Eastern quoll to be reintroduced to Bathurst as breeding program begins

Australia Broadcast Center

31-05-2025

Joel and Andrea Little met at a wildlife sanctuary more than 20 years ago as part of an effort to save the eastern quoll.
The carnivorous native species had been extinct on mainland Australia since 1963, with small pockets of the animal remaining in Tasmania.
The pair met in 2002 and spent the next five years caring for dozens of eastern quolls at the Little River Earth Sanctuary near Geelong in Victoria.
"A lot of the time it was just Andrea and I working together and we really bonded over this species," Joel said.
Andrea and Joel worked on a private program reintroducing the eastern quoll to the wild and creating feral-free zones for the animals.
"We bred them in cages and then released them into a big area where they don't get served their food so they have to hunt," Andrea said.
"They had a normal life but within a secured area with no cats or foxes."
For Andrea, who had travelled from East Germany to backpack through Australia when she met Joel, it was a surreal experience.
"I just wanted to come and see kangaroos and platypuses, I had only really heard of them," she said.
"Coming from East Germany where we couldn't really travel for a long time to other countries … it was always a dream."
Before working with the quolls, Andrea had been volunteering at a wildlife park in the Adelaide Hills when the opportunity arose to go to the Little River Earth Sanctuary.
The eastern quoll is born with its white spots before growing fur and spends up to 10 weeks living in its mother's pouch.
The carnivorous marsupial is known to eat insects, grubs, rabbits, rats and small birds.
More than two decades on, the Littles are involved in the Tasmanian Quoll Conservation Program (TQCP), a national initiative to return eastern quolls to the wild.
The national program was launched in 2008 and quolls were rewilded on the mainland for the first time in 2018 at Booderee National Park on the NSW South Coast.
The animals were killed by predators and in April 2024 another group of 19 quolls were released inside a fox-proof fence.
The Littles' wildlife sanctuary near Bathurst, in the New South Wales central-west, is home to four of the marsupials that will be bred and then released.
"Then they go out into this big area where they can learn about what to look for and how to deal with something that might bite back.
"That is often what has been missing from a lot of conservation programs where you breed them in captivity and then release them into the wild, it is a step too far."
Along with releasing the species into Boodoree National Park, the TQCP initiative has placed quolls in fenced enclosures at Mount Rothwell near Geelong, where Joel and Andrea used to work.
To support these projects, the TQCP maintains captive populations of the eastern quoll across sanctuaries in Tasmania and on the mainland.
Eventually it is hoped the eastern quolls will end up in the wild around Bathurst.
"That is a pretty good feeling."
For Andrea, working with the eastern quoll again has provided an opportunity to come "full circle" with the species and her family.
"It is a great feeling to have them and to show our son as well what the animal is and how Joel and I met," she said.
Joel and Andrea's wildlife sanctuary also contains other endangered and threatened species such as the parma wallaby, bandicoot and bettong that they hope to assist with breeding efforts in the future.