Frame by frame, the wildlife living on a Queensland cattle station are revealed. A long-eared bilby is caught mid-hop on a gibber plain, the name given to the densely packed rocks of the desert pavement. The eyes of an endangered kowari – a palm-sized carnivorous marsupial with a bottle-brush tail – glow an eerie white. A feral cat stalks past and a curious dingo eyeballs the trail camera, one of eight planted on a North Australian Pastoral Company (Napco) property in the channel country as part of a joint biodiversity project with Australian Wildlife Conservancy.
Napco, which manages a 6m hectare cattle estate across northern Australia, first invited AWC ecologists to undertake an ecological assessment on its western Queensland properties in 2020. The ecologists recorded 51 bird species, 10 reptile, seven mammal and six types of frog.
