A rare animal that was extinct first

The Mountain Pygmy-possum, or Burramys, is a mouse-sized, nocturnal marsupial that lives in boulder-strewn slopes of the Victorian and NSW alpine region, particularly in areas of treeless vegetation dominated by dense shrubs including the fleshy-fruited Mountain Plum-pine.  It feeds on invertebrates  fleshy fruit and seeds during the spring and summer months and hibernates during winter - the only Australian marsupial to do so. Burramys is classified as critically endangered in Victoria, endangered in Australia, it is listed under the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act (FFG), and is classified as endangered in IUCN Red Book.

The first non-Aboriginal to see a Burramys was a 28 year old South African palaeontologist named Robert Broom and all he saw was a small collection of fossilised bones - six jaws and some skull fragments - that had been collected, in 1894, from the Wombeyan Caves, about 100 km south-west of Sydney.  Although he wasn't an expert on marsupials (he would go on to become a world authority on early hominids) he knew enough to recognise that some of the teeth were unusually large with distinct serrations and ridges which were unlike those of other marsupials, and he wrote the first description of the new species the following year.  In the absence of a full skeleton Broom thought that the fossil was of a small kangaroo and thus the name Burramys parvus (from 'burra' - thought to be one of the Aboriginal words for kangaroo : 'mys' - a mouse : parvus - small) was coined.

This discovery went virtually unrecognised for over 50 years until a Western Australian zoologist, David Ride, and a field naturalist from Victoria, Norman Wakefield, revived the interest.  David Ride re-examined Broom's specimens, including some that Broom hadn't looked at, with more advanced techniques and then prepared a new description for Burramys which he now determined was a small possum.  In 1960, Norm Wakefield, with the help of another Victorian zoologist, Bob Warneke, found bones of Burramys in a cave near Buchan, in eastern Victoria.  These bones, although old, weren't fossils.  Some were of animals that had been alive a few thousand years ago and others were much more recent, perhaps only a few hundred years old.  For the first time it occurred to biologists that Burramys might still be living in Australia.

Six years later Burramys took living form.  Small rat-like animals had been noticed entering a ski lodge on Mount Higginbotham in the Victorian Alps, seeking food and shelter.  One of the more observant of the lodge's residents realised that the animal wasn't a rat and decided to catch it.  Later he took the live animal to Bob Warneke, of Fisheries and Wildlife in Melbourne, who immediately recognised it as a new species of pygmy-possum and shortly afterwards made the historic identification.  Burramys quickly became a celebrity in the Australian zoological community and the hunt was on to find more specimens.

Over the next 13 years extensive live trapping in the high country of Victoria and NSW realised about 30 or so individual animals.  About a third of these were from two locations, 10 km apart, north-east of Mt Kosciuszko in NSW.  In Victoria, after a survey effort of about 40,000 trap-nights (a trap-night is one trap laid for one night) a single animal was captured from Mount Kaye on the Bogong High Plains, and the rest were from Mount Higginbotham, very near to the ski lodge where it was first seen.  Clearly Burramys was very rare, very hard to catch or scientists weren't looking in the right places. 

In 1979 an ecological survey team made up of zoologists from Fisheries and Wildlife and botanists from the Victorian Herbarium combined forces in an effort to determine the habitat of Burramys in Victoria.  The starting point was Mt Higginbotham, where the biologists set up a fine trapping and vegetation monitoring grid immediately around known locations for the animal.  They also set up a much larger, and more widely-spaced, survey grid which covered most of the ecosystem types in the region.  At each of these sites live traps were laid and botanical data were collected.  An analysis of the floristic and structural composition of the vegetation at sites where Burramys was captured, compared to those where they were not, revealed a close association between the animal and vegetation dominated by a few shrubs species, including the Mountain Plum-pine, that grew on rocky-boulder slopes.  When this kind of vegetation was later targetted for selective trapping the success rate was between ten and forty times that of non-targetted sites in the alps.  It seemed that biologists now knew where to look for Burramys.

Since 1979 the number of locations where Burramys has been found has increased in both states, but the populations are never large and the habitat is very restricted.  Local disturbances such as fire, roadworks, buildings, changes to drainage, all have an adverse effect on Burramys numbers and some innovative solutions have been required to mitigate these changes.  One of the better known of these came about after it was found that female Burramys tended to stay in the preferred vegetation, higher on the mountain, whereas males would roam down to lower altitudes in search of food.  After plans were made for a road to be constructed between the male and female populations, biologists were concerned that the males wouldn't be able return to the breeding grounds for mating.  When it comes to problems of this type biologists tend to think in terms of habitat conservation and behavioural manipulation, while engineers tend to think in terms of building solutions.  In this case the two came together rather well with the construction of a so-called tunnel-of-love beneath the road, which was filled with boulders of the same size as those on the original slopes.  The preferred native shrubs were also encouraged to grow up to the edge of the tunnel to increase the appearance of the natural habitat.  This construction-for-conservation program was a success and the males moved through tunnel seemingly without stress.

New locations continued to be found for Burramys into the 1990s, the most recent of which is small patches of vegetation surrounding the Mt Buller ski resort about 80 km west of Mt Higginbotham.  It seems fitting for Burramys that the original record in this area came not from the capture of a live animal but from the identification of Burramys hair found in predator droppings.