[00:00:00] Speaker A: Australia is home to an astounding array of wildlife found nowhere else on Earth. However, many of these unique species are endangered due to human cost pressures.
So what does it take to conserve, restore, and rewild the planet's largest island?
Welcome to rewildology, the nature podcast that explores the human inside of conservation, travel and rewounding the planet. I am your host, Brooke Mitchell, conservation biologist and adventure traveler.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: Good day, mates.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: Today I'm taking you to Australia for a ripper conversation with John Kawanowski, PhD, chief science officer at the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.
John's career has been nothing short of fascinating, between life threatening advocacy work in Malaysia as a young man going back to school to better understand the conservation issues he was promoting, delving deep into understanding Australia's rainforests, and now conserving and rewilding the island on a continental scale.
In this episode, John and I explore the top conservation issues plaguing the island, notably invasive predators and inferno fires. How AWC is protecting and reintroducing Australia's endangered mammals the methods AWC is using to remove introduced predators collaborating with indigenous communities and landowners to create ideal habitats for wildlife. The tech they're using to monitor said.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Wildlife with a big shout out to.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Debbie Saunders of wildlife drones from episode 145. We'll definitely get into that. The challenges and successes of his career, and so much more. So grab another shrimp off the barbie, pour yourself a refreshing beverage, and join us as we have a rip roaring time exploring the wild side of Australia's conservation efforts. Today on rewatology.
[00:02:12] Speaker C: I'm the chief science officer of an Australian not for profit called Australian Wildlife Conservancy. That for the rest of the interview, I'll just call AWC.
My job involves running our conservation science program across Australia, so we have about 80, I think, now ecologists.
About a quarter of them are doctoral graduates. So it's a fairly high powered team, and they're focused on everything from conservation on sort of extensive landscapes through to rewilding type projects. So that's my job, and quite a.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Big job that is. But you had a pretty uncanny or original and unique route to what you're doing today.
[00:03:08] Speaker C: We all did.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: Yes, we all do. But yours is especially fascinating to me, so please share your story.
What is the journey that led you to that amazing summary of what you're doing now?
[00:03:23] Speaker C: Right.
Where do I start? Well, I am someone who grew up in rural Queensland, which is sort of one of the more rural states in Australia. Anyway, my father was a professional forester, which meant he cut trees down. Or oversaw people cutting trees down. But also conserving forest.
So that's a sort of interesting background. Because we spent time in the bush on weekends. So I got an appreciation for it. But I also got to see people working in the bush, managing it, caring for it and also sort of utilizing it. And that is a different paradigm to a lot of conservation in western societies. But it's not that different from what indigenous people in Australia have been doing for tens of thousands of years.
Australia is not a wilderness. Australia is where I live in particular. Very human managed landscape. In the sense that fire in particular has been a really important landscape management tool by aboriginal people. That shaped the country. And that goes to what conservationists need to do in Australia now. We can't just take our hands off the place.
Because it changes if you do that. So yeah, that was my background.
I'm from a big family. An elder brother. My elder brother went on and did what my father did. Became a forester. He's an academic. And of course I'm number two son. So I had to do something different. I went and did an arts degree. And studied philosophy and english literature. And with that fine qualification I dropped out of society altogether.
Went and lived in the bush. And learned how to build mudbrook houses and planted trees. And all that sort of thing that you do. When you're trying to come to grips with. What the hell do I want to do in life? And I don't want to do what I've been brought up to do. But over time I got involved in environmental issues.
Through a very tangled set of circumstances. Ended up in Borneo with a fairly crazy czech guy. Who was helping out the local Penan people. Who are an indigenous group in the center of Borneo. A very impressive swiss guy called Brenna Manson. Had been involved with that group for some years. He ended up dying in Borneo. Very likely a result of police action. But anyway, I was a young man and idealistic. And thought I'd go and help save the penan. And in the middle of the jungle I got very sick. And the Penang saved me. They took me out of the forest. And once we got into civilization we were there illegally. So we got arrested and deported. But it radicalized me. And when I came back to Australia. I became involved in rainforest activist type of things.
We blockade various things associated with rainforest timber.
But behind all that, and sorry, this is a bit of a long story. But behind all that I realized I didn't really know much about the causes I was passionate about. So with an arts degree, you're equipped to talk about the ethics of things or whatever, or the narrative, but I realized I just didn't know enough. So I went and did an environmental science degree, a university chosen by my girlfriend at the time in a very nice part of Australia town near Byron Bay. That was great. It was a new university and it sort of drew people out of the hills. And I went to uni with some really knowledgeable ecologists.
One bloke who raised his own collection of australian snakes, just fantastic people like that.
And look, if I'd finished my degree and been offered a job or been able to get a job in a national park somewhere, that's what I'd be doing. But it was one of those things where I didn't get a job. So I did some more study and eventually got a phd in rainforest possums and tree kangaroos up in the part of Australia I live in, which is right up in the north, in the east coast. It's the wettest part of Australia. There's a mountain not far from me that gets 12 meters of rainier. That's what, 36ft or something?
Very wet. Very wet, but really.
Yeah. And Australia used to be like the Amazon. It used to be rainforest from one end to the other. We're talking 20 to 50 million years ago.
And that collection of biodiversity, it's contracted to really just this tiny part of Australia here and a few bits down the east coast that have had enough rain throughout the ice ages to keep it. And I went in and studied this sort of five species that eat leaves up in the rainforest here. Fascinating. Got to see really interesting parts of Australia, really. Lot of time at night out in the know, serenaded by frogs and owls and looking for eyeshine in the trees. And then I went on for about a decade working in rainforest restoration as a postdoctoral researcher. And that really floated my boat here. I was passionate about rainforest conservation.
I've done some study in rainforest. I felt I knew a little bit about what I was talking about now and repairing the rainforest. Who wouldn't want to do that? And there's quite a movement for that in Australia. It's small scale, but it's interesting.
I worked with a sort of multi expertise from everywhere from mites through to plants and moths and birds, whatever. My job was to measure the trees, they sort of give that to the dumb guy in the group.
You can go and put a tape around a tree. But again, it was fascinating and I learned a lot, but in terms of making a difference to conservation, which is what drives me. After that experience I talked about way back when, I felt like I was plowing an increasingly sort of narrow row. And the rest of it's. That's where most of the conservation issues are in Australia. Rainforest in Australia, provided it's not cleared, it sort of looks after itself, sort of. Not entirely, but sort of. And so whereas, as I said, the rest of Australia largely requires some sort of management, particularly fire, but also you've got to manage feral animals. There's a lot of feral animals in Australia, et cetera, et cetera. So through sort of really just a bloke, I knew, I was offered a job in a not for profit, which I knew nothing about when I took the job, but I clearly wanted to change because I jumped out of my very cushy university role and into a not for profit. And, yeah, that was 15 years ago, so I've made it work and I've changed jobs into the current one about ten years ago, where I'm running the program and I'm never bored. It's not a boring job, but the main thing I am is not. I always feel I'm not quite up to the task because it's just a massive task.
Australia has really pressing conservation issues. Like, it's strange, we're a wealthy country, we've got a pretty small population density, we're the size of the United States, but a 10th of the population. It is a lot of desert, so that sort of explains a lot of that. But we're also like a big island, right? So 40 million years of isolation from everywhere else on the planet. So carrying this precious cargo of kangaroos and platypus and koalas and a whole lot of 90% of Ibada is endemic. You don't find it anywhere else.
It's also like other islands, just a bit naive to the big, bad world, right? So when Europeans sort of colonized Australia 240 years ago, they brought cats, pussycats.
The English wanted to hunt foxes, so they brought foxes over, you name it. And those things, particularly the cats and foxes, well, the cats are everywhere across Australia, from rainforest through to the desert. Amazing animal, but incredibly devastating. And they start getting big as well. So you got these big sort of six kilogram pussycats wandering around the bush and of course they can take prey their size and often they take the young. So while they may not be able to take a decent sized wallaby, they can take its pouch young and have the same effect on the population.
