Back Roads on ABC and ABC iview S11E7 – Back Roads travels to an ecological Noah’s Ark, Kangaroo Island, just off the coast of South Australia.
Presenter, Paul West, sees how the island is recovering from the devastating Black Summer fires, that scorched over half the island in 2019-20.
Paul heads to Pelican Lagoon to meet a woman who knows more about echidnas than most people on the planet. Dr Peggy Rismiller is a renowned scientist, originally from the United States, who moved to the island in the late 1980s to study KI’s short-beaked echidna. Paul discovers that these hardy little critters have been around since the dinosaurs and survived the fires by digging into the earth.
Peggy tells him that attitudes towards nature have changed on the island. Now farmers are more interested in the wildlife on their properties and want to protect it. He gets to see this in action on Ben Davis’s sheep farm.
Ben started working with local ecologist Heidi Groffen after the fires. She’s set up a camera next to the burrow of an endangered small marsupial, the KI dunnart,and shows Paul and Ben pictures of all the animals that have been captured.
Paul can see why they call this Australia’s Galapagos Island. The wildlife here is unbelievable: there are playful dolphins, rare goannas and iconic sea lions.
The scars from the fires might still be visible but ‘Mother Nature’ is staging a comeback and she’s not alone. The people of KI, from farmers to scientists, are banding together to bring this wild slice of paradise back from the brink.
Production credit:
Executive Producer: Brigid Donovan. Series Producer: Louise Turley.
Back Roads on ABC and ABC iview – Thursday 20 February at 8.00pm
TV Central ABC content HERE
Back Roads on ABC and ABC iview S11E7
