[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, rewildologists. Can you believe we're already at the end of 2024? Because I sure can't believe it. This year we added four new countries to the show's global list, published the show's first conservation travel series and highlighted some massive rewilding projects. The numbers are in and I wanted to share with you the top episodes from the past 11 months. First up, we're going back to the Land down under with John Kawanowski, Ph.D. to explore rewilding across the entire continent of Australia.
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 side of conservation, travel and rewilding the planet. I am your host, Brooke Mitchell, conservation biologist and adventure traveler.
Good day, mates. Today I'm taking you to Australia for a ripper conversation with John Kowanowski, PhD, Chief Science Officer at the Australian Wildlife Conservancy.
John's career has been nothing short of fascinating. Between a 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 wildlife with a big shout out to 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 Rewadology.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: I'm the Chief Science Officer of a 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.
[00:03:34] Speaker A: Big job that is. But you had a pretty uncanny or original and unique route to what you're doing today. We all did, 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, Rod?
[00:04:04] Speaker B: God, 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, you know, oversaw people cutting trees down, but also conserving forest. And so that's a sort of interesting, interesting background because we spent time in the bush on, you know, 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, you know, 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.
You know, 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 a, 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, you know, 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 mud brick houses and planted trees and, you know, all that sort of thing that you do when you're trying to come to grips with a. 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.
I, through a very tangled set of circumstances, ended up in Borneo with a fairly crazy Czech guy who was helping out the local Penang people, who are an indigenous group in the centre of Borneo. A very impressive Swiss guy called Brenno Mansell had been involved with that group for some years. He ended up, 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 Penan 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, you know, 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 a environmental science degree, a university chosen by my girlfriend at the time in a very nice part of Australia town near Byron Bay. And 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. So. And look, if I. If I'd finish my degree and been offered a job or been able to get a job in the 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 a. 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 it's. 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 a lot of time at night out in the bush, you 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. You know, 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 smaller scale, but it's interesting. And, and we. I work 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, to the dumb guy in the group. You know, you can, you can go and put a tape around a tree, but. But again, it was fascinating and I learned a lot. But. But in terms of making a difference to conservation, which is what drives me after that, you know, experience I talked about way back when I felt like I was plowing increasingly, sort of narrow row. And the rest of Australia, you know, 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 current1 about 10 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're not very, you know, we've got a pretty small population density. You know, we're the size of the, of the United States, but a tenth 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, you know, 90% of our of Ibotta 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 colonize Australia 240 years ago, they brought feral cat, they brought cats, you know, pussycats, they brought. The English wanted to hunt foxes so they brought foxes over, you name it. And, and, and those things, particularly the cats and foxes have, have. Well, the cats are everywhere across Australia, from rainforest through the desert. Amazing, amazing animal, but incredibly devastating. And you get, they start getting big as well. So you've got these big sort of 6 kilogram pussycats wandering around the bush and of course, you know, 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 of living 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 are on the threatened list.
Many of them very small populations. A thousand individuals, 100 individuals, you know, tiny, tiny. Few fewer, fewer animals in the panda. But you know, they're little sort of creatures that most Australians don't even know, let alone the rest of the world. So there you go. This is a bit of stop. That's a rave over to you.
[00:14:21] Speaker A: Oh, that was so good. Oh my gosh, no, that was fantastic because you were starting to get into one of my big questions.
And actually, could you, 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. Stage for the work you're doing now? Sure, yeah. Maybe just that. That's the prompt. Go for it. Explain, explain that more a little bit.
[00:15:02] Speaker B: Okay, so I'm going to take a step back before the Europeans because, you know, 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 human arrived, humans arrived, we had a lot of big animals. You know, we had, I think about 20 species bigger than 100kg we had, you know, sort of rhinoceros size wombats. A wombat is basically a marsupial that lives in, lives in a borough. I don't know if these guys lived in a borough, but you know, they're like a sort of very placid type of cow, you know, 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 carnivore called Thalakoleo that, you know, so we just had this amazing big fauna. And when humans arrived, modern humans, you know, one of the first big migrations out of, out of Africa got to Australia maybe 60,000 years ago, you know, quite early.