Foxes, in a way, are even worse, but they're not as capable as upliving in the north, in the tropics. So the two thirds of Australia that have foxes and cats are really hammered. We've got the worst mammal extinction in the world in modern times. Over 30 species extinct, another 60 species on the threatened list, many of them very small populations, 1000 individuals. 100 individuals. Tiny, tiny. Fewer few animals in the panda, but they're little sort of creatures that most Australians don't even know, let alone the rest of the world. So there you go. I better stop. That's a rave over to you.
[00:13:43] Speaker B: Oh, that was so good. Oh, my gosh, that was fantastic. Because you were starting to get into one of my big questions.
And actually, could you go into it a little bit further? I want to understand more of the timeline here, like the conservation timeline you did mention, like the English bringing these invasive predators that have just done complete havoc to Australia's native wildlife. But maybe could you just go into further detail so we can understand and really set the stage for the work you're doing now? Sure, yeah, maybe just that's the prompt. Go for it. Explain that more a little bit.
[00:14:24] Speaker C: Okay, so I'm going to take a step back before the Europeans, because Australia had no primates and no humans for most of its evolutionary journey as well. And we had a whole lot, just like every continent before humans arrived, we had a lot of big animals. We had, I think, about 20 species bigger than 100 kg. We had sort of rhinoceros sized wombats. A wombat is basically a marsupial that lives in a burrow. I don't know if these guys lived in a burrow, but they're like a sort of very placent type of cow. So we had massive things like that. We had sort of things called short faced kangaroos that probably ate bark and leaves.
We had a big marsupial carnival called thalacolio.
So we just had this amazing big fauna. And when humans arrived, modern humans, one of the first big migrations out of Africa, got to Australia maybe 60,000 years ago, quite early.
What else we had, we had giant land, like almost crocodiles, but monitor lizards, big turtles, big birds, they all went within. You know, it's, it's contested the timeline, but they all went. And that's the, you know, that's the common story, right? Humans come in and even with a small amount of predation, again, even on the young, for a slow breeding animal, like a lot of australian animals are very slow breeding. It's like an adaptation to an ancient continent that we've got. We've had very little glaciation, we've had very little volcanism. Our soils are poor, so things have this slow lifestyle and whatever they went, right?
As you know, in countries where these big herbivores, for example, like an elephant, they really shape the environment, right? They bush over trees, they maintain patchiness, they create conditions for the smaller herbivores to live. That classic sort of grazing sequence you get in places like the Serengeti, we don't have that anymore. And there's a prominent australian ecologist called Tim Flannery who some of your listeners might know, he's done a lot of work in the climate space. He's actually a paleontologist. So this is his Ped topic. But his argument in a book called the Future Eaters is that when aboriginal people came in with fire, right, they quickly learned that Australia is pretty flammable, pretty dry place, but a lot of without the big animals, there's no patchiness. And so they use fire for hunting, for clearing the country when they travel, for a whole lot of reasons, but that fire, if it's in a small enough mosaic, it more or less recreates the patchiness that these big animals had. So again, humans become a really important shaping feature in Australia. So, okay, you got to then imagine that for an unbelievable amount of time, 50,000 years, 60,000 years of this type of practice, we've got good pale, what we call it fossil pollen, paleontological, some strange name I can't pronounce, but good evidence of this stuff, right? We know this was happening. And then 4000 years ago, somehow, four or 5000 years ago, it's again a bit difficult.
A dog, a dingo comes in like, you get the Asian, like related to the singing dogs of New guinea in Borneo. When I was in Borneo, walking in the middle of the night past a village to get around some police, I tripped over and I made a noise and I set off the singing dogs in this sort of Borneo village night, and they all started to howl. It was know this is the dingo ancestors, of course, you know, this is suddenly a placental mammal predator on the continent. And we had tasmanian tigers, the thylacine, across Australia. We had tasmanian devils across Australia. When the dingo turned up, they became extinct. So presumably outcompeted. So there's another massive change in the top order predator sort of stuff.
Still a long time before humans arrive. This is the time of the pyramids. This is a long time ago. And then what we think happened is various technological developments in stone tools and various other technologies that aboriginal people had population density of aboriginal people seems to have increased in the last few thousand years. I mean, it's very hard to tease apart that from the fossil record is also much better the closer you are to the recent time. So anyway, but that's what they then, you know, only a couple of hundred years ago, Captain Cook, white people on sailing ships, we fought a war with the British ahead of state. Still, the king of Britain fought a war with you folk and you guys didn't want to take any more convicts, so we got them.
I've got some convict ancestors, a lot of Australia's has. It was sort of a brutal penal colony. People weren't sent here for the pleasure of it. They were sort of brutalized and they really just unlike other countries where there were tempts at treaties, there was just a frontier war here that went on for about 100 years and aboriginal people were simply wiped out from much of the continent. And so all that management that they did, the fire, all their knowledge of the place that was just trashed. And really the history of australian ecology is importing in american ideas and english ideas. And then really only in the last, I don't know, certainly within my professional lifetime, we started looking to how the Aboriginal managed this country for so long and we've started to learn from that. So they're now, for example, in my work, we do a lot of fire.
We deliberately set fire to a lot of Australia. We manage fire over like 6 million northern Australia. We probably burned 2 million every year trying to recreate the sort of small scale fire patterns that we think were what we know were the indigenous sort of pattern. Thing is, in northern Australia you still have indigenous groups who more or less have lived a traditional lifestyle even through the colonization period. And so we're able to learn from them more or less in real time.
Yeah, so I guess the other timeline is that there's wild pigs in Australia. They're called up Riley, they're called captain cookers because there's this myth that cook had them on his ship and let them go. There was this sort of tradition of letting go pigs and goats on islands and uninhabited land. If the mariners got shipwrecked, which they often did, here's a food source they could have. Of course, the country is brimming with food, but they wanted stuff they're familiar with.
So, yeah, pigs, goats, donkeys, horses, cattle, lots of those things wandering around the bush. And cats, of course, came in with it does only appear to have been since the last 200 and something years because cats are always traveling on people's boats.
And Europeans, the Dutch and various others, actually came past Australia earlier than cook, but it was just a glancing sort of contact and didn't seem to introduce anything right.
The foxes, as I said, the european masters of Australia wanted to hunt like they did up in the Cotswolds. And it actually took quite a few goes to get foxes established in Australia, which is quite amazing, given how successful they eventually turned out to be. And rabbits, another thing, fox has got to live on something. So let's have some rabbits again. Rabbits which are absolutely massive problem in know you talk about rewilding. Well, this was an introduction, but it wasn't straightforward and often had this conversation with government people who are very cautious, and we'll attempt a reintroduction. It doesn't work. We want to have another go. Something didn't work. We've learned from that. We're going to do it a bit differently. We'd like to have another crack. Australia. What we've still got from convict times is a love of bureaucracy. We've got to fill in so many forms and permissions to do this sort of work. And they say, no, you've had a go, it's not going to work. So, no, you're not allowed to do. And I said, the rabbit, remember the many. How long did it take? Just, you know, black rat, brown rat, house mouse. House mouse is massively abundant in the grain growing areas of Australia. One of the things that the mice and the rats and the rabbits do is actually support higher abundances of cats and foxes, which are used to eating them. And then when their numbers crash, if it gets dry. Australia is a very wet and dry place in big cycles. Then those introduced predators, when they're hungry, eat everything that's left, right. And so we've got parts of a show where we have cat plagues.
