Arid Recovery Reserve has experienced a welcomed July rainfall, transforming the arid lands into a wet and muddy landscape. This wet spell gives wildlife a much-needed reprieve from the dry conditions.

A western quoll managed to infiltrate Arid Recovery's Main Exclosure, a paddock designated as a control free of quolls. Discover how our team caught up with him, found out how he was getting in, and sent him on his way.

Discover the adorable kowari, an endangered carnivorous marsupial facing extinction  Join us at Arid Recovery withd PhD student, Molly Barlow, as we monitor, study, and protect kowaris in the rain and shine.

Controlling feral animals is a big job that requires a lot of time and effort. Best results are only achieved when you use all the tools at your disposal, and at Arid Recovery the Felixer is one of those tools. Thanks to funding from Thylation, & the Invasive Species Council, Arid Recovery has extra Felixers helping protect the newly reintroduced population of kowaris from feral cats.

During the middle of January, we had 119mm of rain which is 75% of our annual average…. in a week! Some of it fell very heavily in intense and spectacular storm fronts. Nathan (Conservation Land Management Officer) and myself,  stationed themselves out at the reserve to respond to the event and check the fences. Leanne (UNSW researcher) and three students were out there as well. It has been 11 years since the last comparable rain event and the single biggest dump in the reserve’s 24-year history.

Electric vehicles could become an important tool for working in the bush, whether for wildlife conservation, tourism or primary production. To trial them, we commissioned an EV mechanic to customise an old Suzuki EVNorth.

Science is giving native wildlife a fighting chance against feral cats with two research programs at Arid Recovery named today as finalists for the 2020 Eureka Awards, the ‘Oscars’ of Australian Science. Arid Recovery’s research program is punching above its weight in being named two of three finalists in the Applied Environmental Research category.

After waiting through an achingly long 24 months of drought, solid rain fell this weekend – 50 mm of the glorious stuff.Our very first task is to check the fence. In a landscape where rain is so infrequent, and especially with less vegetation covering the ground at the moment, when water does move it can flow really fast and erode washouts under the fence. 

In May of 2018, Arid Recovery reintroduced 12 western quolls (Dasyurus geoffroii) to the reserve. In June and July 2018 they successfully bred and thirty offspring were born to five females. But who were the fathers of those offspring? That’s where I came in. I studied the parentage of the first generation of quolls born at Arid Recovery for my Honours project at the University of Adelaide, Supervised by Jeremy Austin, Katherine Moseby and Melissa Jensen.

To give drought relief to animals at the Arid Recovery Reserve we have been making and putting out ‘water fountains’. With the awful bushfire crisis raging across the country, there has been a lot of interest in these cheap and simple watering units so we’re sharing instructions on how to make them. These water fountains are not an ‘everyday’ measure.