On Wangkumara and Maljangapa Country in Sturt National Park it’s 5:30AM and I’m on my knees in the red dirt, pulverising a mandarin in a sandwich bag. An immense and deep orange sky coats the desert flowers amber as they gently unfurl to start their days. Ten ecologists-to-be huddle in the desert wind, watching eagerly as Wild Desert’s lead ecologist, Dr Rebecca West, cradles an endangered dusky hopping mouse against the warmth of her chest. She offers it a sip of my freshly juiced mandarin and releases it amongst the grass. Wait. Did my forgotten, bottom-of-the-backpack mandarin/discarded sandwich bag just help tackle the extinction crisis? OK, maybe my ego got away from me there, but it did get me thinking about our ecological toolkit.
When I started research for this piece, months before visiting the desert, Fiona York from GECO (Goongerah Environment Centre) in Victoria had told me how technology has changed the way we find and protect native species. She described that in the 90s this was mainly done using hair traps. If you wanted to find an endangered species—and once found, logging in the area would often be forced to stop—you’d roll up a bit of plastic with some double-sided tape and some bait, then something would crawl through and leave some of its fur. You’d then drive the sample to Canberra or Melbourne and wait months for the lab results … only to learn it was the fibre from someone’s woollen jumper.
As she spoke, I smirked with wide-eyed, millennial disbelief—hair traps sounded rudimentary and