At one point, we sent the army out to shoot these cats, and I've seen these pictures of thousands of dead cats in this particular pace, where it got this really beautiful little native animal called a bilby. It's sometimes called a rabbit eat bandicoot, big ears. It's like a desert animal, sort of black and white. Its tail has got this sort of white tuft of hair on it, and when it runs away at night, a bit like a broken down horse, it's got this really weird gait. Its sort of tail is sort of flapping around in the sky. It's just this crazy but interesting and sort of lovely animal, really. The softest fur. I mean, if you could make some sort of shawl out of that, you'd be a millionaire. Just a beautiful creature. Cats build up on rodents in that it's desert sort of country with rivers going through it. When we get a lot of rain up in the tropics, these rivers flow through the desert. The rodents build up, the cats build up to these massive plagues, then the rodents die out and the cats look around and they eat the bilbies. And there's times there when you simply cannot find Bilby's, except in the stomachs of cats. So that's the type of situation we've got. And the bilby had a cousin, the lesser bilby, that's completely wiped out. And the remaining one, the greater bilby, has lost. It used to be on 70% of the continent. This is an amazingly successful animal. I don't know what 70% of the US is, but it's probably everywhere, what, west of Mississippi or probably even further east than that, right a long way, a big distribution, lots of different habitats. And now it's only in the greater bulbies in, I know, 10% of its former range, 20% and contracting. And this is the common story for most of the animals in the desert. And as I said, 30 of them have gone extinct. Beautiful animals. We'll never see little creatures like this, like little mini. Lot of little mini kangaroo creatures that were partly fungivorous and sort of build little nest. They got a tail that's sort of preensile and you can see them, they carry around the sort of clump of grass in their tail. They build this little nest. I've got some in my yard, actually, but there were some in the desert that could actually leap over a horse.
They'd be chased down by these european collectors and there's stories of them just jumping over the man on the horse, and these are creatures about this big. So, yeah, really sort of amazing boater. Very sad what we've lost, but our group and others like us are sort of determined that this doesn't continue.
[00:27:08] Speaker B: So then, from your experience now with how long you've been doing this, what seems to be the number one threat, if there is one? Because I'm hearing two different themes here. I'm hearing, obviously, invasive species like, holy moly, they are an unbelievable problem. But also the lack of fire, it almost sounds like. But also, too, for having interviewed other incredible australian conservationists, the overraging of fire as well. So I guess from your experience, what's the maelstrom that's going on right now? Is it just all these combined or what do you think?
[00:27:50] Speaker C: Yes, it is. And so the lack of fire leads to the overdoing of fire. Right? So if you've got a flammable system, a bit like indigenous people in pine forests in the US did, if you burn those forests regularly, the fires are cool. It sort of thins out the forest a bit. You're fairly open, you don't have high fuel loads and you can just maintain that regime forever. It's great for hunting lots of green pick for your deer or whatever here for kangaroos. So with the removal of that constant fire, everything thickens up. And then when fire does come, it's very high intensity, it's very destructive. So very interestingly, in Australia we had some massive fires three or four years ago and that's led to a real resurgence of interest in the south of Australia in what's called cultural burning. So trying to get this sort of ancient pattern of fire back into landscape, it's very hard once the system has changed, though, because instead of having 20 trees per hectare, you've got 201 of the projects I've been involved in up not far from where I live, to try to recreate habitat actually, for one of these little creatures, which we call the northern Bedong, this is an animal with less than 1000 individuals in its entire remaining population.
We, as conservationists and as someone who's planted a lot of trees, we got out the chainsaws, we work with indigenous groups and we thinned the forest and then we reintroduced fire because that's incredibly labor intensive, incredibly expensive, can be done in small areas where you're really trying to recreate habitat for high value threatened species, but very hard to do at the national scale. So, look, this is an ongoing argument and when I went through my ecology degree, so that was in the 90s, you'd read the literature and people go, oh, it's cows or, oh, no, it's fire.
Not many people were. They're saying, oh, yeah, cats and foxes a bit. But actually it was the projects of the type that I'll explain in a minute that really helped clarify what the key threat was. And the key threat for the mammals is foxes and cats because our ngo was started by essentially a wealthy englishman called Martin Copley. He had a love for the bush, which is fantastic. And he had an insurance business and I think he wanted something else to do. On the weekend he bought a property up in the hills behind Perth in Western Australia. And there was this, what shall I call him? Eccentric, brilliant, difficult human being called John Warmsley. He used to have a hat made out of a cat skin.
Everyone knows who this guy is because he had a head, nose, the head, the tail, the cat, the guy in the cat, he started to realize from his point of view that it was cats and foxes causing the problem. And I think he just fenced initially, just a very small area in a fence that cats and foxes couldn't get in. And it worked. And then he built a couple of bigger ones. And this guy, our founder, called Martin, he looked across at that example, which was happening in a different part of Australia, and he said, I can afford that. I want one of them. And I think we need to do it because the government's not doing it. And, hey, I've got the money, I'll just do it. So he did that and he reintroduced, actually, again, one of these little bed ons, these cute little sort of. It's only a couple of kilograms. So what's that? Four or five pounds little.
Partly fungivorous, partly herbivorous mammal that builds a little nest with its stuff in its tail. He put them in this fenced area and suddenly there were 500 of them, whereas before there were none.
And he went, wow, this works, right? And the bloke in the cat hat wasn't a good businessman. He actually tried to sort of like, talk about decades ahead. He tried to have a biodiversity type of credit scheme around the.
[00:32:16] Speaker B: Really?
[00:32:17] Speaker C: Yeah. He tried to float, like his bilby and mammal reintroductions on the sort of stock exchange valuing each individual. But it didn't work. And one of the reasons it didn't work, interestingly enough, is that I said Australia is this. We still got a very colonial mindset. Government people insist that all the animals in Australia, all the wild animals, are owned by the crown. So that's. The king of England owns all these animals. So you sort of don't own them to float them, if you know what mean, like they're not yours. Okay. You might have built the fenced area, you might have reintroduced them. We do this right, we build fenced areas now we reintroduce animals and we still have to go cap in hand to government and say, can we shift some of these animals from one of our fenced areas to another? And they will sometimes say no just because they don't think it's a good idea. They've got no skin in the game at all, other than they think that they are the gamekeepers. And I hope they're listening to this because it really is a barrier to conservation Australia, and it's something that needs to change. Anyway, that's enough of that particular rave. But just an example, going back to your question, right, what is it? Is it chase fire regimes? Is it cats and foxes?
A couple of years ago, a scientific paper came out talking about the decline of mammals in sort of South Australia, part of it that's relatively dry, called a malley. And this paper talked about how critical this mosaic burn pattern was for small mammals, because a lot of the plants they eat are stimulated, they come after fire. And this is true.
And these people's arguments was, well, that was the primary cause of decline. And so all you have to do to bring it back is restate the fire regime. We know that's not true because we've got a property right in that country, big fence around it. Yes, we do some burning, but absolutely not like the aboriginal people would have done for the reasons I talked about. It's not easy to recreate something after 200 years of change, and those animals are generally doing well. They might do better if we could reinstate the fire regime, but primarily doing fine. And we've tried to release them outside the fence when they build up in numbers and they just get smashed by cats and foxes. So for the small mammals, there's no doubt cats and foxes are the primary threat. And if you're going to do a reintroduction project in Australia for many of these species, they can't tolerate any cats or foxes, particularly in that phase when there's just 20 or 50 at the founding stage. So our approach is to reintroduce these very vulnerable species. Again, you imagine most of they were over most of Australia now, often just on islands or tiny bits of the country that for various reasons, don't have as many cats and foxes. We try to bring them back. We build a big fenced area, or we've got an island as well, get rid of the cats and foxes, put them in, build up the populations. And then what we're starting to do now, because that takes decade or more and the numbers are very dependent on rainfall. So we've just gone through a wet period and our populations are really good. We're just going into a dry period. We expect the populations to crash, but in the end game, we're then trying to reintroduce them outside the fence in conjunction with various sorts of predator control.
But the thing is, there's no effective method at the moment. The main things people do are trapping, which is more or less what our ancestors did for hundreds of thousands of years. Almost the same techniques, right leg hole, traps, like snares, various sorts of traps. It's incredibly labor intensive, and it just reduces the density, doesn't eliminate them.
There's various baits being developed. But again, if something like a fox, which is a scavenger, it'll happily take a bait. But cats like to hunt, so cats will only really take baits if they're starving. So baiting for cats works well in dry years, and it's hopeless in other years. People have invented this interesting machine called a felixer, which is like an AI controlled machine. It costs like $10,000 for six months to hire a single machine. We've hired a few of them at the moment to try them out, but they essentially recognize, oh, this is a cat, or this is a fox, and it sort of shoots this poison gel at them. And cats growing themselves, right? So it's very effective when it gets them. But you think of how many cats are in Australia. There's millions.