And we had, yeah, 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 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 a, it's like an adaptation to a ancient continent that we've got. We've had, 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? So you. So as you know, in countries where these big, big herbivores, for example, like an elephant, they really shape the environment, right? They push over trees, they maintain patchiness, they create conditions for the smaller herbivores to live. A 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 on in the climate space, actually a paleontologist. So this is his TED 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, it's 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've 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 should call it, you know, fossil pollen, paleological, some strange name I'd have cuffed pronounced. But good, good evidence of this stuff. Right, we, we know this was happening and then 4,000 years ago somehow 4 or 5,000 years ago, it's again a bit difficult.
A dog, a dingo comes in like you get the Asian, they're 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, and I made a noise and I set off the, the singing dogs in this sort of Borneo village night and they all started to howl. It was crazy. You know, this is, this is the dingo ancestors of course, you know, this is a suddenly a placental mammal predator on, 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 out competed. So there's another massive change in the top order predator sort of stuff.
Still a long time before humans arrive. You know, this is the time of the pyramids, this is a long time ago. And then what we think happened is various, you know, technological developments in stone tools and, and various other technologies that Aboriginal people had. The 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 times. So anyway, but that's what they think. And then, you know, only a couple of hundred years ago, you know, Captain Cook, white people on sailing ships, we fought a war with all the British.
Our head of state still the king of Britain, you know, fought a war with you folk and you guys didn't want to take any more convicts. So we got them, we got, you know, 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 to for the pleasure of it. They were sort of brutalized and they really just unlike other countries where there were attempts 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, you know, that was just trashed. And you know, 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, 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, we, we deliberately set fire to a lot of Australia. We manage fire over like 6 million hectares in northern Australia. We probably burn 2 million hectares of that every year, trying to recreate the sort of small scale fire patterns that we were, we think were the, or 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, the other timeline is that, you know, there's, there's wild pigs in Australia. They're called up rally, they're called Captain Cookers because there's this myth that Cook had them on his ship and, you know, let them go. There was a sort of tradition of letting go pigs and goats on islands and uninhabited, uninhabited land. If the, you know, mariners got shipwrecked, which they often did, here's a food source they could have. Of course, the country's brimming with food but you know, 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, know, the last 200 and something years because I mean, cats are always traveling on people's boats. And Europeans, you know, the Dutch and various others actually came past Australia earlier than Cook. But you know, 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 Australia, took several. You know, you talk about rewilding. Well, this was an introduction, but it wasn't straightforward and often have this conversation with government people who are very cautious and you know, will attempt a reintroduction that doesn't work or we want to have another go. You know, we. Something didn't work. We've learned from that. We're going to do it a bit differently. You know, we'd like to have another crack. It's a very. Australia's. What we've still got from convict times is a love of bureaucracy. We got to fill in so many forms and permissions to do this sort of work. And they say oh 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 rabbit? How many, how long did it take to just rabbit. Deaf ears. So yeah we've. And 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's 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 have these. We've got parts of Australia where we have cat plagues. Like I've, you know at one point we sent the army out to shoot these cats and you know I've seen these pictures of thousands of dead cats in this particular place where we've got this really beautiful little native animal called the bilby. It's sometimes called a rabbit ear 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 when it runs away at night. A bit like a broken down horse. It's got this really weird gait. It's 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 us some sort of you know, shawl out of that you'd be a, you'd be a millionaire. Just a beautiful creature. Cats build up on, on, on rodents in that it's desert sort of country with rivers going through it. When it we get a lot of rain up in the tropics these rivers flow through the desert. The rodents build up, the cats build up these massive plagues. Then the rodents die out and the cats look around and they eat the building bilbies. And there's times there when you simply cannot find bilbies except in the stomachs of cats. So you know that's the type of situation we've got. And you know the bill we had a Cousin, the lesser bilby that's completely wiped out and the, the remaining one, the greater bilby has lost. You know, it used to be on 70% of the continent. This is an amazingly successful animal. You can, I don't know what 70 of the US is but, but it's probably everywhere, you know 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 bulby is in I don't know, 10% of its former range, 20% and contracting. And this is the common story for most of the animals in the desert. And you know, As I said, 30 of them have gone extinct. Beautiful animals. We'll never see little creatures like this, like little mini, a lot of little mini kangaroo creatures that were partly fungiverous and, and sort of build little nest. They've got a tail that's prehen I saw a prehensile and they, you can see them, they carry around this sort of cloth of clump of grass in their tail. They build this little nest. I've got some in my yard actually and, but there were some in the desert that could actually leap over a horse, you know like that. They'd be chased down by these European collectors and you know there's stories of them, you know, just jumping over the man on the horse. And these are creatures about this big. So yeah, a really sort of amazing boater. Very sad what we've lost but our group and others like us, you know, I sort of determined that this doesn't continue.
