Mountain Pygmy Possum - Hotham Heights
Dean Heinze - wildlife biologist, is up at Hotham Heights for the Mountain Pygmy Possum survey.
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00:00 Hi, I'm Dean Hines, I'm a wildlife biologist and I work for the Alpine Resorts Victoria,
00:07 but also within the Alpine National Park and for the North East Catchment Management Authority.
00:14 So the monitoring that I undertake is for the endangered Mount Pygmy Possum and it's
00:21 located in Mount Bulla, the Falls Creek and Mount Hotham resorts, but it's also found
00:28 within the Alpine National Park.
00:32 The monitoring that I do is based on mark recapture where I live capture the animals
00:38 and then I check on the condition of the animals and give each animal an individual number
00:43 through an ear tag.
00:46 I also take a little part of the ear which is a genetic sample.
00:50 So over time what we're trying to do is look at these populations and look at the health
00:55 of them to see how they're travelling genetically and then also look at other issues like do
01:03 we need to do more fox control or more cat control and how is that helping.
01:08 The possums that you've seen, they're all full grown.
01:10 They don't get any bigger than this.
01:14 So they might get fatter than this but they don't get any bigger.
01:22 So this one you can really see the milk.
01:43 She'll have four young.
01:50 In a nutshell that's sort of the monitoring but we have a number of sites across the Alpine
01:56 National Park and across the Alpine resorts as well.
02:00 One of the major issues for the conservation of the Mount Pygmy Possum is the habitat fragmentation
02:07 which has been caused by things like roads, ski runs or ski resort developments which
02:12 have basically encroached on habitat or broken up habitat.
02:17 So some of our big projects in the past have been to try and relink these habitats and
02:22 this was first done at Mount Hotham in the 1980s when a tunnel or culverts were put under
02:28 the road to link the habitat above and below the Greater Alpine Road and that was really
02:34 successful because the possum started using that and it linked basically the males with
02:39 the females and that tunnel is affectionately known as the Tunnel of Love.
02:45 So that goes back a long way but we've done that more recently also at a place called
02:49 Mount Little Higginbotham where we've managed to put tunnels under the road and we've actually
02:55 put microchip breeders within those tunnels so when I've been catching the animals I've
03:01 been putting microchips like what they put in cats and dogs in the Mount Pygmy Possums
03:06 and what that means is that whenever an animal uses that tunnel we can actually monitor its
03:12 movements and start to look at how effective and how well used these tunnels are.
03:17 So one of the big food sources for the pygmy possums particularly at this time of the year
03:21 in November and December is the bogon moths.
03:25 Now bogon moths migrate from the lowland areas into the alpine area to what they call 'estivate'
03:31 or escape the heat and those bogon moths accumulate at great numbers in the boulder fields which
03:38 are the same areas of habitat for the pygmy possum.
03:42 What we noticed in 2017 is that very few bogon moths turned up in the alpine area and what
03:49 that means is that the pygmy possums couldn't put on very much condition, didn't produce
03:54 very much milk and they actually lost a lot of their pouch young for that year so that
04:01 looked very dire at the time for the possums.
04:04 Now thankfully the year since that the bogon moths have improved and in fact last year
04:10 bogon moth numbers were relatively high and what that has meant this year is that we've
04:16 actually got higher numbers of pygmy possums in some of the key areas than what we've had
04:21 in recent years.
04:22 So bogon moths are really important, I mean pygmy possums are omnivorous so they eat lots
04:29 of other things as well but the bogon moth is really important because it usually turns
04:35 up at the end of winter and in spring which is the time when the pygmy possums wake up
04:40 out of their hibernation and need to put on condition and also to raise young so that's
04:46 why the bogon moths are very important but it looks like you know maybe we're in the
04:51 new era where bogon moths just aren't as consistent in their numbers as they once were arriving
04:57 in the Alps so I guess that's going to provide challenges in the future where some years
05:02 could be very lean for pygmy possums whereas other years we could get a big flush of bogon
05:08 moths and get some good outcomes in those years.
05:11 [BLANK_AUDIO]