Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife

20/08/2026

1520 seedlings planted! 🌱

20/08/2026

With restoration work comes a lot of science. National science week is here, and we're sharing the sience of plant selection and why species matter.

A Glossy Black-Cockatoo can starve in a perfectly healthy forest. Not a damaged one. A healthy one. It just has to be the wrong trees.

Frogs are a completely different puzzle. They don't eat the plants at all. They need them for cover, and they need the gaps between them just as much, because basking in the sun raises their body temperature and helps them fight off a fungal disease.

Plant too little cover and there's nowhere to hide.
Plant too much and there's nowhere to warm up.

We've written up what actually goes into choosing what to plant, and who it's for 👇

http://bit.fnpw.org.au/4gGMv5S

17/08/2026

Good news for anyone who has been avoiding the yard work. 🍂

Researchers near Canberra tipped 2,000 tonnes of dead wood onto the ground and waited.

Nine years later, they counted more lizard species. And the more logs they'd put down, the more lizards turned up.

It turns out the bush we think looks unkempt is the bush that's actually working. The fallen branches. The leaf litter. The scrappy prickly stuff you'd normally rip out. All of it is somebody's house.

It's National Science Week, so we've written up a few things about the Australian bush that genuinely surprised us. Including the seed that refuses to sprout until it smells smoke, and why a tree you plant this winter won't have a hollow ready for wildlife until the 2200s.

Go on. Learn something excellent about your own backyard 👇

The science of restoring Australian bushland, and why tidy is the enemy. Read more about how we're bringing back the bush.

14/08/2026

We love to see our program's impact on the ground!

12/08/2026

A cat-sized marsupial with a serious attitude problem (affectionate), a tail longer than its own body, and tiny "thumbs" on its back feet built for scrambling up rock faces like a pint-sized free climber.

That's the Northern Quoll for you.

Across the rocky escarpments and eucalypt woodlands of Northern Australia, they've spent generations keeping the ecosystem in check, hunting insects, small mammals and anything else that crosses their path after dark.

Wildest fact? Most male quolls don't survive past their first breeding season. It's mums who raise the young, and newborns are born in litters far bigger than the eight teats available, so it's a race from day one. Australian wildlife rarely does "gentle."

So, what's this little battler up against? Cane toads, mostly. One bite of a toad's poison and a quoll can be gone in minutes. Add feral cats and changed fire patterns, and numbers have dropped hard in parts of their range.

But there's hope. In pockets where cane toads haven't reached and rocky refuge habitat stays protected, quoll numbers are holding steady, even bouncing back.

It comes down to safe, connected habitat so populations aren't cut off from each other, fewer feral predators, and smart fire management that keeps their homes intact.

04/08/2026

For 85 years, we believed greater gliders could sail up to 100 metres through the forest, about twice the length of an Olympic pool. New research from the Australian National University has measured them properly for the first time, and the real average is closer to 19 metres.

Dr Ana Gracanin and her team tracked 41 glides across five forests in New South Wales, following these nocturnal marsupials through the canopy at night with thermal cameras and lasers.

What they found: for every metre a greater glider drops, it travels about one metre sideways. A yellow-bellied glider covers twice that.

So Australia's largest gliding marsupial turns out not to be the greatest glider in the forest.

Greater gliders are endangered, and they depend on old, hollow-bearing trees and on a canopy that stays connected, tree to tree, so they can move to feed and find mates. I

f they can't glide as far as we assumed, then every gap in the forest, every cleared patch and every road, is a bigger barrier than we knew.

The good news is that better data means better protection. We now know that wildlife corridors and canopy links need to be planned around the glides these animals actually make, not the record leaps we imagined.

Keep the forest joined up, and the gliders can keep doing what they have done for millions of years.

Protecting the greater glider starts with protecting the forests it calls home, and that's the work we're here for. 🌿

29/07/2026

Superb fairy-wren males court their partners by presenting them with bright yellow petals.

Blue-tongue lizards will clear your snails for free.

Blue-banded bees shiver at 350 beats a second to shake pollen loose, a trick introduced honeybees never learned.

Every one of these can happen in a suburban backyard. Some of it can happen on a balcony three storeys up.

We tend to picture habitat as somewhere far away and hard to reach. But a quarter-acre block, a shared courtyard, even three pots on a rail can be the next safe step for an animal trying to cross the suburb.

Plant the right natives and the guest list turns up: nectar-feeding birds, native bees, and microbats putting away half their body weight in mosquitoes a night.

Our new blog has the science, the delightfully odd animal facts, and the easiest possible place to begin (hint: one local plant, and a bit of garden mess you're finally allowed to leave). It'll also point you to the community-led nurseries growing exactly the right plants for your patch.

Have a read, plant a native, then go say hello to a blue-tongue 🤗

Your backyard, balcony or courtyard can be genuine habitat. Simple ways to help Australian native species, starting with one local plant.

28/07/2026

National Tree Day is one day a year. Bringing places like this back is the rest of it.

The FNPW team recently swapped the office for gumboots at Tempe Lands in Sydney's Inner West, a site with one of the stranger histories you'll find in the city: a shale quarry in the 1920s, a greyhound racing track in the 1940s, then a rubbish tip until council remediation turned it back into wetlands and parkland in 2005.

Today Tempe Lands holds one of the largest reconstructed saltmarshes in the southern hemisphere, and a working wetland that filters stormwater before it reaches the Cooks River. Our team spent the day clearing invasive weeds and planting natives, giving the site's superb fairy-wrens, blue-tongue lizards and kookaburras a bit more room to thrive.

A tree in the ground is a small act with a long tail. Tempe Lands is what that looks like two decades on.

27/07/2026

21/07/2026

25,000 native plants, grown in the Forktree Nursery, now on their way to Raukkan on the Coorong.

We backed plant production this year: months of seed collection and propagation from The Forktree Project team, now heading home to Country with the Ngarrindjeri Community. More to come as these seedlings go in the ground! 🌱