The Woylie and the Fox

And under the trees I saw Brown Barbaloots
Frisking about in their Barbaloot Suits
As they played in the shade and ate truffula fruits
The Lorax, Dr Seuss 1971.


How quickly things change. One hundred years ago the floor of our great jarrah and wandoo forests was churned up nightly like a freshly ploughed field by millions of small digging animals called Woylies. The Woylie, or Brush-tailed Bettong, spent its nights digging for truffles, which are the underground fruit of mycorrhizal fungi. These fungi attach to the roots of trees and act as root hairs to provide the trees with phosphate, nitrate and other nutrients in return for sugars. They also protect the trees from pathogenic Phytophthora fungi. Woylies and other small digging mammals like bandicoots would spread the mycorrhizal fungi through the forest as well as burying the leaf litter needed by the fungi as a source of food and reducing the fire risk to the forest. The forest was alive with Woylies. Each of an estimated 300 million Woylies in the southern forests of Western Australia would turn over about 6 tonnes of soil a year, aerating the ground and allowing rainwater to infiltrate into the naturally water repellent soils. It was a marvellous three-way symbiosis that sustained a healthy forest. And then in a blink the Woylies were gone, or almost so and the great forests began to sicken and die because of the feral fox.

The feral fox followed the rabbit across the country from Victoria and arrived in Western Australia in the 1930’s. In a few short decades the small forest mammals including Woylies, Numbats, Tammar Wallabies and bandicoots were wiped out. By 1997 the last of the Critically Endangered Woylies were hanging on by the skin of their teeth in a couple of isolated forest pockets containing Gastrolobium Poison Pea. This Pea, which was once widespread through the forests, is deadly to sheep and had been systematically eradicated by sheep farmers for 100 years. It is also deadly to foxes. Western Australian native mammals had evolved a resistance to the fluoroacetate poison in the pea and could survive with high levels of the toxin in their bodies. Foxes were often poisoned when they consumed these animals. This discovery and the consequent use of fluoroacetate in 1080 Poison Baits had enormous implications for the Woylie. Targeted baiting programmes under the Western Shield Fox Control Programme provided effective fox control and the Woylie and his mates are now on the road to recovery in many places. If you want to see this marvelous animal and other fox vulnerable species like Numbats I strongly recommend a visit to the Dryandra Woodland near Narrogin. Here you will experience a shadow of the ecological marvel that once sustained the southern forests and may one day do so again if we can eradicate the fox. I believe that the eradication of the fox is the single greatest ecological priority in Western Australia.

Endless woylies without rest
Dug truffles where they pleased
And protected the great forest
From fire and disease

But then the greedy feral fox
Ate woylies by the score
As they quickly like the pox
Spread from England’s shore

But now we halt this great decline
Of woylie and his mates
By killing off the fox malign
With potent poison baits