[00:27:47] Speaker A: 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 like the lack of fire, it almost sounds like. But also too for having interviewed other incredible Australian conservationists, the over raging of fire as well. So I guess from your experience what's the like maelstrom that's going on right now? Like what's the. Is it just all these combined or what do you think?
[00:28:28] Speaker B: 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 you know, indigenous people in pine forests in, 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, with the removal of that constant fire, everything thickens up. And then when fire does come, it's, 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, and that's led to a real resurgence of interest in south of Australia in what's called cultural burning. So trying to get this sort of ancient pattern of fire back in the landscape. It's very hard once the system has changed though, because, you know, Instead of having 20 trees per hectare, you've got 200. And one 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 a thousand individuals in its entire remaining population.
We as conservationists and as someone who's planted a lot of trees, we got out of chainsaws. You know, we work with indigenous groups and we thinned the forest and then we reintroduced fire. So 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, when I went through my ecology degree, so that was in the 90s, people, you'd read the literature and people go, oh, you know, 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 this mammals is foxes and cats. Because what the. So our NGO was started by essentially a wealthy Englishman called Martin Copley. He had a love for the bush, which is fantastic. And he, 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, 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 like this, like everyone knows, in disguise, because he had a head. You know, the head, the tail, the cat. Oh, the guy in the cat.
He started to realized from his point of view that it was cancer foxes causing the problem and he just started, 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, oh, I can afford that, I want one of them.
And I think we need to do it because we where 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 bedongs, these cute little sort of, you know, it's only a couple of kilograms, so what's that, four or five pounds? Little, little partly fungiverous, partly herbivorous mammal that builds a little nest with its stuff in its tail. He put them in this fenced area and, you know, suddenly there were 500 of them, whereas before there were none. And, and, and he went, wow, this works, right? And the bloke in the cat hat wasn't a good businessman. His. His. He actually tried to sort of like, talk about decades ahead. He tried to have a biodiversity type of credit scheme around the.
[00:32:54] Speaker A: Really?
[00:32:55] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He tried to float, like, his, you know, 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 I 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. Nothing. 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 changed fire regimes. Is it cats and foxes?
A couple of years ago, a paper, a scientific paper came out talking about the decline of mammals in sort of South Southeast Australia. Part of it that's relatively dry, called the mallee. 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, you know, they come after fire. And this is true.
And these people's arguments was, well, that was a primary cause of decline. And so all you have to do to bring it back is restart 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 100, 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, you, they don't, they can't tolerate any cancer. Foxes, particularly in that phase when there's just, you know, 20 or 50 at the founding stage. So our approach is to reintroduce these very vulnerable species. Again, you know, you imagine most of, they were over most of Australia now and 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, you know that takes decade or more and the numbers very depend 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, a fox, which is a scavenger, it'll happily take a bite. But cats, cats like to hunt. So cats will only really take baits if they're starving. So, you know, the 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, shoots this poison gel at them. And you know, cats grooming themselves, right? So it's very effective when it gets them. But you know, you think of how many cats are in Australia, there's millions. They have a, they're not roaming around like a circus. They're, they're got home ranges, $10,000amachine. You, it's, you know, we'll have to get Elon Musk to subsidize that one. You know, it's an, it's an expensive and, and you know, even then it's not, it's not a, for some of these animals it's just even not effective enough because, you know, 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've 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 10 locally extinct mammals. We're now starting outside the fence work, but we've started with the tougher animals. You know, there's, there's our biggest native predator, marsupial predator is only a couple of kilograms, it's called a qual. 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, you know, grass eating sort of nest building. Bennett. So we've started with them. We're doing that in conjunction with aerial bait. So we fly over this place, drop 50000 cat baits a year.
We've got these machines, these sort of AI machines. We've got trapping and even then, you know, 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. Because it's not working and you're just sacrificing the animals for the sake of experiment, which we're not not wanting to do.
