Cute, furry and disappearing: how we can keep these critters in our skies

It’s just after midnight in the Greater Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, and ecologists Dr Judy and Dr Peter Smith are slowly shining spotlights through the branches of tall gum trees, hoping to find reflective eyes staring back at them.

Tracking through several 500-metre marked transects between Wombeyan and Jenolan, the couple is surveying one of Australia’s most elusive animals.

It’s an annual expedition, started in 2015 after the ecologists noticed greater gliders were disappearing.

It felt like we were out partying and having fun and someone important was missing.

Dr Judy Smith

“It built over a few years when we’d been taking people out spotlighting and it was harder to find where the greater gliders were, they weren’t there in places we expected them to be,” Peter Smith said.

Dr Peter Smith has been fascinated by native Australian plants and animals since his childhood. Source: SBS News

Are our forests deteriorating?

About the size of a cat with big round ears and long fluffy tails, greater gliders are found along eastern Australia from southern Queensland to the Victorian Central Highlands.

Once widespread, the population has fallen by about 80 per cent in just 20 years, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

The head of WWF’s regenerative country program, Darren Grover, says greater gliders are also an “indicator species”, meaning their rapid decline demonstrates the health of Australian forests is likely deteriorating too.

A greater glider in a patch of old-growth forest south of Brisbane. Source: Supplied / Josh Bowell

“It would be a signal that other species, maybe more obscure, or species that we don’t know so much about, would also have been affected quite significantly, including to the point that they disappear from some parts of our forests,” Grover said.

Increasingly severe bushfire seasons pose a major threat

The CSIRO found the Black Summer bushfires of 2019 burnt more than 24 million hectares of land, mostly forests in southeast Australia.

It impacted many of Australia’s most distinctive and vulnerable species, with up to 3 million animals killed or displaced according to Australia’s most recent

.

The results from Judy and Peter Smith’s

have shown mixed results for the greater gliders three years after the megafires.

Dr Judy Smith has been going out on spotlighting trips since the 1970s. Source: SBS News

“The severely burnt sites where [greater gliders] had been wiped out by the fires, there’s still no sign of recovery,” Peter Smith said.

“But where they had still been present after the fire, their numbers have actually boomed in the last few years.”

The ecologists say it’s a welcome discovery, but are concerned another major fire would be detrimental to the species.

Megafires like Black Summer are supposed to be rare, but organisations such as WWF are already preparing for what could be another major fire season this year.

“The forests of eastern Australia, again, will be the areas that we are most concerned about,” Grover said.

“To have another fire event of the scale and the intensity of Black Summer could be for some species the final death knell sadly.”

Why protecting Australia’s biodiversity is critical

Australia has been described by scientists as one of the most diverse countries in the world when it comes to unique species.

According to Dr Rebecca Spindler from Bush Heritage Australia, the majority of Australia’s flowering plants and mammals are not found anywhere else in the world.

We have so many species that once they’re lost from Australia, there’s nowhere to go, there’s nowhere to be able to bring them back.

Dr Rebecca Spindler

Yet pressures from climate change along with habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and resource extraction, are intensifying a deterioration in Australia’s environment, according to the

Australia holds the world record for the most mammal extinctions, and in data collected for the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s

, ranked third for the number of animal species listed as threatened.

Judy and Peter Smith say preparing for individual fire seasons won’t be enough to stop species like the greater glider from becoming extinct.

Their studies show it’s not just fires impacting the species in the Greater Blue Mountains but more a general trend of rising temperatures associated with climate change.

“You can adapt as best you can but really, the basic thing is to control climate change,” Peter Smith said.

“If we don’t do that, whatever other actions we take aren’t going to be successful in the long term.”

A call for faster action on climate change

The ecologists want to see faster action taken to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions and Spindler agrees the country needs to pick up the pace.

“I see a great deal of hope but I also see a great deal of urgency, we all need to act much more effectively now, government, non-government and individuals,” Spindler said.

“We are profoundly reliant on the health of ecosystems to maintain a healthy thriving human society as well.”

Spindler says this fire season will likely be a preview of what’s to come and innovative approaches to conservation will be crucial for the long-term protection of Australia’s biodiversity.

Unlike other gliders, the membrane in the greater glider only goes to the elbow. To glide they tuck their hands under their chin and push out their elbows. Source: Supplied / Sami Raines

“It’s really essential that we start changing that thinking but also developing the tools that we really need to understand when we need to intervene,” Spindler said.

For Judy Smith, the loss of native species feels personal.

“I find it quite gutting that our grandchildren won’t see what we’ve seen, very gutting,” she said.

If you come across injured or dead wildlife during bushfires, you should report it to a local wildlife organisation such as WIRES, which can be contacted on 1300 094 737.

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