'Extinct' Wallaby Caught on Camera

Yawuru Country Managers and an experts from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) say that they have found compelling evidence that the Spectacled hare-wallaby, and threatened species which had been feared locally extinct, is back in Roebuck Plains, Australia.

The wallaby in question, Lagorchestes conspicillatus, is not a global concern for conservation, as it boasts healthy populations that dot the Australian countryside. However, a great number of changes in Australia have been linked to steady declines and even local extinctions of these nocturnal marsupials.

Competition for limited food resources with grazing livestock, as well as the introduction of cats and foxes in some regions, has kept this wallaby in danger. In the Yawuru-owned Roebuck Plains Station, it was thought that the last of this species had been struck by a motor-vehicle in 2004 after feral cat populations boomed in the region.

However, that fact didn't stop WWF ecologist Alex Watson from looking for the animal.

"Their shelter and feeding requirements make them highly sensitive to habitat changes, so assessing their numbers is a good indicator of overall health of a local environment," he said in a recent release.

As part of a training module, Watson showed Yawuru Country Managers how to set eight cameras in likely habitats near the road kill site, now a decade old. The motion-triggered cameras were left running for two months.

Watson was stunned when his trainees returned with two clear photos of the supposedly 'extinct' animal.

"The [managers] showed me photos of probably two animals so we've got definite proof that there's spectacled hare wallabies there," he told Science Network of Western Australia.

"We now have an opportunity to rescue these animals and their habitats through the implementation of sustainable land management practices," Yawuru Corporation Board Director Dean Mathews added in the WWF release. "The Yawuru Indigenous Protected Area.. will enable the regeneration of the country in partnership with the Indigenous Land Corporation's environmentally sustainable rangeland management program so that this wallaby and other threatened species can thrive as they once did."

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