But that is 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 10 to 12 of these sites, depending how you categorize them, in 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 is in this fenced area. There are populations left on for one species up on a couple of mountaintops, tiny areas on mountain tops. The last, if you can imagine, hunted to the top of the mountain. And yeah, this bedong, 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. So you know, but it's still at a continental scale. It's less than 1% of the country. You know, 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 you know, we are, we can't do that. Well, I don't think we'll be able to do that on current technology. So yeah, so that's a, 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, you get, you get, you know, 100 square kilometers. I don't know what that is in square miles, but you can, you can get lost in these places pretty easily. And animals have got home range, got nothing to do with the fence. They're just, as I said, they're living free of Kensington foxes. But you know, it, it's, it's still a real stretch to figure out how to get them outside. And, and they're not just for a year or two, but they're through the, through the wet times and the droughts. As I said, when the, when the animal, when the cats and foxes build up in numbers and then become really hungry, how are you going to protect them? That phase, that's the, if you can do that, you've probably had a win. So.
[00:42:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was amazing. And I think that most people listening can probably pick up what your, 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?
[00:43:13] Speaker B: Yeah, well, actually, well, I've been in for 15 years and the organization for 30. The mission is very simple. It's, it's conservation of Australian wildlife and their habitat. So it's quite an ambitious mission particularly because while, you know, we manage 7 million hectares, again, I don't know what that is in, but that's, you know, it's less than 1% of Australia. It's, it's probably bigger than some European countries, but at a continental scale, it's a fraction of the country. Right.
We also, what actually very interestingly so I said we started with this sort of wealthy Englishman, more or less a hobby, hobby 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 and when I joined we had 13 properties and 3 million hectares. And so it really expanded from one property, 200 hectares to this sort of thing. And then in the last 15 years we, we've more than doubled in size. Most of that increase in size has actually rather than been through buying land which, you know, you're sinking massive amounts of capital into, just owning it is to do partnerships. And, and, and so we've got a, we've developed our conservation processes and, and approaches on our own land. And. And then we've now say to. So some government agencies like the Defence and a lot of countries Defence owns big training areas. And so we're managing a big defence property up in northwest Australia in the Kimberley. Absolutely amazing, absolutely amazing places is property with these massive boab trees. So like in Africa, those big boab trees, we've got some in north northern Australia and you've got these barb trees where you say, okay, where's the giraffes? You know, but you know, there's kangaroos and there's gum trees and 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 more introductions to these fenced areas. We're also managing the entire national park. So that's, you know, that's sort of interesting. We work with pastoralists, so there's some situations with pastoralists run cattle on the, you know, the more productive grasslands. We often have some rocky country. This particular pastor we're working with up on this, again, quite an interesting place called Wooloo River. He's got a bit of an eco tour 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, you know, basic recognition of indigenous rights, including the fact that they, you know, owned land. And so we, there's the sort of. The legal system has recognized a thing called native title. Sometimes native title is more or less the same as if, you know, 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 and wuk wok. 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 the, 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 have been, we've been terribly cruel to Aboriginal people for a long, long time. And there was a, 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, it wasn't called slavery, but they were working for nothing or rations. They could live on their country and. But, 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 on a. 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 into town, you know, just terrible social problems as a result, loss of connection to country. So now that, you know, we're slowly redressing those past mistakes and Aboriginal people are getting titled to land and management. They're coming from a basis of dispossession and dysfunction and limited skill set. And, you know, to manage country in the modern world, you know, you need financial acumen, you need, you know, 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 a site, 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 10 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 savanna left in the world already. There's a whole lot of carbon abatement fire projects. Interesting thing about this fire management that Aboriginal people did is that while we lighting up country, letting, you know, 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. You know, there's a lot of science around that. So there's actually functional carbon markets around indigenous fire practice, which is great. So look, that I'm now going on to another. Right. But I can't even remember what your question was, Brooke, you like to ask.
[00:50:37] Speaker A: Keep going. I'm so good at this. That's why we go down these funnels.
[00:50:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
Yes, indeed.
[00:50:45] Speaker A: Yeah. So 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 are, do you have to use different tactics and when they are a part of these projects, what is their role like and what is your role, what is your team's role in this whole rewilding Australia concept?
