(unless otherwise noted)
“She’s about 500m from here,” says Patrick Giumelli. Patrick, a rewilding program ecologist from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), is tracking platypuses in the Royal National Park, which lies just south of Sydney. While the park—which coincidentally is the world’s second-oldest national park—used to have platypuses in its waterways, there have been no confirmed sightings for decades. Now, though, the VHF antenna which Patrick waves about emits clicking sounds, indicating that a tagged female is nearby. She is one of six females released a couple of weeks earlier, in mid-May 2023, with four males being released into the national park about a week earlier.
These unique egg-laying monotremes—relocated from the New South Wales Bombala and Dalgety regions—will be monitored regularly in their new environment, to track progress or any developments, especially if they reproduce successfully. If so, it would be a vital step for a species that’s experienced a significant habitat loss; roughly a quarter has disappeared in the past
