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Uluru rabbit plague threatens native wallaby population

A team of volunteers is fighting to protect an endangered species of native wallaby from a rabbit invasion at Uluru.

The rabbits have been breeding out of control in a conservation enclosure at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park designed for the mala or rufous hare-wallaby.

The species of small macropod, once common to the western deserts regions of the NT and Western Australia, was reintroduced to the purpose-built enclosure at Uluru in 2005.

The population was thriving: growing from 30 to more than 200 - but it is now under threat, with the rabbits competing for natural food sources.

Kerrie Bennison, natural and cultural resources manager at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, said a team had been set up to fight the invaders but could not keep up.

"We would clear one area of rabbits and move onto the next. Because we couldn't clear the whole paddock at once we'd find reinvasion in the area that we'd cleaned from rabbits elsewhere," she said.

A team of volunteers from a range of backgrounds and professions, including cartography, fire control and atmospheric physics was working with experienced national park staff.

They have been fumigating rabbit warrens and reinforcing the mala paddock fence with a fine mesh that will hopefully keep out any future rabbit incursions.

"What we're doing for the first week of the volunteer blitz and sweeping through the whole paddock and marking all the warrens that we find," Ms Bennison said.

"So we're pretty confident that we're going to get every single warren and then the second week we'll actually be fumigating those warrens."

Feds hop in to help eradicate 'furry menace'

Parliamentary Secretary for the Environment, Senator Simon Birmingham, said a dozen department volunteers from national parks and offices across the country had also joined the campaign.

"In a fortnight, these volunteers will make a major dent in rabbit numbers, they might even be able to eradicate this furry menace from the mala paddock altogether," Senator Birmingham said.

"The staff at Uluru are working valiantly to keep rabbit numbers down, but there comes a point where business as usual isn't enough, you need a blitz approach to tackle things once and for all."

The park is trialling the volunteering approach with plans to open up future volunteering opportunities to the general public to assist in helping conserve wildlife in Commonwealth national parks.

The mala has faced threats from wild dogs and foxes before, and a feral cat invasion in 2012 was seen off by traps set by staff at the park.

Mala are a deeply significant species at Uluru, considered as creation ancestors for the park's Anangu Aboriginal owners.

Uluru currently holds the largest mainland population in existence, making the ongoing success of the park's mala reintroduction project critically important to the future survival of the species.

The mala stands about 30cm high and weighs between 700 grams and two kilograms, with the female generally larger than the male of the species.

They were documented in 1844 by John Gilbert after he collected specimens in Western Australia wheat country.