Leadbeater's possums — Victoria's faunal emblem, nocturnal acrobats sometimes called "forest fairies" — have been reduced to a rump population so small that ecologists at Zoos Victoria made a drastic call: extract every remaining lowland individual from Yellingbo conservation area, 50km east of Melbourne, and relocate them to a purpose-built refuge at Haining Farm. For a period of weeks, the lowland subspecies was functionally extinct in the wild. The numbers tell the collapse story clearly. From more than 110 individuals recorded in 2003, the Yellingbo lowland population fell to 20-30 over the past decade, then roughly halved again between October and June of this year — losses attributed to predation. By the time the decision was made to intervene, just 13 animals remained. Nine have now been released into the new site, with more scheduled for 2027. Haining Farm is an engineered landscape. Eight years ago, Parks Victoria began converting cleared farmland at the confluence of the Yarra and Don rivers into bespoke possum habitat: 900,000 hand-planted trees, shrubs and grasses, a restored floodplain, and a 3.6km predator-exclusion fence designed to block foxes and feral cats while admitting human visitors. The possums were released in pairs and trios — serial monogamists, each group a territorial household. "Every group is a household and we're trying to build a neighbourhood," says Dr Dan Harley of Zoos Victoria. But the forest is young. It lacks the ancient tree hollows Leadbeater's possums require for denning, and the food web is unproven. Nest boxes, supplementary feeding platforms and branch runways have been installed as stopgaps. Harley estimates 220 hectares of suitable habitat is needed to sustain the lowland subpopulation — far more than Haining Farm alone provides. "We're searching for solutions in altered landscapes where threats remain," he says. "The pathways are not straightforward." The underlying driver is the historic and ongoing loss of large, hollow-bearing trees across Victoria — a legacy of state logging and bushfires that also threatens the larger highland subspecies. Prof David Lindenmayer of the Australian National University, who has studied the species for more than 40 years, says the Yellingbo collapse was foreseeable and preventable. His primary criticism targets the Victorian state government's failure to create the proposed Great Forest National Park in the central highlands ash forests — the species' stronghold. Despite a Labor government promise to "deliver the largest expansion to our public forests in our state's history," Lindenmayer says the government has "done absolutely nothing in terms of increasing the amount of national parks in a substantive way." Other parties offer no better, he adds. The sedge-rich Eucalyptus camphora swamp ecosystem that Yellingbo represents — once widespread, now reduced to a remnant — is itself a threatened ecological community, also critical habitat for the helmeted honeyeater, Victoria's bird emblem. The rescue is real and the ecological engineering is ambitious. But the structural problem — a state government that won't protect old-growth forest at scale — remains untouched. Haining Farm buys time. Whether it buys enough depends on political decisions that no amount of hand-planting can substitute for.
