Fauna monitoring at Hidden Valley Bushland Reserve (in the north of the Merri Creek catchment) has revealed exciting footage of the Slender-tailed Dunnart, a small marsupial that relies on healthy ground cover habitat for the insects it loves to eat.

MCMC’s Upper Merri Landcare Facilitator Chris Cobern set the remote camera and was delighted to find the footage in mid-September. Chris’s work is part of a fauna survey project with members of the Hidden Valley Environment Sub-committee (HVES-c) to get a better understanding of what wildlife occurs in the area.

“We originally had the cameras set to take photographs and recorded what looked like a dunnart species,” says Chris. “Fauna ecologist David DeAngelis was pretty confident it was a Dunnart but said that videos would confirm it, since dunnarts have a unique way of moving compared to the introduced house mouse and similar-sized native animals like antechinus.”

The Subcommittee has been undertaking other citizen science activities at the reserve to record the area’s fauna and flora including woodland birds, native orchids and wildflowers. HVES-c and the Wallan Environment Group have also been rehabilitating bushland nearby in the adjoining rail reserve, with the support of MCMC. Funding has been provided by VicTrack for MCMC to oversee weed control, revegetation and install nesting boxes, working with contractors, the Wallan Scout Group and ANZ staff through our corporate volunteer program.