Greater glider possums have returned to the Royal National Park near Sydney nearly two decades after huge bushfires forced them out.
The 1994 blaze destroyed the park’s eucalyptus canopy and the tree-dwelling marsupial, that grows to nearly a metre, has been missing ever since. However, a series of confirmed sightings in the last few weeks has caused great excitement.
”Greater gliders never come to ground and need a continuous forest canopy to move about,” Debbie Andrew, a biologist with the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, told the Sydney Morning Herald. “That’s why it’s important we continue to protect the moist forest wildlife corridors between Royal National Park and the Illawarra escarpment.”
The gliders spend their lives nibbling eucalyptus buds at the top of big gum trees. They can glide up to 50 metres between trees but, in places, the fires left areas of skeletal trees many kilometres wide, forming barriers that would have trapped and starved survivors.
The SMH reports that fauna surveys in 1996, 1997 and 2010 found no trace of the marsupial. It is not clear if the glider is a descendant of survivors that endured lean times in the park, or if it migrated along a treetop corridor from the Illawarra.
More surveys are being organised to see how many gliders are back in the park
