WHEN THE GREATER glider was listed nationally as endangered in mid-2022 it joined 90 Australian mammals that were either already extinct or at high risk of extinction. For more than a decade there’d been strident calls for the species to be protected, yet logging of the forests where it lives continues. The glider’s listing means almost a third of the 320 land-based mammal species present at the time of European colonisation are now gone forever or are perilously close to disappearing.
In two decades, the glider’s numbers in some regions had fallen by 80 per cent and it had gone regionally extinct in others, with destruction of its habitat a key factor. Extraordinarily, the koala – arguably the most recognisable symbol internationally of Australian wildlife – joined that same inauspicious group of endangered Australian mammals a few months earlier, in February. Again, habitat destruction was blamed as a major cause for its decline.
The listings didn’t shock the country’s ecologists and conservationists, who’ve reluctantly come to regard such things as par for the course. “It’s really concerning that our list of threatened species and ecological communities is not diminishing; it’s still climbing and rapidly so,” says Dr Euan Ritchie, professor of wildlife