[00:51:29] Speaker B: Okay, so I guess one straight up difference from say a lynx reintroduction or a wolf reintroduction is that when you're reintroducing to a, to a, to a, to a fenced area in Ireland, which you've got to do in Australia because of the, you know, mostly you have to do you, you don't have the same, oh, my animal's going to eat your sheep problem that is, is, you know, or tiger rewilding in India, my tiger is going to eat your villages, you know, like. So the, 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 ago. So, you know, a little sweet bet 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 range it because, you know, rodents are a quarter of Australia's fauna, you know, and really, of course, cats like eating rats, right. So we did a rodent introduction recently to an area that had just suffered a massive plague of introduced hemispheres. And you know, that was, you know, in the news. They were in people's beds. You know, it was like the bedbug invasion of Paris. It was talked about. And here we are introducing one. And who's gonna. Nobody knows about this animal, right? This is, you know, this is pseudomies, Australis. It is not mus musculars, you know, you peasants, you know, take it easy. You know, no one was going to buy grant. But anyway, so we're introducing defense 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 of when they thought of themselves as the gamekeepers of the Queen's dearest state. 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 anti conservation. 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 odd risk on our property. It is just nuts.
And so, you know, we've got people who spend half their life filling out forms to do one. Retro. 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, it's naturally, it comes from this pea plant. And in Western Australia, where we say your bed on or your little wallaby eats the pea plant, the toxin builds up in its body. They're. They're. 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, which is a lot of what we're doing.
We need 11 permits. 11 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. They might. And I've heard this from talking to other reintroduction practitioners worldwide.
You get these species experts who worked on the refugial population and they, they, 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, this forest, right? Beautiful, lovely, big gum trees and banks is. And it's, it's so reasonably, you know, 600 millimeters of rain. What's that, a couple of feet of rain a year. We want to take them out into the desert where it's, 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 a hundred 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 stripy. A tail, like a sort of. Again, this is a tail designed to attract cats. It's sort of fluffy and when the animal runs around, waves in the air. So, okay, not many of them left, but they eat termites. And we know they eat termites in, in tens of thousands a day. And they eat whatever termites is there. We wanted to bring them into Central Australia. Central Australia.
And 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. Or why don't you let us try the introduction 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, Save the, you know, the western barred bandicoot, save the possum, okay? Possums. Aren't they the things that live in my roof and annoying? You know, so we got a, we got a. 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?
You now, 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, everyone must love this because it's good, you know. But in actual fact, as I said, Aboriginal people really strongly identify with, with nature and, and particular animals often and, 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 a, a little, it's a little omnivore, about a kilogram. So two pounds was over again. Most of Australia, from the deserts right up into the savannas and was very common, was a major food source for Aboriginal people back in the day. And now they lived on a couple of islands and the rockiest difficultiest 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 neighbouring 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, they were 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 Cessna, you know, I know, five hour flight or something, land in the middle of Australia in the desert, met by the indigenous people, the Warlpiri for that area, who really keen to have this animal back. There were people, you know, recreating paintings. You know, you might have seen the Aboriginal sort of the dot paintings, they sort of paintings of this sort of. I don't even know how to describe it but to me it's like a, a mental landscape of the landscape. But anyway, I'm a white bloke, I don't know but you 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 to talk about it because it's a beautiful thing, right? And the richness of that translocation by involving the Aboriginal people, which, you know, 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. You know, we've now done that in a few, A few times. And yeah, that's just super when that, that happens. And, you know, I get huge amount of joy if, you know, 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 I'm, you know, people out in the field are doing things and occasionally I get invited to, you know, oh, get him down to the reintroduction. And you know, thank you. I'll come down and I, you know, you get to release and like I said it Bilby and you know, you've got the animal in your hand that you've just worked on. I said, you're stroking its fur. I mean, when the, with Bilby that I released, I'm striking its tail and halfway down its tail is like a little nail. I thought, what's that? I've never even read about that. What, what is it 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 furrow, soft fur. I want to take one of these home. And then you let it go and you just, your heart is full of joy, like, and you're laughing with just pure joy for an animal that's been out of its. This habitat for 100 years. And it's sort of, you know, they sniff around, they think, what are you doing to me here?
