Yellow-bellied Glider (Petaurus australis australis)
Photo: Mikayla Burke
Description
- The Yellow-bellied Glider is a medium-sized marsupial.
- It has grey-brown fur with a black stripe down its back and tail.
- It has white or yellow belly fur that gets more yellow as it gets older.
- Adult males weigh 470–725 g and adult females weigh 435–660 g.
- It makes loud shrieking calls at night that can be heard up to 500 m away.
- It is a social species and lives in family groups.
- It has a large home range.
- It eats tree sap from eucalypt species by making “V”-shaped notches in multiple tree trunks at any one time.
Find out more about the Yellow-bellied Glider on Canberra NatureMapr.
Where are they
The Yellow-bellied Glider is patchily distributed across eastern Australia. They can be found across southeast Queensland to coastal and high-country forests of NSW, ACT and Victoria. Due to their large home range, they need large expanses of forest.
In the ACT, Yellow-bellied Gliders have been detected in the Lower Cotter Catchment and southern Namadgi.
The Yellow-bellied Glider lives in forests that have wet and dry types of eucalyptus trees. It shelters in hollows in large, old trees. It also needs certain trees for feeding on sap.
Conservation threats
The main threats to the Yellow-bellied Glider include:
- wildfire and prescribed burns
- clearing and fragmentation of forests
- timber harvesting
- loss of food sources
- less rainfall and more droughts caused by climate change.
Conservation status
- International – Near threatened (International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List)
- National – Vulnerable (Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999).
- Australian Capital Territory – Vulnerable (Nature Conservation Act 2014).
Conservation actions
Conservation aims to stabilise the population and rebuild the habitat of the Yellow-bellied Glider, including to:
- protect its habitat from severe fires, fragmentation and destruction
- keep key habit features such as sap trees and hollow-bearing trees
- investigate the use of controlled burns to protect the species’ habitat from severe fire
- improve the understanding of habitat needs and create a habitat suitability model for the species in the ACT
- gather better population and habitat data by conducting more surveys of the species
- study the effects of fire and climate change on the species’ survival and find ways to reduce the impact
- monitor population health and distribution
- collaborate with universities and other regions to fill knowledge gaps and create management strategies.