They're not roaming around like a circus. They got home ranges, $10,000 in machines.
We'll have to get Elon musk to subsidize that one. It's an expensive range.
Even then for some of these animals, it's just even not effective enough, because cats, they're such incredible hunters. And what we've found, or other people have found doing some of this work is you might get a big male cat that just gets a taste for a particular marsupial, and it just hunts them.
And you've got to take out that cat, not reduce the density of cats. You got to take out that cat because that cat is a trouble. So, look, we're absolutely doing this. One of our big projects where we put back in ten locally extinct mammals. We're now starting outside the fence work, but we've started with the tougher animals.
Our biggest native predator, marsupial predator, is only a couple of kilograms. It's called a quale, and there's a few species of them, right? These are things that can climb trees, and they take birds and small mammals and all sorts of things, right? But vulnerable to cats and foxes, but more able to look after itself than a cute, soft little grass eating sort of nest building bed on. So we've started with them. We're doing that in conjunction with aerial bait. So we fly out this place, drop 50,000 cat baits a year.
We've got these machines, these sort of AI machines. We've got trapping, and even then, some of them are getting taken by cats.
But if that works, we'll then just work throughout our way through the list. Right. We'll go to the thing we think is the next toughest, or maybe just the next most common, and we can spare some and we'll try that and at some point we'll just have to stop because it's not working. And you're just sacrificing the animals for the sake of experiment, which we're not wanting to do.
So that is the thing. We've got the biggest network of these predator free areas. By predator, I mean the introduced predator, there's still pythons, there's still goannas, there's still eagles and owls, there's just not these cats and foxes. We've got ten to twelve of these sites, depending how you categorize them, across southern and central Australia.
That's the biggest network of these sites nationally, and we've got 25 species of mammals in them and often multiple populations. So there's like 50 or 60 reintroduction projects within that thing. It's extremely active at the moment. We're doing five to ten reintroductions a year. Some of these mammals are highly endangered and a couple of them, we've got the only secure population in this fenced area. There are populations left on for one species up on a couple of mountaintops, tiny areas on mountaintops. The last, if you can imagine, hunted to the top of the mountain. And, yeah, this northern bedong up here, that's only in two populations, one of which is very nearly extinct, the other one of which is caught on fire this week. So hopefully that's gone okay.
But it's still on a continental scale. It's less than 1% of the country and it's just tiny, really. So the grail, the holy grail, is to get them back everywhere, to make them annoying, to make them dig up your backyard so that people get sick of them. But we can't do that. I don't think we'll be able to do that on current technology.
That's a topic we can explore as well. How do you do that?
There's a lot of people that are very, what I'd call wishful thinking about that. They tend to think of these fenced areas as zoos. They're not a zoo. You go in there, 100 don't know what that is in square miles, but you can get lost in these places pretty easily. And animals have got home range. Got nothing to do with the fence, as I said, they're living free of cans and foxes. But it's still a real stretch to figure out how to get them outside. And they're not just for a year or two, but they're through the wet times and the droughts. As I said, when the cats and foxes build up in numbers and then become really hungry, how are you going to protect them through that phase? If you can do that, you've probably had a.
[00:42:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that was amazing. And I think that most people listening can probably pick up what your organization actually does, but I would like to take a second for that.
So what is AWC's mission? What exactly is it that you all are striving to do that you've been doing for the past 15 years?
[00:42:35] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I've been in for 15 years in the organization for 30. The mission is very simple. It's conservation of australian wildlife and their habitat. So it's quite an ambitious mission, particularly because while we manage, 7 million don't know what that is in, but it's less than 1% of Australia.
It's probably bigger than some european countries, but at a continental scale, it's a fraction of the country. Right.
Actually, very interestingly so, I said, we started with this sort of wealthy englishman, more or less a hobby, mobby sort of development. And then quite quickly, when he realized this work, he was a smart dude. He got in this guy, Tim Flannery. So, high level advice. He got in a very smart and ambitious CEO called Atticus Fleming. And very quickly, they expanded the holdings.
When I joined, we had 13 properties, and 3 million had really expanded from one property, 200 sort of thing. And then in the last 15 years, we've more than doubled in size. Most of that increase in size has actually, rather than been through buying land, which you're sinking massive amounts of capital into, just owning it is to do partnerships.
We've developed our conservation processes and approaches on our own land.
And then we now say to some government agencies, like the defense, in a lot of countries, defense owns big training areas. And so we're managing a big defense property up in northwest Australia, in the Kimberley. Absolutely amazing. Absolutely amazing places. There's property with these massive boweb trees. So like in Africa, those big bowb trees. We've got some in northern Australia, and you've got these biob trees where you say, okay, where's the.
You know, there's kangaroos and there's gum trees.
It's really one of the only parts of Australia that hasn't lost any mammals for some reason. It's just wet enough or rocky enough or something. So we're managing that. We're managing some actual government national parks in the state of New South Wales, which is over in eastern Australia. So there's two projects there where we're doing introductions to these fenced areas. We're also managing the entire national park. So that's sort of interesting. We work with pastoralists, so there's some situations with pastelists, run cattle on the more productive grasslands. We'll often have some rocky country. This particular pastelist we're working with up on this, again, quite an interesting place called Bullu river. He's got a bit of an ecotour business as well. And so it's a nice fit to have conservation working on part of his land. And the other big partnerships we do are with indigenous people. So one of the good things about Australia in the last 30 years is there's been basic recognition of indigenous rights, including the fact that they owned land. And so the legal system has recognized a thing called native title. Sometimes native title is more or less the same as if I own this little bush block here.
Other times it sort of coexists with pasture. So a lot of us, again, colonialism, right? Oh, you can run your cows out in Wookwok. Here's a form of tenure. It's like a lease, a rental. The government will rent you this land. So a lot of Australia is this pastoral lease. Well, it's really just rental to run cows. And what our legal system determined was that didn't override the fact that aboriginal people had lived there for 60,000 years and made a living out of it in a different way. And so that's a really interesting sort of joint tenure we've got across a lot of Australia. So we've formed partnerships with aboriginal people in a number of places where we're learning from them and they're learning from us, because, again, without talking Australia down, I live here. I love it. But we've been terribly cruel to aboriginal people for a long, long time. And there was what was considered a victory for human rights 50 years ago, sort of aboriginal people were recognized legally in our constitution and were allowed to vote and all that sort of stuff and given equal pay. Right before then, a lot of aboriginal people wasn't called slavery, but they were working for nothing or rations. They could live on their country, but they weren't getting paid.
Basically, as soon as the people had to pay them, they didn't want to do it. So there was a time 50 years ago when a lot of aboriginal people were just shipped out to towns. Here you go. You live in this town. A terrible thing to do with people who absolute identity comes from living in a place that the ancestors have for an unbelievably long length of time, where all their mythology and stories have to do with individual parts of the landscape, where their identity is linked to song lines and essentially like homeric oral poetry, but sung that ties that land together with who they are. So we took them out of that, dumped them in the town.
Just terrible social problems as a result, loss of connection to country. So now that we're slowly redressing those past mistakes and aboriginal people are getting tiled to land and management, they're coming from a basis of dispossession and dysfunction and limited skill set. And to manage country in the modern world, you need financial acumen.
If you're going to fly around in a helicopter and drop incendiaries to do fire, you need to know how to use that machine, you need working safety system, all this stuff, right? So there is absolutely a place for organizations like us to work with aboriginal people on their lands for the benefit of conservation, for the benefit of their culture. In ten or 20 years, we hope we're not there, right, because it's their land.
We hope that through the interaction and through the things like biodiversity market or a carbon market, they'll be able to fund land management in a real win win situation. Australia has the largest area of intact savannah left in the world already. There's a whole lot of carbon abatement fire projects. The interesting thing about this fire management that aboriginal people did is that while we lighting up country, letting greenhouse gases up into the air, that regime releases less greenhouse gases. If you do nothing and you get this massive wildfire through in the hot season, that burns everything down.
