Numbats are bouncing back!

Good news doesn't get cuter than this; numbats are bouncing back!

The numbat has been reclassified from *Endangered* to *Near Threatened* on the IUCN Red List. It's a moment of real hope, and a tribute to decades of work by conservationists, scientists, land managers, and volunteers who refused to let this extraordinary little marsupial disappear.

This is great news, but we want to be clear, the numbat is not saved. It is still one of Australia's rarest mammals, with an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 individuals left in the wild. The species now survives across just 0.04% of the range it once called home, a fraction of the woodlands and shrublands that stretched across southern Australia before feral predators and habitat loss took hold.

The change in status reflects how far we've come, not that the danger has passed. In the late 1970s numbat numbers had crashed to around 300. That we now count them in the thousands is thanks to sustained predator control, predator-proof havens, captive breeding and careful translocations that have re-established populations one by one. Every one of those gains is hard-won, and every one of them is fragile.

So we're celebrating, and we're asking everyone who cares about this animal to keep going. The numbat's recovery shows what's possible when people commit to a species over the long term. Let's make sure this milestone becomes the middle of the story, not the end of it.

There is still a lot of work to do. We hope you'll do it with us.

📸: Flynn Prall