Warddeken Mayh Project

The rangers have gotten through all the photos from the grid at Barradj last year, and sadly there are no quolls captured. Cara at Warddeken said the site was hit by a very intense late dry season fire in 2020 so she wasn’t surprised and they still may be in the region since there are gorges radiating out from the area. There were some other threatened species (northern brown bandicoot, black footed tree rat, white throated grasswren) so the plan is still to do tailored fire management to bring it back to suitable quoll habitat.

Click the image above to view poster summary

Please see the above poster summary of the long term Mayh Monitoring Program results from last year. Cara’s currently prepping for this years camera deployment and is planning to get all the cameras out in one go hopefully (38 sites this year!) which opens up the schedule for other work (another threatened species grid might be on the cards if things don’t get worse with covid, possible in a woodland area this time).

Check back here for more updates and photos as this project progresses.

The support of the Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife has allowed Warddeken to begin a research project investigating the extent of two populations of the Northern Quoll (djabbo), which were uncovered through the monitoring program. The project involves establishing a 70 camera station grid at each site to understand the size of the djabbo and feral cat populations. The team were able to start, but not complete the first grid on the Barradj clan estate this field season (more detail below).

In exciting developments, senior daluk (female) rangers from the Manmoyi ranger base have designed and begun to implement a second research project to investigate a suspected decline of the Orange-footed Scrub-fowl (kurrkurlanj). This project is a bininj (Indigenous) priority, as the kurrkurlanj is a culturally important species, and while the daluk team have back end support from the IPA’s Monitoring Officer, they have taken charge of all the field work for this project. The cameras from the first monitoring sites will be retrieved soon.

Mayh Species Recovery Project – KKT News December 2020

The Northern Brown Bandicoot (‘yok’) is the largest of Australia’s bandicoots – they are nocturnal, solitary and omnivorous, eating a range of small animals, roots and plant matter. As with all bandicoots, they make signature conical diggings as they fossick for resources.

Significant grass cover is a key requirement for yok. During the day they rest in long dense grass in nooks and depressions, and will form the grass into cylindrical nests or take shelter in hollow logs. When understory is severely burnt by large and hot late-season fires, or denuded by buffalo and pig, yok are susceptible to predation.

However, if these threatening processes are mitigated, populations can quickly rebound, as yok can breed all year round, with females producing and weaning around four young (up to seven) within 60 days.

In the Warddeken Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) the Mayh Monitoring Project has located 20 populations of yok. A simple analysis gives weight to the habitat requirements described above; yok are commonly found in areas with gentle, patchy and early fire regime with a diverse and mostly dense grass and midstory layers.

Yok are important to Indigenous people (‘bininj’). There are many bandicoot-dreaming sites across the landscape, there are roles in ceremony, representations in rock art and yok are still prized food sources. Senior people have observed a decline in yok over the past 20 years, concurrent with western scientific findings. In the Warddeken IPA, Landowners have been heartened by seeing yok in the images coming in from the Monitoring Project.