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.

We are going through the worst drought here in outback South Australia since the Arid Recovery Reserve was established. For two years we’ve received only 90 mm of rain (in total), well below the average, and there’s no relief forecast on the horizon. We’re looking into the abyss of a brutally hot and dry summer. Years of less than 100 mm rainfall (in red) have been historically rare in our region but we’ve received only 90 mm in two years over 2018 and 2019.

Our fenced reserve is constantly under threat. Every night, cats and rabbits patrol the outside of the predator-proof fence looking for weaknesses. And unfortunately, the region’s soils work against us, constantly eating the steel in the fence as what must be some of the most corrosive soils in Australia.