Keep an eye out for long-nosed bandicoots

The Mornington Peninsula is known as a destination for nature-lovers because of its diverse landscape, ranging from the wild ocean coastline to the magical hinterland. And of course the landscape provides habitat for a range of wildlife to keep your eye out for.

Long-nosed bandicoots on the southern Peninsula have made the news this year because they’ve been seen in increasing numbers. This has delighted Mornington Peninsula Landcare Network’s newsletter editor Greg Holland. “It was getting very close to long-nosed bandicoots completely disappearing from the Peninsula,” he says.

Greg says long-nosed bandicoots are important to our environment because they’re classified as ecosystem engineers. “They spend a lot of time foraging. They scratch around and shove their nose into the ground, sniffing to see if there’s any bug or insects. If they smell an insect, they dig a little hole to get to it. Those holes stay around for quite a while, so they’ve opened the ground below to oxygen and extra water filtration. The ground is covered with leaf litter and bits of old trees. They’re continually scrambling that around and eventually that gets buried in soil and composts down, cultivating the soil.”

Through Parks Victoria’s biennial camera monitoring program Signs of Healthy Parks, the population trends of long-nosed bandicoots and other small mammals in the Point Nepean and Mornington Peninsula national parks are mapped over time. Camera evidence this year shows long-nosed bandicoots have dispersed over 10km to the southeast. “Not only has their range increased, but they have increased in numbers too due to good habitat conditions providing places for them to hide from predators, providing good food and good habitat to raise kids in.”

The main two predators of the long-nosed bandicoots are foxes and cats. Mornington Peninsula Shire has a 24-hour cat curfew in place. Despite this, the camera monitoring program confirmed sightings of cats out at night. In support of long-nosed bandicoot protection, Parks Victoria’s Southern Peninsula team has secured three years of federal funding to target fox and cat predation through Sorrento, Blairgowrie, and west Rye.

“All ecosystems are interconnected,” Greg says. “Humans are part of the ecosystem and we often forget that. If you unbalance the ecosystem, which humans have been pretty good at doing, then the ecosystem becomes unstable and species die out, and other species you don’t want to grow in number – like foxes and cats – start to multiply.”