And then they, they go. And, and, and we know from doing this a lot of times that by and large they're happy. They're going breed and they build up a popular. That's just me not even attached to the animal except intellectually. So for us to involve indigenous people for where it's meaningful enough in just a night, in, in the sense of who they are, who they. What their culture is. I'm so glad that we're now doing that here. So anyway, again, another raven and long story, no.
[01:02:31] Speaker A: 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. I mean, sometimes I wish that, like, my, my culture had something like that. Like, not to say not, not, not envious or jealous of, you know, these indigenous cultures, but just the way that I love wildlife in the landscape. I can only imagine if it was awesome identity. So, like, wow, that just sounds. It sounds like I. I probably would have cried if I was there that day. I would have been so moved by what I saw.
[01:03:10] Speaker B: And it's the right response, you know, it is the right response because as is Joy, because, you know, one of the great things about working in rewilding is you are doing, taking positive steps. So, you know, as Aldo Leopold said, to be an ecologist, to live in a. Is to live in a world of wounds. You know, and we go around, you know, the news is terrible. You know, you look at the Antarctic ice sheet or you, you know, the U.S. yesterday, you know, called 30 species extinct. I think, you know, like, you know, yes, it did. The place is. 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, you know, and, you know, 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, you know, it is one of the ways we engage with our supporters. It's one of 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, you know, and you bring them out to these projects and you. You involve them in their introduction or you even just take them to where the animals are running around. These animals, they've never seen.
And they melt, right? They melt and they go, okay, we get it. So, yeah.
[01:04:44] Speaker A: 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?
[01:05:22] Speaker B: Yeah, so I guess the wins are, you know, the fact that, you know, 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, you know, 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 life.
So, and, and you know, we're, you know, genetics is a massive part of what we do. We, we've got a geneticist on our team and a former US person called Jenny Pearson who is just amazing and we do a, actually a bit of engagement with revive and restore in the States, who are incredible genetic group. So that's a win. Right? And in fact, there was a paper came out recently that suggested that these reintroduction projects were so, 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 bun fight because, you know, people go, well, but you know, they're in fenced areas or on islands and then, 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 hectares 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, 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, it's, it's quite dramatic to put up a fence with, with electrified things and, you know, lock the gates and, but that's, that's, that's the, 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, very dry sometimes. We had a terrible drought a few years ago where at one of our, one of these properties, the total rainfall in the year was just over an inch, 19 millimeters of rain. And that was Dry. That was dry. That was crispy. Right. And, and there's a couple of species that went from, you know, in their thousands or hundreds to in their tens. Now we got all of them through, through that, but that was touch and go. Right, so you want another, you want to met, 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. We actually, 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 sort of, I'm the old fossil in the team. So I go and get to read what, you know, Leichardt in 1845 wrote in his diary. I love it. To me, that's exciting. Right, but no one else wants. Oh yeah, it's great. But, but so, you know, 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, with government people who say they did not occur here. And well, the evidence is really fragmentary. You know, 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, you know, 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. So I'm, you know, and from that we're going, we're mapping past distributions.
You know, 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 chooks. How do we do that? You know, so, and that's something we're starting on in this Mount Gibson project in Western Australia where we've got a sort of sciences set up, a control area, a treatment area, lots of cameras out in the landscape, telemetry, doing these releases, starting for 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 do, we'll replicate that a number of sites. We do have an ambition that's sort of bigger than that, which is, you know, we, we have dallied in the genetic biocontrol space. Not, 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 it. And you know, one of the government groups here in Australia with the Western Australian government and we were very keen to get gene drive technology up and running on our predators. And it was sort of interesting. We had Kevin Esvelt come out from MIT who was sort of the guru in this space and you know, his main message was be careful with, you know, the, you 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, Heron island. You know, you'd knock off for lunch and go swimming with green turtles on the coral one more workshops like that. But you know, my main thing was to say, you know, you've got to develop this for cats. Cats weren't on the agenda. My, my side job at that conference was say cats have got to be on the agenda. And of course, you know, we've had, we've had Bridget Bardot complain about our killing of cats. You know, people, people have this idea in the world that, you know, 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 problem. So yes, we're still working on that. I mean the technology sort of seems to have come sort of, you know, it's the, the excitement of the new thing has hit the reality of how hard it is to muck around with it, with the, you know, the fundamental biological mechanism of reproduction. I mean talk about survival of fittest things want to reproduce, right? And you, you try to stop it. Because some of this gene drive stuff is for example to, you know, I don't know, produce a whole lot of just male cats or something like that. It turns out that, you know, the experimental work has been done on house mice, some of it in Australia actually. It turns out it's quite resilient to the being mucked around with. But you know, hopefully we'll progress that too. Because if we can get a genetic bio control 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, 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 there's. That happens, right? People do that. People will take a yacht with their pussycat on and that yacht might turn up on, in, at an indie at India, right? That pussycat might jump on. If that's a genetically engineered cat, that cat is through Africa, Asia, Europe and the felines 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 our 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 build with the thylacine that, you know, the eastern hair wallaby, the pig footed bandicoot, the lesser sickness 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, you know, 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, you know, and then people could come to Australia not only to look at the Kangaroos and the koalas. But to look at the bilbys 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, you know, we're cute. We're cute. Yes, you're cute. So yeah, that's our vision.
