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Meet the new parents: Pip and Milo in their hollow in May 2023. Photo: WWF-Australia.<\/p>\n
Plenty of mums are run off their feet looking after their babies \u2013 and \u2018Pip\u2019 isn\u2019t an exception.<\/p>\n
The difference is, she\u2019s a greater glider living in a tree\u2019s hollow in Tallaganda Forest. And unlike you, she and her family are being watched by a 24\/7 livestream.<\/p>\n
Australian National University (ANU) research fellow Doctor Ana Gracanin\u2019s livestream started beaming out to the world from a secret location<\/a> within Tallaganda National Park, in southeast NSW, in 2024.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been a window into the world of greater gliders, which are large gliding marsupials native to eastern Australia.<\/p>\n They use hollows (naturally forming holes in trees) as a safe place to sleep and breed.<\/p>\n The camera caught mum Pip and dad Milo with one joey, named Brimi, last year. Now, another small face has joined the family.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a symbol of hope [to see the joeys],\u201d Dr Gracanin told Region.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been really nice to see the behaviours that we otherwise had no idea about. It\u2019s been really fascinating to see how they raise their joey.\u201d<\/p>\n The baby\u2019s birthday isn\u2019t known, but in August, Dr Gracanin noticed movement in Pip\u2019s pouch on the livestream, which suggested a joey was inside.<\/p>\n She said the unnamed baby, like other joeys of the same age, had been \u201cmuch more active\u201d than Pip and Milo, but hadn\u2019t ventured far from home.<\/p>\n \u201cThe joey will spend hours and hours of the night peering out of the hollow or the nest box \u2013 [they\u2019re] looking down at the world, sometimes cheekily going to have a little explore but then always going back inside.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr Gracanin said Pip had had at least one other baby before the study started, detected with a previous project, but this joey was a surprise.<\/p>\n \u201cShe may have had another one before that, but we definitely know that [she\u2019s had joeys] for three years in a row.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a really good sign that the forest is really healthy, they\u2019ve got secure access to nutritious food and access to the hollow.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s such an intensive thing to undertake in raising a baby \u2026 There isn\u2019t a whole lot of data on the species as a whole, but other studies have found they don\u2019t necessarily breed every year, because of reasons like drought.\u201d<\/p>\n Typically, a joey remains in the pouch for about four months and gradually becomes independent by about 10 months of age.<\/p>\n \u201cThey either get booted out to make room for the new baby (which is what we suspect happened to Brimi) or they hang around.<\/p>\n \u201cIn other locations we\u2019ve seen four or five greater gliders living together in the same hollow, which raises a lot of questions \u2026 It goes to show that we still don\u2019t know everything there is to know about these animals.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Dr Gracanin said a goal of the study was to get eyes on the marsupial.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can only conserve if [we know the population is there] \u2026 A lot of people don\u2019t realise that there are just thousands of these animals out in the forest.<\/p>\n \u201cThe livestream offers an opportunity to know that they exist, become connected with a family as they raise their little joey.\u201d<\/p>\n The joeys are also giving researchers hope that the species is making a steady recovery after 2019\/20 bushfires, which saw widespread swaths of the forest burned.<\/p>\n