To recover and restore Kangaroo Island after last year’s devastating wildfires, Australian authorities are working to remove harmful, feral cats.

Kangaroo Island, Australia’s third-largest island, provides refuge for a variety of threatened and endemic species. In the summer of 2020, Australia and Kangaroo Island were hit with large and deadly brushfires. A total of 210,000 ha burned including 64 percent of reserves and protected bushland patches. The devastation included a loss of around 70 percent of the habitat, leaving wildlife even more susceptible to predation by feral cats and other threats. As a result, restoring the island has become a top priority.

The remaining vegetated areas left across Kangaroo Island are now considered highly important for conservation steps. Protecting and alleviating threats to the remaining wildlife is a top priority for the island’s recovery. Without competition for food and resources, feral cat populations have reached numbers close to 5000, and are known to prey heavily on the island’s native wildlife, and are also vectors of parasitic diseases including sarcosporidiosis and toxoplasmosis.

The Kangaroo Island Echidna is an endemic and threatened subspecies of the mainland Australian species. Known as “ecosystem engineers”, echidnas play a crucial role in the environment through digging that helps influence plant growth and species diversity. Unfortunately, young echidnas living on are extremely vulnerable due to predation by feral cats.

The Australian Government’s National Land care program along with the Kangaroo Island Council and Kangaroo Island Landscape Board have begun removing feral cats from the Island, beginning with the Dudley Peninsula on the eastern side of the island. The site is an ideal place to begin removal because it is joined to the island by a 3km wide isthmus that can be easily fenced. While funding for expanded eradication efforts is being sought and allocated, a feral cat-proof barrier fence is being placed across the isthmus. The team is utilizing a range of techniques including trapping, shooting with thermal equipment at night, baiting in select areas, detector dogs, and Felixer Grooming Traps. Monitoring for incursions in areas already eradicated is being done by nighttime survey and camera traps coupled with an Artificial Intelligence image recognition system (eVorta).

“Kangaroo Island represents a unique opportunity for feral cat eradication as the vast majority of islanders are pro-eradication because of the benefits it will bring to primary producers and the protection of the islands endemic and threatened wildlife,” says James Smith who is leading the project.

Once completed, the eradication will benefit local livestock populations because diseases spread by feral cats are much more prevalent on Kangaroo Island than on mainland Australia. These diseases (Toxoplasmosis and Sarcosporidiosis) are known to lower fertility and create cysts on the muscle tissues of sheep, cattle and pigs. Sarcosporidiosis in particular has had a large effect on Kangaroo Island’s sheep meet industry infecting as much as 70 percent of the sheep on the island, resulting in a loss of around two million dollars each year.

Once rid of feral cats, Kangaroo Island will become the largest inhabited cat-free island in the world. James and his team hope to accomplish the task by 2030. Despite the devastation caused by the fires, conservationists are optimistic that the removal of feral cats will help to secure a future for Kangaroo Island’s native wildlife.

Featured photo: Coastline of Kangaroo Island.