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\u2013 credit, Australian Wildlife Conservancy<\/p>\n \u2013 credit, Australian Wildlife Conservancy<\/p>\n
On Australia\u2019s Kangaroo Island, cat-proof fencing is protecting native species from predation following a devastating wildfire and allowing them to recover in numbers that are shocking biologists.<\/p>\n
The third-largest island controlled by Australia, Kangaroo Island saw a large fire burn through much of its scrub habitat in 2020, and conservationists knew this would leave native animals extremely vulnerable to attack from feral cats.<\/p>\n
As soon as a week after the fires receded, employees of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy got to work surveying the landscape to see how feasible it would be to build a fence around the burned areas.<\/p>\n
Their work immediately saw them come into contact with the impact of the cats on the native Kangaroo Island dunnart, a mouse-sized marsupial with no natural defense against them.<\/p>\n
Erecting the fence around the Western River Refuge, however, has seen the number of dunnarts increase between 90 and 100%, shocking the conservancy staff and the traditional Ngarrindjeri owners who run cultural tours on the island.<\/p>\n
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\u2013 credit, Brad Leue \/ Australian Wildlife Conservancy<\/p>\n
\u201cSo the dunnart has fared a lot better than I think a lot of people thought [they would] \u2026 especially me, six years ago,\u201d Australian Wildlife Conservancy principal ecologist Pat Hodgens told ABC News AU,<\/a> adding that another shock came from the reappearance of native birds.<\/p>\n MORE STORIES LIKE THIS: Birds Start to Show Signs of Recovery After Bee-Harming Pesticide Ban in the EU<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThe western whipbird and also the Bassian thrush \u2026 these birds are also really predated upon by feral cats. We didn\u2019t have any of those birds living within the feral cat exclusion fence at the time of construction, but they\u2019ve found their way back there.\u201d<\/p>\n Australia has in the past had some of the highest rates of extinction of native species seen anywhere on Earth, but this has slowed dramatically over recent years, such that even mainstream media doom and gloomsters have had to admit<\/a> that anything which could even remotely be called a \u20186th mass extinction\u2019 isn\u2019t happening by any stretch of the imagination.<\/p>\n