And that's very well studied process. There's a lot of science around that. So there's actually functional carbon markets around indigenous fire practice, which is great. So look, I'm now going on to another, but can't even remember what your question was.
[00:49:57] Speaker B: Brooke, you like, keep going so good at this. That's why we go down these funnels.
[00:50:05] Speaker C: Yes, indeed.
[00:50:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay.
That's the perfect segue to the next thing I wanted to talk about. And obviously we all know now, at least it seems to be well known in the conservation rewilding restoration community that to protect this landscape, to bring these animals back, to do all of this stuff, we can't do it without engaging communities. And you've already started to mention the indigenous community, which is great, and pastoralists and landowners. So how exactly do you engage with them and do you have to use different tactics. And when they are a part of these projects, what is their role and what is your role, what is your team's role in this whole rewilding Australia concept?
[00:50:51] Speaker C: Okay, so I guess one straight up difference from say a lynx reintroduction or a wolf reintroduction is that when you'reintroducing to a fed steer in island, which you've got to do in Australia because of the.
Mostly you have to do, you don't have the same, oh, my animal is going to eat your sheep problem or tiger rewilding in India. My tiger is going to eat your villages.
So the sort of social engagement issues are different at the moment. And of course, as I said, australia lost all its large animals, its large carnivores and herbivores tens of thousands of years.
You know, a little sweet bed on this big or a bilby, it's not going to savage you, your dog or your cows, right? So it's all good.
I did get a bit worried when we did a rodent reintroduction because rodents are a quarter of Australia's fauna and really, of course cats like eating rats. Right? So we did a rodent reintroduction recently to an area that had just suffered a massive plague of introduced house mice. And that was in the news. They were in people's know. It was like the bedbug invasion of Paris. It was talked about. And here we are introducing one. And nobody knows about this animal, right?
This is pseudomy's Australis. It is not muscular.
You peasants take it easy. No one was going to buy grant anyway.
So we're introducing the fenced areas. So the type of community engagement we need to do is different by and large.
So talk about this in two ways. As I said, there's an incredibly strong government overreach regulation that goes back to the time when they thought of themselves as the gamekeepers of the Queen's deer estate and they still ultimately think of themselves like that. I'm talking to you, australian bureaucrats, back off because what you're doing is just stupid. There's no other way of doing it. It is anti conservation, it is anticonservation. You've got to let groups like ours with 30 years runs on the board, nationally leading reintroduction people. We know what we're doing. You've got to let us take the OD risk on our property. It is just so you know, we've got people who spend half their life filling out forms to do one reintroduction from. So Australia has this colonial setup where animal and land management is on a state basis, not on a national basis. So if you want to take animals from Western Australia where through chance a lot of these animals end up in refuge populations on islands, well they've got this pea, a native pea that's got, I don't know if you know the poison, 1080 sodium fluoracetate, it's used as a poison in parts of the world.
It comes from this pea plant and in Western Australia where say your bed on or your little wallaby eats the pea plant, the toxin builds up in its body, what's the word? Very tolerant of it, right? But a cat and a fox eating that animal will die. So there's these sort of natural refuges in parts of Australia as well as islands. Anyway you want to take an animal from there to another state, which is a lot of what we're doing. I count up we need eleven permits. Eleven permits. And at each step along the way someone can say no, there's no review process. This is not a transparent process. The people you're appealing to see us as a competitor, and I've heard this from talking to other reintroduction practitioners worldwide.
You get these species experts who worked on the refugee population and they identify with the animal and their expertise and they're used to it being in this type of landscape. So a classic example in Western Australia there's forest, right? Beautiful lovely big gum trees and banks ears and it's sort of reasonably 600 rain. What's that a couple of feet of rain a year. We want to take them out into the desert where it's sand dunes and spiky grass and we know they were out there. But you talk to the species expert and there's 100 reasons why not. I mean we've got this amazing termite eater called a numbat. It's actually a relative of a tasmanian tiger, but it's ferociously eating termites, right? Big long tongue, only about this big stripey, a tail like a sort of. Again this is a tail designed to attract kent. It's sort of fluffy and when the animal runs around it waves in the air. So okay, not many of them left but they eat termites and we know they eat termites in tens of thousands a day and they eat whatever termites is there. We wanted to bring them into central Australia. Central Australia. There's nature papers on the termites in central Australia, right? We know there's termites here. Oh, they're the wrong termites. They're the wrong termites, says the expert. But how do you know how do you know they used to live here? They must have eaten them at one point. Oh, no, wrong. Termites. Why don't you let us try the reintroduction and we'll see if they eat these termites? Oh, no, we can't do that. So we get this trapped in this crazy cycle with no way out other than eventually, what? Appealing to the public. But as I said, you're appealing to a public in Australia that doesn't know these animals. These aren't saying, save the panda, save the leopard, save the giraffe, the rhino. We're saying save the rat, save the western barred bandicoot, save the possum. Okay, possums. Aren't they the things that live in my roof? And annoying. So we got a disconnect between the public and what's important to Australia. So that's part a, part b, the indigenous thing, as you said. And this is my own journey. Right.
It's now part of our process to engage with indigenous people, both at the areas we're getting the animals from and the areas we're going to. But when I started, we never did that. We just thought of it as animals in the landscape. We'll take them from here. We put them there. Oh, and everyone must love this because it's good. But in actual fact, as I said, aboriginal people really strongly identify with nature and particular animals often.
And so it is a positive thing, but you've got to go with people's process. And recently we did a reintroduction of a thing called the golden Bandicoot. So the golden bandicoot is just like.
It's a little omnivore, about a kilogram. So two pounds was over again. Most of Australia, from the deserts right up into the savannahs and was very common, was a major food source for original people back in the day. And now they're lived on a couple of islands and the rockiest, difficultest country right up in the Kimberley. Like I said, the area that hasn't had any extinctions yet. And we work with a few indigenous groups in the Kimberley, even the neighboring groups, very different tribes, different nations. Right? And one group didn't want us to take the animals for various reasons, the other group did. And so we worked with a group that were happy to take them.
We're working with them anyway. They came out and helped us with the trapping.
They flew with the animals to central Australia. So that's in a little know. I know, five hour flight or something. Land in the middle of Australia, in the desert, met by the indigenous people, the walprey for that area, who really keen to have this animal back. There were people recreating paintings. You might have seen the aboriginal sort of the dot paintings. They're sort of paintings of this sort of. I don't even know how to describe it, but to me it's like a mental landscape of the landscape. But anyway, I'm a white bloke, I don't know.
And they hand them over like a gift. These are our animals and we're giving them to you. And that was just such. I mean, I'm almost emotional as I talk about it because it's a beautiful thing, right? And the richness of that translocation by involving the aboriginal people, which, as I said, that's not my shtick, I'm just take the animals from here to here. Conservation done. It actually was a much more meaningful and important process than if we'd not done that. And so I thank my staff, who are more tuned in to the modern world than me. So thank you, sky in particular and danae and people like that. So, yes, there you go. And we now do that. We've now done that a few times and, yeah, that's just super when that happens. And I get huge amount of joy.
Here I am sitting in my office, right? I don't leave this place.
I write things and I review things and I get cranky.
But it's all because people out in the field are doing things. And occasionally I get invited to get him down to the reintroduction and. Thank you. I'll come down and you get to release an animal, like I said, a bilby. And you've got the animal in your hand that you've just worked on said, you're stroking its fur. I mean, with Bilby that I released, I'm stroking its tail and halfway down its tail there's like a little nail. I thought, what's that? I've never even read about that. What if it's even for. Does it like, scratch its ears with this little nail? I don't even know what it's doing. And I'm thinking, oh, yes, soft fur. Soft fur. I want to take one of these home. And then you let it go and your heart is full of joy and you're laughing with just pure joy for an animal that's been out of this habitat for 100 years. And they sniff around, they think, what are you doing to me here? And then they go. And we know from doing this a lot of times that by and large, they're happy. They go and breed and they build up a population that's just me, not even attached the animal, except intellectually. So for us to involve indigenous people for where it's meaningful in the sense of who they are, what their culture is, I'm so glad that we're now doing that. Anyway, again, another raven and long story.
