Fixing the Cat-astrophe!

It’s a well-known fact that feral cats have contributed to the extinction of several Australian bird and mammal species, whilst threatening the existence of many more.

Though being an island, from off an island of another island—many of our supporters and guests generally assume we’d be immune to their onslaught, right? Unfortunately, not! Bruny Island suffers the same catastrophic effects as the rest of the country.

Having witnessed several feral cats traverse our sanctuaries over the years—whilst surveying many more on film through our wildlife camera monitoring—we implement cat management operations on our nature sanctuaries as part of our wildlife habitat initiative to break the national/world trend of species decline.

So learning of Kingborough Council and UTAS Bruny Island Cat Control Project, we were delighted to support such a crucial undertaking by allowing the use of two of our nature accommodation sanctuaries as key habitat monitoring sites, so much so, we’ll also be part funding the research into discovering the distribution of feral cats across the entire island—along with many other investigative facets (including Eastern Quoll distribution)—in an attempt to better understand feral cat behavioural patterns, hunting techniques, ecological impacts, etc., and subsequently improve *everyone’s* cat management procedures and control-results into the future.

We’re extremely excited to be supporting such a fabulous program and honestly can’t wait for the invaluable insight— although, we’re obviously trepidatious about the probable severity of the research findings —which will allow for the implementation of new and improved measures to kerb the harrowing impact on our beloved wildlife: such as the Eastern barred and Southern brown bandicoot; Forty-spotted pardalote; Swift parrot; Hooded plover; and many more.