How this little rat managed to dig itself out of a hole
The tree rat’s good fortune lies mainly with its presence on a series of islands off the Kimberley coast, which have protected it from feral cats and cattle grazing.
First, the good news: the golden-backed tree rat, with its extravagant tail and distinctive colouring, is no longer on the threatened species list.
The bad news is that its population may still be in decline. And, worse still, the rodent – a native of the Kimberley region that is also known as the koorrawal – is the only Australian creature to have made it off that list of species most at risk of disappearing all together.
Michelle Ward from the World Wide Fund for Nature Australia told The Weekend Australian the rat’s good fortune lay mainly with its presence on a series of islands off the Kimberley coast.
Those islands, she said, had been untouched by the three key threats facing it and other native animals on the mainland. “The saving grace is that it’s on these islands which are often predator free and which haven’t experienced the change in fire regimes and haven’t experienced the disturbance from cattle,” she said.
Mainland populations have also benefited from a return of Indigenous fire practices in parts of the Kimberley, which have been credited for reducing the risk of large-scale bushfires. The so-called “cool burning” techniques, which use smaller fires in mosaic patterns, have also been found to provide ecological benefits by not burning entire plant root systems or destroying shelters that can house wildlife.
The rat’s journey off the threatened list, however, is due not to a spike in its population numbers. Instead, Dr Ward said the pace of its population decline was deemed to no longer be at such a speed that its existence was under threat.
Dr Ward is a co-author of a paper to be published on Saturday in the sustainability-focused academic journal One Earth, which found that less than 0.5 per cent of Australia’s land-based threatened species had made it off the threatened species list. The tree rat was the only animal among them, with the other seven species to find their way off the list all plants.
She said the findings of the paper showed that Australia was not doing enough to help improve the survival prospects of its threatened species.
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