Two iconic Australian animals meet in ‘rarely documented’ encounter. Take a look
In a remote part of southeastern Australia, two iconic native animals went about their daily business — until they came face-to-face. A nearby trail camera captured the “rarely documented” encounter, exciting the witnessing ecologists.
Ecologists set up a trail camera at Oxley Wild Rivers National Park in New South Wales (NSW) to monitor a colony of brush-tailed rock-wallabies. The animals are endangered and “hard to see in the wild” because “they live in rugged terrain along rocky outcrops, cliffs, ledges and caves,” the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service said.
While monitoring the video feed in early May, park staff saw a pair of rock-wallabies come face-to-face with a spotted-tailed quoll, a local predator, the department said in a June 7 Facebook post.
The roughly 30-second video shows a rock-wallaby moving along an outcropping when a spotted-tailed quoll appears from the brush and starts climbing up the rocks. The animals see each other and almost seem to make eye contact.
In response, the quoll bolts, running across the rock, while the rock-wallabies start “puffing out their chests to deter the unwelcome visitor,” park officials said and the video shows.
“While a quoll has been detected in the brush-tailed rock-wallaby colony on two other occasions … the (May) sighting was the first recorded observation of brush-tailed rock-wallabies responding to a quoll’s presence by posturing, where they puff up their chest and stand up tall,” a park spokesperson told McClatchy News via a June 27 email.
“While we don’t know for certain if this is the same quoll as before, quolls are known to return to the same ‘latrine site’ — basically, their preferred poop spot,” park officials said.
The spotted-tailed quoll, also known as the tiger quoll, is an endangered marsupial and the “largest native carnivore left on the (Australia) mainland,” according to the Australian Conservation Foundation. About 14,000 spotted-tailed quolls are left in the wild, the organization said.
These quolls are “semi-regularly observed” at Oxley Wild Rivers National Park, and the May sighting confirms “their ongoing presence within the park,” the spokesperson said.
The sighting was also “a valuable opportunity to better understand these animal’s behaviour particularly because interactions between quolls and brush-tailed rock-wallabies have been rarely documented,” the spokesperson said. “The recording highlights that there is still much to learn about the animals and plants that live in NSW.”
Oxley Wild Rivers National Park is near the southeastern coast of Australia and a roughly 290-mile drive northeast from Sydney.
This story was originally published June 27, 2025 at 10:17 AM with the headline "Two iconic Australian animals meet in ‘rarely documented’ encounter. Take a look."
