While I was mowing my lawn two weeks ago, I noticed some disturbed soil at the edge of the lawn under a Lilly Pilly tree. I took a closer look and instantly recognized the inverted conical digging pit of a bandicoot. I was a bit surprised at this because I’m in a pretty built-up area, although there is a railway line behind the houses across the road and a banana farm behind that. But as far as forest goes, there is very little. Just a row of gum trees alongside the railway and a few beside the creek about 200 metres down the road. Also, my back yard has a fence all the way around. And if his fence can contain my Houdini-like kids then I can’t imagine anything that can’t fly getting in. So I installed a trail camera near to where the digging pits were. I even enlisted my daughter as a research assistant giving her the task of checking the video and images. Sure enough, after only one night of monitoring, a bandicoot appeared in the images. My daughter named her Sapphire.

I was curious as to how Sapphire was getting into the yard so I inspected the fence-line all the way around, and indeed I found a little hole that not just Sapphire, but also a mouse, and a buff-banded rail, were using to get into the yard. The location of the hole suggests that Sapphire is crossing the road at night to get to the yard. This is risky, although a lot less risky at night. So, it looks like bandicoots are thriving in this peri-urban environment which is a very different landscape to the forest in which I’m used to seeing them. There’s also a thriving population of brush turkeys here and I see them far more frequently in the suburbs that I do in the forest. This is interesting in that it suggests that there are divergent populations of turkeys and bandicoots with different strategies for finding food and shelter. Those in the forest following traditional paths and those in the suburbs adapting to human-dominated landscapes with very different threats such as dogs, cats and cars (although those first two can be found in the forest but at much lower numbers).  Looked at in this framework, we can see that these animals have been adapting to some rapidly changing landscapes over the past 200 years and it gives us an indication of the sorts of characteristics that will define which species persist through and beyond the Anthropocene.