[01:01:53] Speaker B: No, I love these stories. Oh, my gosh. That was incredible. I can only imagine if I had been there, I probably would have started crying just to see the whole experience that sounds beyond moving.
Sometimes I wish that my culture had something like that. Not to say not envious or jealous of these indigenous cultures, but just the way that I love wildlife and the landscape. I can only imagine if it was also my identity. So, wow, that just sounds.
I probably would have cried if I.
[01:02:29] Speaker C: Was there that day.
[01:02:29] Speaker B: I would have been so moved by what I saw.
[01:02:32] Speaker C: And it's the right response. It is the right response because as is joy. Because one of the great things about working in rewilding is you are taking positive steps. So, as Aldo Leopold said, to be an Ecologist is to live in a world of wounds. And we go around, the news is terrible. You look at the antarctic ice sheet, or the US yesterday called 30 species extinct. I think, yes, it did. The place is going to hell in a handbasket. And yet there are good people doing good work, and there's nothing more tangible than to take an animal back to where it used to be and to let it go, to have a system around that where you're building up a population, you've got ambitions to get it out into the landscape if it can. I mean, that is an incredibly good thing for the heart and soul to be involved in. And it is one of the ways we engage with our supporters. It's one of the ways we engage with politicians. And I've seen hardened ecologists who hated our projects, who thought the man in the cat hat was a fruit loop. And you bring them out to these projects and you involve them in our introduction, or you even just take them to where the animals are running around. These animals they have never seen.
And they melt, right? They melt and they go, okay, we get it.
[01:04:06] Speaker B: And actually, that is the perfect. You just lobbed me the perfect softball there in the next segue that I wanted. Because we have spent a lot of time on the hard stuff and the negatives and the things you have to overcome to even do any of this incredible work. That's your mission. So let's talk about the wins for a second. I mean, you are the chief science officer. And I'm sure that you and your team have put together a system and trial and error and all these different things that you've done to make progress. So what is some of that progress? What are your wins? What have you accomplished so far? And then maybe, what's the vision? Where are you going with this?
[01:04:44] Speaker C: Yeah, so I guess the wins are the fact that we've got these 25 locally extinct mammals back to parts of their former ranges that not only increases the population size, increases the number of populations.
Australia is very diverse. So, as I said, if you're taking an animal from a forest and putting it back in the desert, you're ensuring that at least some of that species is being exposed to the selective environment of the desert, which, if you're wanting to maintain adaptive potential, you've got to do. You can't just have it in the softest, nicest place. Some of them have to be living the hard know. Genetics is a massive part of what we do. We've got a geneticist on our team and a former us person called Jenny Pearson, who is just amazing. And we do actually, a bit of engagement with revive and restore in the States, who are incredible genetic group. So that's a right. And in fact, there was a paper came out recently that suggested that these reintroduction projects were successful enough for a bunch of species that, at least on paper, those species could be taken off the threatened species list. And that's just sparked this massive bunfight, because people go, well, but they're in fenced areas or on islands, and you have to maintain that. And if you took away the fence or if you weren't maintaining your biosecurity on the island, then they'd be lost. Okay, that's true.
But so is any sort of conservation intervention an intervention, right. If you're doing aerial baiting, like this part of Western Australia, that aerial baits 2 million ha every year, that's a massive intervention, right. That could stop next year. They could run out of money. So it's a funny sort of argument.
I think it goes to the fact that people are still not quite at home with the fact that we have to take this pretty dramatic intervention in Australia. It's quite dramatic to put up a fence with electrified things and locked gates, but that's actually what has to happen. So in terms of our ambition, what we're aiming to do is to ensure we've got enough populations of each species so you don't just want one, because Australia gets very dry sometimes. We had a terrible drought a few years ago where at one of these properties, the total rainfall in the year was just over an inch. 19 rain. And that was dry. That was dry. That was crispy. Right.
There's a couple of species that went from in their thousands or hundreds to in their tens. Now we got all of them through that, but that was touch and go, right? So you want to manage things as a metapopulation. So that's part of our ambition.
We're looking right now, we're doing some mapping of. And this is really interesting too, our small little group of ecologists, we're doing historical reconstructions based on whatever evidence we can get. I'm reading the old explorers, I'm the old fossil in the team. So I go and get to read what Lycart in 1845 wrote in his diary. I love it. To me, that's exciting, right, but no one else wants.
Yeah, it's great.
And we're piecing together where did these animals used to occur? Because, as I said, there's often an argument we're having with government people who say they did not occur here and, well, that evidence is really fragmentary. You have to sort of extrapolate on. I'm prepared, based now on our experience of putting animals back in fenced areas where people said that'll never work. And it working. And also increasingly the fossil record adds evidence. Right? And so over time we're finding, oh, this species that did occur here, we've seen it in the subfossil record and from that we're mapping past distributions.
We've got this additional complication which is climate change, which is biting right now and will bite more in the future. So you can't just say, well, it did occur here, you've got to say, well, will it occur there in 20 years time, given what we know of its climate envelope? Which again is a fair bit of guessing and extrapolation. So we're essentially doing a mapping project based on that to try to look to where we would build these projects to get about another 30 species. So we sort of want to possibly double our scope because that would then ensure that the animals that are really vulnerable to cats and foxes are protected in this network of sites. Now, we probably don't have to do the whole thing because there are other people working in this space and some of them are doing a good job and there's no need to cut their grass for them. So that's great.
I guess that's part of what we're doing. The second part is then how do we get them out of these secure areas into the broader landscape. So they're annoying people and digging up their backyard and harassing their chucks. How do we do so? And that's something we're starting on in this Mount Gibson project in Western Australia, where we've got a sort of sciency set up, a control area, a treatment area, lots of cameras out in the landscape, telemetry doing these releases, starting to the toughest animals, and then working our way down and doing that over a number of years. So we capture the wet and dry cycles, which is, as I said, a primary driver of australian ecology, and we'll replicate that a number of sites. We do have an ambition that's sort of bigger than that, which is we have dullied in the genetic biocontrol space.
We're not sort of lab coat wearing technicians, but we've engaged with people who are. And for a while there, there was a consortium with, I think it was called D Bird, but island conservation were involved in, you know, one of the government groups here in Australia with the western shore government.
We were very keen to get gene drive technology up and running on our predators. And it was sort of interesting. We had Kevin Espeld come out from MIT, who was sort of the guru in this know. His main message was be careful, know, don't do the sources apprentice sort of stuff and create a monster that you don't know how to control.
But I remember I was sent to this workshop on. Terrible workshop was on a great barrier Reef Island, Herod island. You'd knock off it for lunch and go swimming with green turtles on the coral. What? More workshops like that? But my main thing was to say, you've got to develop this for cats. Cats weren't on the agenda. My side job at that conference was say, cats have got to be on the agenda. And of course, we've had Bridget Bardot complain about our killing of cats. People have this idea in the world that cats are a wonderful companion animal and why the hell are you killing them? But in Australia, there's very good public awareness that you've got your house cat. And in fact, increasingly people have to keep their cats inside or in a run. In Australia, there's a lot of local laws around that. People are very aware that there's feral cats that are a.
So we're still working on that. I mean, the technology sort of seems to have come sort know.
The excitement of the new thing has hit the reality of how hard it is to muck around with the fundamental biological mechanism of reproduction. I mean, talk about survival of fittest things. Want to reproduce, right? And you try to stop it because some of this gene drive stuff is, for example, to, I don't know, produce a whole lot of just male cats or something like that. It turns out that the experimental work has been done on house mice, some within Australia, actually. It turns out it's quite resilient to being mucked around.