[01:16:10] Speaker A: 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 more? How one, like let's, let's give Debbie here a good shout out. So how are you engaged? Engaging Wildlife Drones technology And then are there any other advances that you're trying as well to see? Does, does this work? You know, fences are great, great, simple but great pieces of technology.
But now that we are really expanding, I don't know if is AI even a thing in the space, I don't know. But please tell us how, what are you using there?
[01:16:54] Speaker B: Sure. So a massive shout out to Debbie and Wildlife Drones.
A key metric need to know when you're doing reintroductions is survival. Right. Because the, generally speaking, the risky phase is immediately after introduction where the animals aren't familiar with the landscape. They, you know, 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 the introductions with a sort of, you know, slightly too heavy radio collar and you know, you'd be out there with a handheld yagi looking for the animal. And you know, we've got massive, you know, these fenced areas, as I said, 100 square kilometers. You know, not many roads, pretty dense scrub. It's very, very hard to find a little creature. You know, 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 they, you can automate their, the data collection. They have slightly different, I'm not a tech guy, we had a quite a very techie guy called David Rashia 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 engage with Debbie, we were doing these outside the fence releases of animals that I said were a bit tougher. The brush tailed 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 stay around there, you know, they'll move 10 kilometers in a night. So we needed something and Debbie was developing that, that work and so yeah, we try and of course, you know, it's very, I've been onto our site and watched the ecologists use it once. You know, the ecologists love it. You know, there's always a few people who are just. In fact people always kept buying drones in IWC 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, you know, so there's mad king drone fanatics and so it gives our staff a new skill, they're pilots, it gives us great data and you know, there's upfront cost in acquiring the drone and the training but it's technology that use a multiple way. So I'm very happy with that. Other technology that I referred to with AI are these things called Felixes, which are an automatic 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 reintroductions.
And I think this is one of these things that start in someone's garage and then ended up, you know, very sophisticated. And you know, 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, in Canberra, our capital city. So it's, 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 and you know, so it's not something you can use 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 you know, 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, of the different camera images that he'd started getting sort of epilepsy, just induced from, you know, the flickering of the screen. So just, just for occupational health and safety, we're going to automating it. We've, we work with Microsoft and others using the AI system. We've got our own tech people in our hair office and 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, you know, then we'll have fantastic data. Already there's some acoustics, right? You can. The koala, for example, you think of this cute animal. It actually is the most horrific grunty male breeding behavior of any creature. Just, you know, like, don't worry about. Come here, darling, I'll read you some poetry. It's you. You know, and so that picks up really well on, on an acoustic monitor. But, you know, we want the, we want the whole environment, we want to interpret the whole environment so that we're collaborating with, with, you know, universities and people on, on doing that. And that's, I reckon that's not very far off. And that will massively increase our ability to monitor properly and, and, and yeah, we'll start getting to the scale we need. 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.
[01:23:05] Speaker A: 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, like the fundraising budget or what. It's 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 like 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, so how do we do this, like, for decades to come? Like, how do we make this financially make sense? And maybe we'd have even more people involved, you know, and on board.
