A few weeks ago, Backyard Zoology had a wonderful article about finding a bandicoot in her backyard. What good fortune to have these amazing creatures around us in the Illawarra. Each of us who has a little patch of ground to play with can help provide safe havens and habitat for local fauna, including bandicoots.
The bandicoot to be seen around the Illawarra is the Long-nosed Bandicoot (Perameles nasuta) and it lives mostly in rainforests, tall eucalypt forests and grassy woodlands.
The Illawarra escarpment is the most likely place where you might encounter a Long-nosed Bandicoot, thanks to the relatively large areas of remnant and recovering vegetation that is suitable for this species. So if you live anywhere along the escarpment, particularly in the upper reaches or near the State Conservation Area, you may have areas that are home to bandicoots, or could be adjusted to host them.
Some useful things to know about these bandicoots. They live in our local forests and eat the very wide range of foods that occur there, such as fungi (including underground truffle-type fungi), insect larvae and insects, fruit and seeds, leaves, and even small lizards.
So recreating the forest habitat that contains all these elements will provide a natural bandicoot larder.
As well as planting a wide range of local plants, you can also provide habitat by leaving fallen logs and branches to rot down and be consumed by fungi, leaving areas of mixed meadows for foraging, letting native grasses go to seed rather than mowing, and protecting some or all of your garden from domestic pets or other animals.
Long-nosed Bandicoots are nocturnal, so you're much more likely to see them moving around at night. Keeping night lighting to a minimum is beneficial for the animals, however. If you want to go bandi-spotting in your backyard, the best option is to cover your torch light with red cellophane or a red filter, as this disturbs them less.
In the light of day, signs of bandicoot activity include conical depressions or holes in the ground where they've inserted their long, narrow snout to extract insects or fungi.
The wide range of trees, shrubs, vines and groundcovers that form the forests of the escarpment can be mixed and matched in escarpment gardens. The Growing Illawarra Natives website, which I help manage, provides guidance on suitable species, and lets you select plants that meet your aesthetic preferences as well.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, the Long-nosed Bandicoot was common across the Illawarra Region, and would have benefited from Dharawal people's care for Country. With the increasing urbanisation of the coastal plain in particular, the species has become more or less extinct.
Norm Robinson recorded them in Yallah, just south of Dapto, in the 1990s, but found that they had become locally extinct in the Keiraville and Gwynneville areas. As West Dapto is urbanised, it is likely that the Long-nosed Bandicoot will struggle unless significant areas of suitable habitat are retained.
Larger intact areas such as Saddleback Mountain would still retain good populations. If you're lucky enough to live in that area, protecting and restoring as much native vegetation as possible will benefit bandicoots and, of course, many other other native animal species.