The report asserted that Australia leads the world with 34 such species wiped out and a further 74 land mammal species under threat. With time running out for many species, this February, Australia’s federal parliament released a report that confirmed that cats were the primary drivers of mammal extinctions in the country. Newhaven is on the front line in Australia’s fight to protect its native animals from cats. Inside the fence, threatened and reintroduced native species such as the red-tailed phascogale and western quoll are making a comeback. The fence at Newhaven was completed in March 2018 and the exclosure-an area built to keep unwanted animals out-was declared feral-predator-free the following year. Left unmanaged, cats would continue to eat their way through much of the rest of the Australian fauna.” “Many mammal species that survived have been reduced to a minute fragment of their former range and population size, are now threatened and continue to decline. “Australia's biodiversity is special and distinctive, forged over millions of years of isolation,” says Woinarski. At the sanctuary’s heart is a fenced, 36-square-mile reserve from where Ellis and her colleagues from the Australian Wildlife Conservancy removed feral cats-escaped pet cats or the descendants of cats that came to Australia aboard the convict transportation ships-to create an area where native species could recover. With its 23 ecosystems, Newhaven-an area in northwest Australia about one-third the size of the U.S.’ Yellowstone National Park-encompasses 1,023 square miles of sand dunes, salt lakes and red-rock escarpments. On a yearly average, an estimated 2.8 million feral cats roam the continent, but according to John Woinarski, a conservation biologist at Charles Darwin University and co-author of the book Cats in Australia: Companion & Killer, this number can balloon to 5.6 million in years of heavy rainfall. Within 70 years, cats had spread throughout the country cats now inhabit 99.9 percent of Australia’s total land area. As she puts it, out there, “There are no stories without cats”.Ĭats arrived in Australia with the first European settlers in 1788. As an Aboriginal Warlpiri ranger at Newhaven Wildlife Sanctuary in central Australia’s Great Sandy Desert, she knows what they can do to Australia’s native animals: In just over 230 years since their introduction to the continent, feral cats have wiped out more than a dozen species that lived alongside Ellis’s people for millennia and pushed others to the brink of extinction.
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