Northern hairy-nosed wombats at Epping Forest National Park.(Supplied: Queensland Department of Environment)

When conservationist Alan Horsup travelled the world in his early 20s, it was the catalyst for a lifetime dedicated to preserving an elusive critically endangered animal closer to home.

“I was doing an Africa overland … and visited a lot of game parks,” he said.

“I always had an inkling I wanted to be a zoologist, but that tilted the balance for me.”

Dr Horsup is a senior conservation officer with the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service (QPWS) who has spent the past three decades leading the charge to save the northern hairy-nosed wombat from extinction.

Alan Horsup with a northern hairy-nosed wombat from Epping Forest National Park in 2003.(Supplied: Department of Environment and Science)

His efforts have paid off, with the wild population jumping from just 60 in 1991 to more than 350.

And after consecutive La Niña seasons, Dr Horsup said a recent census showed even better news: a wombat baby boom.

“I feel a lot more positive now than I did 30 years ago,” he said.

“There are baby wombats everywhere, we’re seeing females with big pouches and small prints around the [Epping Forrest National] park.”

There are three species of wombat in Australia, but the northern hairy-nosed wombat is the rarest and the largest, weighing an average of 32 kilograms and reaching more than 1 metre in length.

Northern hairy-nosed wombats are mostly nocturnal.(Supplied: Graham and Linda Lee)

Wombat pioneer

As he prepares to step away from the job he loves and into retirement after 31 years, Dr Horsup reflected on the changing fortunes of the nocturnal marsupial.

“It was grim,” he said.

Alan Horsup measuring a northern hairy-nosed wombat.(Supplied: Department of Environment and Science)

At the time, the northern hairy-nosed wombat was only found at Epping Forrest National Park near Clermont in central Queensland and faced a low population and a drought that dragged on for years.

Before Europeans arrived, the species was found as far north as Townsville and south to the New South Wales-Victoria border.

“The wombats survived but they weren’t breeding … we were watching the species go to extinction,” Dr Horsup said.

He said, after the weather improved, tragedy struck and up to 20 wombats were killed by dingoes.

It pushed QPWS to build a predator-proof fence around the park, which also kept the wombats contained.

“It might sound weird, but we discovered they were leaving the park of their own volition and looking for a new habitat, of which there was nothing out there really, it’s all cattle country,” Dr Horsup said.

A ‘secretive’ species

These days, researchers use high-tech infrared cameras to track the animals, but when Dr Horsup started out little was known about them.

“They’re a very, very difficult animal to work on. They’re almost totally nocturnal … they live in a burrow and they sleep down there for 18 hours a day,” he said.

“They’re very secretive … and we think that their conservative nature is a response to the tough environment they live in.”

A northern hairy-nosed wombat and her joey.(Supplied: Department of Environment and Science)

Dr Horsup said, initially, it was believed the wombats did not need to drink water — a theory he proved incorrect when he watched one drink from a puddle.

The discovery led him to provide water troughs at Epping, giving the animals drought-proof access to water and improving their recovery chances.

Every year the department undertakes a census, using a strip of double-sided sticky tape across burrow entrances, which rips hair off wombats’ backs and allowing scientists to use the DNA profiling to track the population.

“We’re going to have a little bit of an increase again this year, which is fantastic,” Dr Horsup said.

Dr Horsup monitoring wombat activity at Epping Forest.(Supplied: Department of Environment and Science)

The director of the Wombat Foundation, Leanne Brosnan, said Dr Horsup had been instrumental in the species bouncing back from the brink.

“Without Alan’s passion and dedication to the species, they wouldn’t have survived,” she said.

“We often have poor outcomes for critically endangered species, so the survival of the northern hairy-nosed wombat, and the fact that their population has increased tenfold … we’re delighted.”

A second colony

Of all his work, Dr Horsup is most proud of successfully introducing the animal to a second location in Queensland — the Richard Underwood Nature Refuge near St George in the state’s south.

A northern hairy-nosed wombat when it was moved to the Richard Underwood Nature Refuge in 2017.(Supplied: Queensland Department of Environment and Science)

“To go down there and to see wombat tracks in the soil and around the burrows, it was the first time that they’d been outside Epping Forrest in 100 years,” he said.

“That was a big step.”

As part of their relocation, Dr Horsup’s team created artificial burrows, building 5-metre-long tunnels.

“Wombats don’t carry a lot of fat, they don’t have huge energy reserves so they’re living on the edge a lot of the time,” he said.

“If you just put a wombat into an area and allowed it to dig its own burrow, it would probably kill itself.

“We would dig these 5-metre burrows with a bend in them so they couldn’t see the light coming out and they had something to shelter them initially.

“That was a pretty exciting time, for sure.”