You know, hopefully we'll progress that too, because if we can get a genetic biocontrol that is safe, because we don't want something that if you take a pussycat, like, there was a famous thing when Johnny Depp turned up in Australia with pistol and boo, his two little dogs, right? He just took them on his private plane and turned up here. Despite our very strong biosecurity laws, he got in big strife. But that happens, right? People do that. People will take a yacht with their pussycat on, and that yacht might turn up at India, right? That pussycat might jump. If that's a genetically engineered cat, that cat is through Africa, Asia, Europe, and the feelings are all very closely related genetically, right? So you just got to be super careful. So it's most likely that the technology will be solved way in advance of the social license for this thing. And you don't want to rush it. So now, sort of working game is we've got decades of building and maintaining these secure things we call safe havens. We've got to do that. We don't want to have any more extinctions. We can't have the lesser bill with a thylacine, the eastern hair wallaby, the pigfooted bandicoot, the lesser thickness rate. I could just go on and on listing the species we've lost and we'll never have again. We've got to stop that happening. And then decades in the future when I'm dead, hopefully, smart people with good technology can figure out this landscape scale solution and we'll be rewild all of Australia. That would be terrific. And then people could come to Australia not only to look at the kangaroos and the koalas, but to look at the bilby's and to look at the bedongs and just to marvel at them like I do when I go outside at night to look at the stars and I see this tiny little creature that I know is a truffle eater just sitting there with an even smaller little baby just looking at me like, we're cute. We're cute. Yes, you're cute. So, yeah, that's our vision.
[01:15:32] Speaker B: That is a beautiful vision. And you just brought up tech. And I want to go back to this for a second, because the reason I got connected with you, which I'm so grateful, is Debbie Saunders at wildlife drones. And I know that you're starting to engage in different forms of technology, so could you talk about that a little bit?
Like, let's give Debbie here a good shout out. So how are you engaging wildlife drones technology? And then are there any other advances that you're trying as well to see? Does this work? Fences are great, simple, but great pieces of technology.
But now that we are really expanding, I don't know, is AI even a.
[01:16:12] Speaker C: Thing in this space?
[01:16:12] Speaker B: I don't know, but please tell us, what are you using there?
[01:16:16] Speaker C: Sure. So a massive shout out to Debbie and wildlife drones, a key metric you need to know when you're doing reintroductions is survival. Right? Because generally speaking, the risky phase is immediately after introduction, where the animals aren't familiar with the landscape.
They haven't figured out what's going on. And so you've got to get a certain proportion through that initial demanding stage. So not very long ago, you'd do their introductions with a sort of slightly too heavy radio collar, and you'd be out there with a handheld yagi looking for the animal. And we've got massive, these fenced areas, as I said, 100 many roads, pretty dense scrub. It's very hard to find a little creature, especially, let's say you're releasing a rodent. It's got a tiny little radio tag on it. So before Debbie, what we went to was using low tech tags that I think developed for fish. And you can automate the data collection. They have slightly different.
I'm not a tech guy. We had quite a very techy guy called David Rasheea who helped develop this stuff. And so a couple of our bigger introduction sites, we've got these towers with this automatic sort of logging device, and it captures the data from the tags.
But when you're going, like, when we engaged with Debbie, we were doing these outside the fence releases of animals that I said were a bit tougher. The brushtail possum and the western qual. And they're animals that have a big home range. They move, so you can't just stick up a tower and go, oh, you better stay around there.
They'll move 10. We needed something, and Debbie was developing that work.
And so, yeah, we try. And, of course, I've been onto our site and watched the ecologists use it once. The ecologists love it. There's always a few people who are just. In fact, people always kept buying drones in AWC and they'd call it a peak detection device in the budget. And then you turn up to their property and they've got a drone. So there's mad keen drone fanatics.
It gives our staff a new skill. They're pilots, it gives us great data.
There's upfront cost in acquiring the drone and the training, but it's technology that you can use in multiple ways. So I'm very happy with that. Other technology that I referred to with AI are these things called felixes, which are an automated cat killing device and also fox killing device developed by a really decent chap called John Reed who's worked in fenced area reintroductions and outside the fence.
Know, I think this is one of these things that started in someone's garage and ended, know, very sophisticated. And I saw him on the news a month or so ago with our federal environment minister showing off this thing in our parliament house in Canberra, our capital city. So it's getting a lot of attention and we're trialing it. It's just as I said, it's very localized. Cats are everywhere because it's a pretty high tech bit of equipment. It's expensive, so it's not something you can use. You've got to use it at high value locations. Basically it's like getting a really fantastic player on your team, but it's not the whole team, right. You got to have the other. Even the old tools. Right. The trapping, the shooting, the baiting, we're still using that.
The other place we're using AI is like everyone else. We just get terabytes of data through cameras and acoustic sensors. And I remember when I 15 years ago starting this job, one of our staff ended up in hospital. He looked at so many images on the computer of the different camera images that he'd started getting sort of epilepsy, just induced from the flickering of the screen.
Just for occupational health and safety. We're going to automating it. We work with Microsoft and others using the AI system. We've got our own tech people in our hair office and there's some of their writing code to link the various. And again, I'm not a tech person, but there's something that identifies. Is there an animal in the picture? Okay. And then if there is, what is it? And of course that stuff's developing rapidly.
Yeah. And as soon as we can get into acoustics, then we'll have fantastic data. Already there's some acoustics. Right. The koala, for example. You think of this cute animal. It actually is the most horrific, grunty male breeding behavior of any creature.
Don't worry about. Come here, darling. I'll read you some poetry.
And so that picks up really well on an acoustic monitor. But we want to interpret the whole environment, so we're collaborating with universities and people on doing that. I reckon that's not very far off. And that will massively increase our ability to monitor properly and we'll start getting to the scale we need. Because I should say that AWC, less than 1% of our area is these rewilding projects. 99% of it is landscape management. Fire, feral animals, weeds. So I shouldn't neglect. That's mostly what we do. Right. It's just this other stuff is so sort of sexy and so important. We often focus on it, but it's just part of the story.
[01:22:27] Speaker B: So you've brought up there for a second costs and it sounds like the scale at which you're doing this. I can't even imagine the fundraising budget or what it takes for you to do this. So how do you make this sustainable for the future? How do we keep this going? I know you brought up a biodiversity credit and I'm sure that you have a great team. I'm not trying to imply that at all, but one of the big issues we have in conservation is just making it financially doable. You know what I mean?
How do we do this for decades to come? How do we make this financially make sense? And maybe we'd have even more people involved and on board.
[01:23:17] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I completely agree. And, I mean, anyone who's worked in an NGO knows that it's probably like politics. You spend far more time trying to raise money than you do passing legislation or doing things right. And yes, we have a fantastic team of professional fundraisers and we've got a good fundraising model. And our budget this year is 36 million australian.
If you divide that by the number of hectares, it turns out like it's $5 a hectare australian to manage country. So it probably needs to be a lot higher. Right. And so everyone faces problem, I think the days there's a peak body of private land managers in China. I just went to their conference last week in Canberra. There was actually a massive amount of focus on new methods of know. We had people there from pollination. So one of know new companies that is trying to link conservation and stuff with finance markets. We ourselves AWC, we had engaged a merchant banker for a know and I was working with him trying to translate our science outcomes into something that he could flog to a pension fund or something like that.
My take on all this is that there is a lot. Look, conservation nature is a scarce resource that is increasingly recognized as valuable just as the climate space has developed. And now you have in Australia and other places, you have carbon projects. Australia, we're lucky we've got the government involved in developing methodologies for carbon sequestration and emissions abatement. And there's a lot of trust in that. I'm very familiar with the carbon abatement from savannah burning. I've read the papers. It's rigorous sides, and so you can have trust in the product. And of course, with carbon, it's sort of easy, right? Because everything can be converted to carbon dioxide equivalents. Even if you're releasing methane, you can do the conversion. Of course, the trouble in nature is, what does it mean if you're saving five bilbys over here? What does that mean to a canadian pension fund?
It's the whole issue of fungibility.
And people are developing metrics, and I'm in discussion and argument with a bunch of people doing this at the finance end, they want to convert everything into just a number, just like a dollar or just like a carbon dioxide equivalent, so that you can trade your five bilbys here for your three salamanders over there and your two caribou over there. Of course, most ecologists just cannot come at that. It's like, no.
