The Lesser Bilby
The Lesser Bilby is now considered to be extinct, the last reported official siting being back in 1931.
However, from this report it seems to have been moderately abundant on Cooncherie Station in the summer of 1932, where Hedley Herbert Finlayson collected a dozen specimens. These were all caught by an Aboriginal helper who ‘seldom returned without 2 or 3 after a morning’s work and I suspect many found their way to the cooking fires as well’. These were, however, the last to be collected alive.
People were not concerned about animal extinction in those days, nor did they understand the delicate balance of the natural ecology (how one animal or plant species affects another).
A decline or increase in numbers or quantity of that plant or animal can change the ecology of a whole area.
The lesser bilby was an inhabitant of Australia’s driest deserts, and recorded as a living animal on just a handful occasions between its discovery in 1887 and its being officially declared extinct in the 1950s.
Who or what were its natural predators?
The Aboriginal man who caught the Lesser Bilbies that morning for food was not to blame. The indiginous population caught animals for perhaps more than 50,000 thousand years in Australia. So what went wrong?
Who is to blame?
It is not anyones fault but was due to an ignorance of how things worked. The Aboriginal population lived in harmony with nature, they lived on a paleolithic diet of fruit, nuts, berries, leafy greens and animal meat. They walked around. They did not farm the same land in the same place or chew and destroy the seed part of plants as they knew it had to go back to the earth to grow a new plant so that later when they returned it would be there.
This system worked for 40,000 to 50,000 thousand years.
The European farming methods worked in Europe but they did not work in Australia. The European settlers did not understand Aboriginal culture and tried to enforce their ideas on the local population.
Many Aboriginals embraced the new ideas, not realising what would happen to the ecology. No one realised. No one studied ecology in 1930. There were botanists who studied and catalogued new species but no one really understood how one species affects another species.
The Aboriginal habit of controlled burning of small areas kept things in balance. When they began to wear clothes and live in the cities or work as station hands, or died of diseases they were not used to, there were not enough people continuing to do things like back-burning the excess dry vegetation.
When they stopped eating certain animals and started eating other animals instead, the animals they stopped eating reproduced to excess and ate too much of other things. This (and other factors) upset the balance of the ecology.
Back to Australian Desert Animals
Link to a site about Indigenous Australians
