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Jeff Pinder (Fitz-Stirling Fauna Recovery Project) put out seven cameras on Chereninup Reserve on Koreng Noongar Country in the Fitz-Stirling region of south-west Western Australia in the hope of catching a Tammar Wallaby or two.
To his great surprise, what he found instead was a Red-Tailed Phascogale running across the ground in front of the camera.
We thought there was a remote chance of them still occurring here as this reserve provides large areas of undisturbed woodland that provides habitat for these threatened, arboreal, carnivorous marsupials.
This find is good news on many fronts as it represents a previously unknown population, the habitat is healthy and protected and we can monitor the group and its response to introduced predator control.
The Red-tailed Phascogale used to occur across most of arid and semi-arid Australia but now only occurs in the Western Australian wheatbelt and adjacent areas in less than 1% of its former range.
