby Recovery Team and CEO of Save the Bilby Fund, told Cosmos.
The cyclone also dampened the Greater Bilby Recovery Summit, an initiative of the Save the Bilby Fund, held on the Gold Coast from 4th to the 6th of March, 2025.
While floods are not generally an issue for bilbies, they do make life difficult for scientists.
Dr Cassandra Arkinstall, postdoctoral wildlife ecologist at the University of Queensland and a member of the Greater Bilby Recovery Team, has been unable to get to her six field sites in western Queensland because of flooding, and is restricted to remotely monitoring the area using satellite imagery.
“We planned to go out in February but there was a lot of rain and road closures, so we had to reschedule, then more floods happened.”
The water affected the vast plains known as the Channel Country in western Queensland, which includes the iconic Diamantina River, and the Cooper and Eromanga Basins, and eventually drainsinto Lake Eyre.
“I have no doubt that the bilby populations that we were monitoring would be fine. They will predominantly be high and dry just because they don’t typically have borrows down in floodplain habitat and they are highly mobile.”
Burrows didn’t get flooded out because bilbies don’t do so well along water courses, she says, as these are also home to feral predators.
“Bilbies are such incredible foragers, able to eat great diversity of food items. They’re highly mobile, so can respond to changes in conditions out in these arid areas, some of the harshest places in Australia, they’re able to find adequate food and thrive. When conditions get too harsh for other species like feral cats and foxes, the bilby is just warming up.”
Understanding how to manage our patchy bilby populations is the key to their persistence say researchers after the Greater Bilby Recovery Summit
Understanding metapopulations is a vital part of management, she says and was a key session at the Bilby Summit, alongside the important predator and fire management and genetics sessions.
A metapopulation is like a bunch of regional towns linked by country roads. The towns are the suitable habitat which is naturally patchy, and the roads are the tracks that bilbies take between those patches.
There are three kinds of bilby metapopulation management, Arkinstall says.
Small actively managed zoo populations are transferred around Australia to maintain genetic diversity. These are managed intensively with stud books.
Next is management of fenced safe havens and offshore islands where bilbies have been reintroduced within their former range, such as those run by Save the Bilby Fund.
Finally, there are naturally-clumped wild populations, she says.
Researchers are trying to unravel what is happening with bilbies across the country. Arkinstall says that “since the 1990s that the Queensland bilby population has somewhat stabilised. Even potentially increased its extent, which is positive, although it’s nothing near its original distribution”
But its’ boom-bust’ for bilbies and species like native long-haired rats, says Arkinstall.
“We’ve got six sites with wild bilby populations and are trying to unravel relationships with introduced predators and boom-bust species. When conditions are good, after these floods, we’re going to have an increase in long hair rats. Then feral predators increase off the back of that prey source.
“What happens once those long hair rats drop out of the system? Is there prey switching going on? And is that the time when bilbies groups are the most vulnerable and when we need to support the populations out there through additional predator management?
“We need to get to the crux of how we can best manage those populations and support them so they are able to persist”
For Arkinstall, the take-home message from the Bilby Summit was “the need to really focus on how we can get support from the federal government to enable us to do broad scale Australia-wide surveys to understand what the populations are doing over time.”
Every 5 to 10 years, there should be a broad scale survey, she says.
“This would be quite a coordinated effort, but we want to be able to understand what’s happening, what are the trends in the area that they occupy? Are they increasing or decreasing, or becoming locally extinct?
“So, if we can collect scats (poo) while we’re doing these broad scale surveys across Australia, we get a really good picture of what’s happening genetically, and you can use that information to look at abundance as well.
“Currently each state is doing fantastic work in terms of understanding what’s happening in their state with wild populations.”
But we really need a coordinated approach to get an Australia-wide picture, she says. And someone to coordinate the data.
“It is actually a massive job, but it’s so crucial.”
Bilbies safe behind bars