As we've seen in the carbon market, as soon as there's money involved, you get a whole lot of people looking at the system go, I can gain that. And there's lots of critique around this at the moment in the carbon and the biodiversity space that people are putting up projects that just aren't credible enough. Though my own take is that the market on both sides will develop in sophistication and integrity. The tools, the tech tools we've talked about will help. So at the moment, I can send out, if you want to know how many threatened mammals there are on one of our properties, I send out one of our people and they count them. Is that trustworthy? I mean, what am I saying? You can trust us. We're an ngo, but if we're starting to earn millions of dollars off it, the incentive is to fudge it, right? But if I have to put out to monitor a bunch of cameras, or if a satellite can do it, or if a third party comes and does it in a way that's completely transparent and accountable, then suddenly you've got a system you can trust. So I do see the huge impetus towards developing systems that are trustworthy. I'm involved in debates at the moment around this stuff because an example I'll give is the carbon market for this savannah burning in Australia. A lot of science went into it. Initially it was mainly developed for indigenous groups who know recreating their traditional things. We took advantage of it because we're trying to do the same stuff. And then all of a sudden, across northern Australia, running cattle. I know what it's like in the states, but in Australia, half the time you don't make any know. It's hard yaka and thin margins and the market changes. And suddenly these people had a massive new income stream. And our neighbors across the north of Australia with a lot of properties in northern Australia, suddenly the people running cows were running carbon.
Know in one way that's fantastic, a market developed and the government didn't say, you must do this, the government didn't do it. It just created a market where there was a good incentive to do it and a good enough incentive to do it. People weren't becoming millionaires, but they were making money. But one of the critique of the ecologists looking at this closely is that the market just said there's good fire, which is everywhere from January to July, the 30th, the 31st, and there's bad fire, which is everywhere from August 1 onwards. And of course that's a simplification, right? There's probably good fire for the first three months of year, then There's InterMediate fire and then There's BAd fire and then There's Terrible fire. But to make the system simple, they just said good or bad. And what we're finding with the people who aren't as committed to the environmental outcomes as we Are, is they're burning in that last month because the fires are running over the landscape. It's really cheap to light your fires. Then most of the COuntry burns and it won't burn in the BAD season, and they're making a MonSter out of that. But the environmental outcomes are actually not as good as if you're doing it the Proper Way. But that's just a market design thing, right? They need to go, oh, that's too simple. Let's make it more sophisticated. So the same thing I see applying to the biodiversity markets, I think they need to be. At the moment in Australia, a lot of the markets are just around. Let's recreate habitat, let's plant some trees. You go and count the trees or there's 20% more trees, you've had an uplift in nature by 20%. But that's BuLlshit, to use a saying, because you might have cats running around there and foxes, the trees might have no understory, it might be miles from anywhere. And I've worked in restoration, so I know that if your restoration site is nowhere near a remnant site, the things that can't fly or run, like the lizards, they're not going to be in there, right? You have to pick them up and put them there. So we need sophisticated metrics that include plants and birds and mammals or some set of groups, and it needs to be packaged up a way, probably within a hierarchy of process, so that if you're a DeveLoper clearing, let's use a green example. You're clearing for a solar farm or you're clearing for a wind farm. Over here you are creating damage. While you're doing that, you want to offset your damage rather than the system should force that developer to offset as closely as possible to the area being impacted. Not to swap the koalas over here for the bilby's over there, but for the koalas. Koalas, that's the ideal system. I think in some places that won't work. And so maybe you will have to swap koalas for Bilby's, but there should be a penalty.
You should have to do much better if you're going outside your region. And I see smart environmental economists working on this system. One of our board members is called Martine Moron. She's a very prominent academic internationally in the offset space. And I see her and people like Megan Evans, who works with her and others developing these systems. So I think the solution to biodiversity credits is not just in the measurement and the metrics, but in the systems of governance that you place it in. But if that can be worked out, then there will be money for conservation much more than the moment. And again, I think privately led approaches are the way to go where you get paid on outcomes, not the traditional national park model where government gives a little bit of money just every year, regardless of outcome. I think that's a crappy model that doesn't work.
You get good individuals, you get good pockets of practice, but there's no incentive for them to continue. So I'm someone who came from a very sort of left leaning background and here I am championing private enterprise.
Government has a role, though. Government has a role in designing the market and ensuring standards are set and governance, and in being a purchaser of some of those products, because government is there representing the public interest and the public want more of this stuff.
That's how I see it playing out. And I reckon it will take off and I reckon it will fly and I think it'll happen pretty soon. What we need to make sure is it doesn't have too many crappy actors and that the money goes to where it's needed, which is people on the ground, indigenous managers, land managers like ourselves, conservation outcomes, cultural outcomes. Not to Zurich, or should I say Manhattan?
[01:33:02] Speaker B: Wow. John, I've been blown away by this entire conversation. So, like, you've taken us through every single aspect of this and I just have to ask for more of a personal level here.
What keeps you going? It sounds like you have just as many headaches as you do triumphs. And some days are probably pretty rough, actually. I know they are. I mean, everybody in this field, we have good days and we have some really shitty days. So for you, why are you still doing this?
[01:33:34] Speaker C: Well, like we started, I was lucky to grow up sort of in a natural environment with people who cared about nature, exposed to nature early on, and have a love for nature. And that's what I think we all share in this space. We love nature and if you love something, you want to protect it.
It's that simple.
I've worked in crappy jobs, right? I've done crappy work, like, again, probably most of us have. I don't mind the crap. Crap comes with the job.
One of the things about being an activist is I've taken a few hits for the team and coming up against a bureaucrat who's difficult is a lot easier than coming up against a malaysian general with a whole lot of epileps.
So I don't mind the trouble because it's such a precious thing to be alive and we're in such an important phase of this planet and what we do matters. We can make a difference. That's what I see in my work, right? It's not my work, the team's work. We can make a difference.
Hell yes, let's do it. So that's what motivates me and I work with good people and that, I guess that's my story.
And also beautiful. I'm an ignorant ecologist. I've been at home for three months with a broken leg and I've lived here for eleven years and I'm finding new birds here. I've started ebirding, I've got a list.
I'm finding new lifers from my veranda and I've lived here for eleven years. So there's lots to learn, right? There's lots to learn.
Nature is just fantastic as an intellectual thing that you also appreciate on a level of being so. Yeah, no, I love what I do.
I'm privileged.
[01:35:47] Speaker B: Absolutely amazing, John. And I have to ask this for everybody that comes on, if there is a message or a piece of advice that you would like somebody listening to, walk away from. What would that be?
[01:35:59] Speaker C: Persist. I would just say persist. If you're working in this field, as you said, we all know it's tough at times, but it's very important work. Don't lose heart.
Look to your wins. If you have one win in your career, that's fantastic. Think of the English who took all those times to get the rabbits going in Australia.
Don't give up. Don't give up. And look, be difficult.
There's people here who oppose what we do for all sorts of reasons. As I said, some of them are on our team, right? Don't let them stop you. Find ways of overcoming those issues.
We're working for nature. That's what we're doing.
[01:36:41] Speaker B: John, you are amazing. And the work you're doing is just phenomenal. And I'm so grateful that you had the time today to sit down with me. And I've been listening to the birds. Speaking of coming through your windows.
[01:36:55] Speaker C: It's very beautiful.
[01:36:56] Speaker B: Gosh, you must live in such a gorgeous place. So again, thank you for your dedication to this, for rewilding Australia, bringing communities togethers and not being afraid to be a pain in the ass of some bureaucrats. Thank you for that. We need more people like you. So thanks, John. Again, I'm so appreciative.
[01:37:14] Speaker C: Yeah, thank you, Brooke. And again, I'm speaking on behalf of my team.
You know, I'm just one person in a fantastic group. Thanks.
[01:37:23] Speaker B: Thank you for joining me on this wild adventure today. I hope you've been inspired by the incredible stories, insights and knowledge shared in this episode. To learn more about what you heard, be sure to check out the show
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