[01:23:55] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I mean, anyone who's worked in an NGO knows it. 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, you know, our budget this year, you know, it's 36 Australian. 36 million Australian, you know, but that if you divide that by the number of hectares, it turns out, like, you gotta. It's. It's, you know, what, $5 a hectare Australian to manage country. So, you know, it probably needs to be a lot higher. Right. And so everyone faces problem, I think the days, like, you know, so we're part of a. There's a. There's a peak body of. Of private land managers in Charlotte. I just went to their conference last week in Canberra. There was actually a massive amount of focus on new methods of financing. And, you know, we had people there from pollination. So one of these, you 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 year, you know, and I was working with. With him, trying to translate our science outcomes into something that he could flock to a pension fund or something like that.
And my take on all this is 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 science and so you can have trust in the product. And of course, with carbon, it's sort of easier, 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 bilbies over here, what does that mean to a Canadian pension fund? You know, how, you know, it's the whole issue of fungibility. Can you, you know, and people are developing metrics and I'm in discussion and argument with a bunch of people doing this at the finance, and 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 bilbies 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, no. And, you know, 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 game that, you know. And, you know, 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 I see the.
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 ngo. But if we're starting to earn millions of dollars off it, the incentive is to fudge it, right? So. But if I have to put out to monitor a bunch of cameras or if a satellite can do it, or, 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 had 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 money. You know, it's hard yakka and thin margins and the market changes and. And suddenly these people had a massive new income stream. And our neighbours across the north of Australia, with a lot of properties in Oregon, Australia, suddenly the people running cows were running carbon projects. And 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. A good enough incentive to do it. People weren't becoming millionaires, but they're 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 30, 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 the year, then there's intermediate fire and then there's bad fire and 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. So. 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 away, probably, 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, you know, the system should force that developer to offset as closely as possible to the area being impacted. Not to swap, you know, 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 bilbies, but there should be a penalty. You should have to, 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 Maron. She's a very prominent, 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 at 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, you know, 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. But yeah, so that's how I see it, plus 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 you know 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, you know, Zurich, or should I say, you know, Manhattan?
[01:33:40] Speaker A: Wow, John, I've been blown away by this entire conversation so far. Like you've taken us through every single aspect of this and I just have to ask for more of like 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, so. Actually, I know they are. I, I mean everybody in this field, we have good days and we have some really really, really shitty days. So for you, why are you still doing this?
[01:34:13] Speaker B: Well, like we started, I was lucky to grow up with, sort of in a natural environment with people who cared about nature, exposed to nature early on. I have a love for nature, and it's, you know, that's what I think we all share in this space. We love nature, and if you love something you want to prot. You want to. It's that simple. So.
And, you know, I've. I've worked in crappy jobs, right?
[01:34:39] Speaker A: I've.
[01:34:40] Speaker B: I've done crappy work, like, again, probably most of us have. I don't mind the crap. Crap comes with the job.
I've also. 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 epaulets, you know, So I don't mind. I don't mind the trouble because, you know, it's. We, you know, 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. You know that. So that's what motivates me. And, you know, I work with good people and, and that. So, yeah, that. I guess that's my story.
And also, I'm beautiful. I'm. I'm an ignorant ecologist. I. I've been at home for three months with a broken leg, and I've lived here for 11 years. And I'm. I. I'm finding new birds here. I've now got. I've started e. Birding. I've got a list. And I'm finding new lifers from my veranda. And I've lived here for 11 years, so there's lots to learn, right? There's lots to learn.
And, you know, nature is just fantastic as an intellectual thing that you also appreciate on a level of beings. So, yeah, no, I'm, I'm. I love what I do. I'm. I'm privileged.
[01:36:25] Speaker A: Absolutely amazing, John. And I have to ask this for everybody that comes on. If there's a message or a piece of advice that you would like somebody listening to walk away from, what would that be?
[01:36:37] Speaker B: I'll 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. You know, look to your wins. If you have. If you have one win in your career, that's fantastic. You know, think of the English who took all those times to get the rabbits going in Australia. You know, like, don't give up. Don't give up. And look, be difficult, you know, like, 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.
[01:37:19] Speaker A: 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. It's very beautiful. Gosh, you must live in such a gorgeous place. So, again, thank. Thank you for your dedication to this, for rewilding Australia, bringing communities gather together 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.
[01:37:52] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you, Brooke. And again, I'm speaking on behalf of my team, awc, so, you know, I'm just one person in a fantastic group. Thanks.
[01:38:01] Speaker A: 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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