A wildlife officer carrying a notebook, Donna Treby, walks in barren Australian bushland. She examines a white piece of fabric that is low to the ground and stretched between two metal poles.
DONNA TREBY:
They'll say, 'What are you doing?', 'I'm going off to help save the northern hairy…' and I'd get as far as 'the northern hairy-nosed', and they'd break into laughter and think it's some creature that's being made up.
A vehicle drives at night through bushland. A man stands on top with a spotlight. Night vision footage shows a hairy-nosed wombat trudging across the terrain.
ALAN HORSUP, WILDLIFE OFFICER:
It's nocturnal, it's very secretive. It lives in quite thick bush. It's very conservative.
NARRATOR:
Spotting a northern hairy-nosed wombat is a rare opportunity.
In daylight, wildlife officer Alan Horsup wades through tall, dry grass. He examines a hole in the ground.
ALAN HORSUP:
It's quite a big hole.
NARRATOR:
It's Australia's most endangered species, with only 110 left.
ALAN HORSUP:
I guess if it's feeding out here and it gets a fright, a dingo comes along or whatever…
NARRATOR:
Queensland Parks and Wildlife Officer, Alan Horsup, has spent a third of his life trying to boost their numbers.
ALAN HORSUP:
The biggest thing we can do to save the northern hairy-nosed wombat is to get another population. All our eggs are in one basket at the moment, but we just don't have enough animals, particularly females, to risk splitting it. But all these things take time. So we need to find another piece of land right now.
NARRATOR:
The marsupial's habitat once stretched from North Queensland to northern New South Wales. But a combination of land clearing, competition from sheep and cattle, and predators has seen wombat numbers slowly dwindle. They're now isolated to Central Queensland's Epping Forest National Park, where their habitat is limited to 300 hectares. A 20km dingo fence is being built around the area, although with prolonged drought and the threat of disease, researchers are worried this little known population could still be wiped out.
ALAN HORSUP:
I guess the goal is to have three or four or five populations of northern hairy-nosed wombats in the next 10 to 20 years. And that would be a lot more secure than it is now.
NARRATOR:
Dr Horsup is now asking landholders to help with the ongoing recovery program.
ALAN HORSUP:
There's an agreement called the Nature Conservation Agreement where we can set up nature refuges on people's properties. We could probably have a covenant placed on that piece of land so that it could only be used for wombat conservation in the long run. But we're looking for, I guess, cooperation.
NARRATOR:
But the prospect of one day moving these wombats into a new habitat depends on numbers, and the success of pioneering research into the mammal's reproduction.
A southern hairy-nosed wombat wanders around an outdoor caged area at a research centre.
NARRATOR:
At the Wombat Research Centre in Rockhampton, scientists are finding out more about the breeding patterns of the species' closest cousin — the southern hairy-nosed wombat. They're hoping to develop a captive breeding program with southern hairy-nosed wombats raising northern hairy-nosed babies, allowing northern mums to reproduce more than once in the same breeding season.
ALAN HORSUP:
This is something we've got to work on. There's so many things to work out. We don't even know when the northern hairy-nosed wombat breeds. That's how little we know about it. In all the years we've been trapping, we've had 16 females with pouch young.
In a laboratory, student Glen Druery examines the contents of a Petri dish under a microscope.
NARRATOR:
At the Central Queensland Fertility Clinic, the concept of assisted reproduction has been taken one step further. PhD master's student Glen Druery is experimenting with artificial insemination. He says achieving in-vitro fertilisation is at least 5 or 6 years away.
GLEN DRUERY:
We still know too little about the basic reproductive biology of one of our marsupial species.
NARRATOR:
But researchers aren't giving up. Back at Epping Forest, efforts are under way to learn more about the animal's behaviour.
At Epping Forest, wildlife officers and researchers examine a map, Amongst them are Alan Horsup and Glenn Shimmin.
GLENN SHIMMIN:
See, Alan, this is where the female was yesterday. Out here at porthole 18.
NARRATOR:
Glenn Shimmin is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Adelaide. He's drilled portholes through the ceiling of wombat burrows to record their activity on camera.
A long tube made of PVC, with an orange light at the end, is inserted into another PVC pipe that feeds into the ground.
GLENN SHIMMIN:
By knowing the architecture of the burrow, we know a little bit about social structure and the importance of it for surviving in this environment.
DONNA TREBY:
Oh, there's so many questions. There really is. You'll ask a question and the answer is, 'We just don't know yet.'
NARRATOR:
Wildlife Officer Donna Treby wants to include the species in an information display at the Currumbin Sanctuary on the Gold Coast as a way of raising awareness.
DONNA TREBY:
We'll incorporate it into our graphics and education side of things and the plight of the northerns and what we're attempting to do to help in any small way.
NARRATOR:
She says even if 10% of visitors took an interest, it'd be an achievement.
DONNA:
It just isn't something that's out there enough. We do need a lot more publicity, you know, there's just so much that can be done.
GLEN DRUERY:
We've got 1,000 giant pandas left in the world and it's probably the most famous endangered species, but it's very cute. We've got 110 northern hairy-nosed wombats and a lot of people don't know about it.