Native mammals returned across burnt Blue Mountains bushland
Five years after the Black Summer fires, camera traps found a similar set of native mammal species in burnt and unburnt bush. Feral cats were photographed more often than before.
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The reporting lives at NSW Local Land Services. Our summary is checked against it, and we link it on every story.
Five years after the 2019-20 Black Summer fires, native mammals in the Greater Blue Mountains are using burnt and unburnt bush in similar numbers of species. NSW Local Land Services reported on October 13, 2026, on work by Science for Wildlife, funded by Greater Sydney Local Land Services. More than 3,000 online volunteers helped identify animals in photos. Eighteen field volunteers were trained from 35 people who offered. Fifty cameras went out, and the Katoomba Men's Shed built 90 scent-lure stations.
The project gathered more than 500,000 images. Science for Wildlife checked an AI-assisted sort and analyzed about 185,000 wildlife images. Burnt and unburnt Hawkesbury bushland now support a similar number of native mammal species no matter how severe the fire was. That includes critical-weight-range mammals: bandicoots, quolls, antechinus, possums, echidnas, and native rodents. Two years after the fires, earlier Science for Wildlife work found little return even where burns were less severe. Effects still differ by vegetation type. Feral cats showed up at six times as many camera sites in 2025-26 as in 2021-22, and deer appeared on camera too. Principal ecologist Kellie Leigh, volunteer Leonie Wishart, and Linda Dedovic of Greater Sydney Local Land Services described both the return and the predator problem.
For the classroom
Five years after big bushfires in the Blue Mountains of Australia, scientists and volunteers used cameras to see which animals had come back. Native mammals such as quolls, possums, and echidnas are using both burnt and unburnt bush. Feral cats showed up on more cameras than before, so the recovery is not finished.
- How did volunteers help scientists count the animals?
- What did the cameras find in burnt bush compared with unburnt bush?
- Why are feral cats a problem for the animals that returned?
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