Wildlife at the Watering Hole - March 2025 - Georgia Badgery

Echidnas on the move: where they go, what they eat, who they meet

Georgia Badgery

No matter who you ask, every Australian has a story to tell about an echidna. Something about them, whether it be their spikiness, their silly gait or their ability to lay eggs, makes them such an iconic and loveable creature. Despite being such a unique animal, there is still a lot to learn about echidnas, namely their interaction with highly anthropogenically modified landscapes and their behaviour outside of captivity. My thesis mainly looks into echidna ecology and behaviour in an agriculturally fragmented landscape. My research takes place on working farms in the Liverpool plains, where the landscape has been drastically modified to allow for large scale farming and grazing. In this study I tagged 30 echidnas over three years and using a mix of GPS and telemetry tracking examined habitat preferences, home range, activity periods and shelter habits. Scats were collected from Fowlers Gap between 2018 and 2021 and from Willow Tree between 2021 and 2024. Since there was a serious drought across NSW in 2018 and 2019, these scats allowed me to examine effects of increased aridity on echidna diet both temporally and seasonally. Finally, I was able to piece together some echidna social networks and see who the big cheese was. 

About Georgia:

I am a PhD candidate at UNSW Sydney, supervised by Mike Letnic and Keith Leggett. My undergrad career started with engineering and Sydney Uni before ending up at biology at UNSW, something that I am far more passionate about. I have always had a strong love for animals, conservation and the outdoors, so when an honours opportunity was advertised studying echidnas at Fowlers Gap I couldn't resist! From there I started thinking about all the echidnas I saw growing up on my family's farm and that's when my PhD started to take shape.