Rewilding Australia’s Private Land

So there’s this guy Bill. Bill’s a farmer. He’s in his 70s and he’s a big, silver-haired, salt-of-the-earth type. He doesn’t have an ounce of pretension about him. Bill owns a farm in Northern Victoria and he loves every brown, dry piece of it. He has this bird on his property. It looks like a little quail (but is genetically very different—we’ll get to that in a second), and it spends its days wandering around the plains, as ground-dwelling birds tend to do. It’s called, rather accurately, the plains-wanderer.

You’ve probably never heard of the plains-wanderer (Bill certainly hadn’t), but it family. To put that in perspective, we humans have more genetically in common with gorillas and chimps than plains-wanderers do with any other bird in the world.