Nicolas worked as camera and director on this assignment, photographing and filming the greater gliders, the conservation detection dog and the people working to find and protect them.
Greater gliders are among the world’s largest gliding mammals, listed as Threatened under Queensland and national legislation. They live high in the canopy and move at night, which makes them difficult to find, so the fieldwork drew on a detection dog trained to pick up the scent of greater glider scats. Working with its handler across private properties, the dog helps locate signs of gliders that would otherwise be easily missed.
Almost half of Australia’s threatened species live on privately owned land, which makes private property central to meaningful conservation. This project brought together four South East Queensland local councils, alongside landowners and researchers, to understand how landholders noticing nature on their own properties can strengthen it.
Land for Wildlife South East Queensland and James Cook University researchers ran the work as part of the National Environmental Science Program’s Resilient Landscapes Hub.