SHARING THE sECRET (3) oUTBACK FAIRIES

Outback Fairies
The delicate hopping mouse paused momentarily, transfixed by the beam from my headtorch, as the sunrise smudged the horizon. After being weighed and measured, I’d just released the mouse where she’d been trapped with two others, not far from where keen golfers playing “Tri-State Golf” at Cameron Corner and chip balls from Queensland, over NSW and into South Australia. The ghost-like 32 gram female appeared impossibly pale, almost translucent in my torchlight. Nick-named ‘kangaroo rats’ for their bipedal gait, long hind legs and tail, the dusky hopping mouse tentatively bumbled along until orientating itself on an invisible trail though the dune. Then, as if whisked away by an extra-terrestrial puppeteer, she vanished into the darkness like a nervous fairy, quickly evading the oncoming dawn.
I’d first seen dusky hopping mice 25 years ago, when Montecollina Bore on the Strzelecki Track was one of only two places these critically endangered rodents could be reliably found. Montecollina, where resident dingoes kept most foxes, cats and kangaroos at bay, had provided a refuge for these outback fairies, from whence they expanded once rabbit calicivirus drastically reduced cat and fox numbers. Two decades later they had spread over 150km to the dune in NSW where I was trapping.
Mini-Tassie Devils
A couple of minutes later, at the same monitoring site, my monitoring team captured a guinea pig-sized ampurta in a baited cage trap. I’m guessing that fewer than a thousand Australians have ever heard of ampurtas, and less than a hundred have ever handled one of these voracious marsupials. Upon seeing their first of these ‘mini Tassie devils’, the University graduates appropriately responded with ooohs and ahhhs as the recaptured female bounced off and then paused, black, crested tail erect, near her burrow. 
18 months earlier our team had moved this ampurta from South Australia, not far from the unlikely Montecollina refuge. She was one of the pioneers for “Wild Deserts” https://www.unsw.edu.au/research/ecosystem/our-research/wild-deserts in Sturt National Park, a conservation restoration project partnership between NSW Government, UNSW Sydney and Ecological Horizons,  reintroducing 7 locally-extinct mammals back into the New South Wales desert and featured in the recent  Australian Story https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-11/into-the-wild-wild-deserts-saving-animals-from-extinction/100967314 . By the end of the week the five trapping teams had caught 11 other founders and 20 of their Wild Desert- born ampurtas, within the feral cat and fox free paddocks we had built three years earlier.
Like the fairy-like dusky hopping mouse, ampurtas originating from these white sandy deserts are also much paler than their brush-tailed mulgara cousins from red sand deserts. One of my favourite little lizards is the feisty narrow-banded sandswimmer, with dark purple lines on burnt orange background. But in white sand deserts these skinks have virtually no pigmentation and are now recognised as a distinct species, the appropriately named ‘Phantom skink’. Animals can adapt to their environments within a few generations. Many rabbits and cats out here in the deserts are already paler than their cousins from woodlands, despite only arriving less than two centuries ago.
Master Diggers
Later in the week I caught ‘Flamethrower’, named by the students at Tibooburra Outback School, a particularly aggressive 1.8km male bilby who had ripped out of its bag, Incredible Hulk-style, and then crushed my index finger, which is still numb and hindering my typwing. Flamethrower was one of the Wild Deserts founders from other refuges like Arid Recovery and Taronga Zoo. Nine months ago I had spent a night running down bilbies on Thistle Island, near Port Lincoln, to add to these founders. Already these bilbies were pock-marking the desert with foraging digs that were trapping seeds, nutrients and water and helping restore the desert.
Only the beginning
Wild Deserts braved the driest two years on record in 2018 and 2019 before thriving during the current El Nino rains. The second and third generations of reintroduced mammals are now evolving and contributing to the restoration of their outback refuge.  But Wild Deserts is more than just fenced islands enabling threatened wildlife to persist in a sea of degraded land and invasive predators. The bourgeoning populations of threatened mammals are part of an elaborate longer-term plan to restore Australian deserts and culture over a much broader scale.
Wild Deserts’ predator exclosures are joined to the Dingo fence, creating another 100 square km zone with low densities of cats, foxes and kangaroos.  We are expecting our outback fairies to breed faster due to less competition from overabundant herbivores.  But we have higher hopes too. During their journey from their dingo-protected refuge at Montecollina, the fastest, smartest hopping mice would have survived. In turn, their progeny may be slightly safer from cat predation. Wild Deserts is now providing more desert mammals an opportunity to adapt their appearance and predator-evasion skills. These savvy fairies will hopefully then be prime candidates for natural dispersal and distant reintroductions, restoring ecosystems, and productivity to other deserts. Maybe if they spread west into the white sands of the Strzelecki Desert, white chocolate Easter Bilbies will eventually be crafted in their honour.