Fight to save the Otways Tiger

Otways scientists have been working to find out more about the Tiger Quoll with only a small number left in Australia in the hope of discovering more in the wild, according to the Geelong Advertiser.

The Cape Otway Conservation Ecology Centre last week opened a sanctuary to house three young quolls as part of a program designed to protect the endangered species, the largest remaining carnivorous marsupials on the Australian mainland.

Program leader Dr Kellie Leigh said that unless action was taken, the species may face the same fate as its cousin, the Tasmanian Tiger, which became extinct 75 years ago.

"There used to be quolls all throughout Victoria but now there aren't many left, and traditional survey methods aren't detecting them because they're at such low densities," she said.

Baby quolls make a Spring entrance

What do you call a couple of handfuls of baby quolls? A quoggle? A quadrella? Well, technically it's a litter of joeys - no alliterations unfortunately!

Australian Geographic has a lovely story about Wildlife Sydney in Darling Harbour which has just welcomed its latest Spring babies, the offspring of the park's spotted tail quolls.

Baby quoll no more than a handful

Staff at the Ballarat Wildlife Park are busy giving some tender loving care to a baby quoll abandoned by her mother.

Named “Flare” the 82- day old quoll has quickly become attached to her keepers and is improving rapidly from her ordeal.

A Ballarat Wildlife Park spokesperson said Flare had taken to the bottle and was even beginning to walk around.

“I don’t know why she was abandoned,” the spokesperson said.

“But things are looking positive though, there is still the possibility she may not come through.”

Quolls, she said, belonged to the Tasmanian Devil family and were found mainly in Tasmania.

Meet Badger, the Quoll-tracking dog!

Colac district conservationists hope a dog could be the key to saving Australia’s tiger quoll population.

Employees of the Cape Otway Centre for Conservation Ecology have been busy training two-year-old Badger, the tiger quoll detection dog, to locate scats from the endangered tiger quoll population.

Program leader Kellie Leigh is training Badger, an Australian shepherd, with the aid of three tiger quolls kept on site in a custom-built sanctuary named the “Qualloseum”.

Staff feed the quolls a varied diet and the quolls, each of which is about 12 months old, provide fresh scats for Badger’s training program.

Conservationists hope new detection methods will help find populations of native tiger quolls in the Otways.

Cape Otway Centre for Conservation Ecology program leader Kellie Leigh hopes Badger the dog will help conservationists find native tiger quoll populations around the Otways.

Ms Leigh said tiger quoll numbers in the Otways were so low that environmental authorities, who use remote cameras to survey the animals, had not detected the marsupial predator for “about seven years”.