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The greater bilby is an animal native to Australia. This cute nocturnal marsupial is often associated with Easter - many Australian children are brought their eggs by the Easter Bilby rather than the Easter Bunny. This is in part due to conservation efforts, as the bilby is becoming endangered. It’s hoped that by raising awareness of the bilby at times like Easter, people will become more concerned about making sure bilbies survive.
The greater bilby (Macrotis Iagotis) is part of the thylacomyidae family. Its close relative, the lesser bilby, sadly became extinct in the 1950s. This is why the greater bilby is more commonly known simply as the bilby. This name was originally given to the animal by the Yuwaalaraay Aboriginal Australians of northern New South Wales - it means ‘long-nosed rat’. The bilby is also sometimes referred to as the rabbit-eared bandicoot.
Here we take a look at some of the most important facts about these wonderful Australian animals, including their appearance, habitat, the bilby food chain and conservation efforts to make sure the species can continue to survive.
The bilby has a long, pink snout and large ears that point upwards. The upper part of its body is covered in soft, pale grey fur, while the fur on its belly is a tan colour. The bilby’s tail is black with a white tip and a tuft of long, white hairs.
An adult bilby is approximately the size of a rabbit, growing to around 55cm in length. Their tails can be up to 29cm long. Male bilbies tend to weigh between one and 2.5kg, while females are lighter, weighing between 800g and 1.1kg.
The bilby has quite poor eyesight, but excellent hearing, due to its large, pointed ears. Its long snout gives it a great sense of smell. This is why bilbies tend to move with their noses to the ground.
While bilbies have powerful hind legs like kangaroos, they don’t hop. Instead, they tend to have a galloping gait, more like horses. Additionally, when they run, they hold their tails out stiffly behind them, giving them an unusual appearance.
A bilby has two extra toes on each hind foot. These toes are small and grow together behind the large middle toe, culminating in a single toenail. Bilbies use these double toenails for grooming.
As marsupials, female bilbies have pouches on their bellies. This is where their babies, known as joeys, live for the first ten or 11 weeks of their lives. Like koalas, bilbies’ pouches open downwards. This means the joeys are protected from dirt when the mother bilbies are digging their burrows in the ground.
The bilby needs to live in a hot, dry habitat. Bilbies populate grasslands, sandstone ridges and deserts, living in large burrows that they dig themselves. These burrows tend to be up to three metres long and two metres deep.
Historically, bilbies were found in semi-arid areas, covering up to 70 percent of mainland Australia. However, habitat destruction and threats from predators drastically reduced their numbers and forced them to relocate to more remote territory. Since the 1990s, bilbies have only been found in scattered arid areas of Queensland, the Northern Territory and Central and Western Australia. Bilbies aren’t found in any other countries; they only live in Australia.
There are currently attempts to reintroduce bilbies to some of the areas where they once lived but are not found anymore, such as parts of New South Wales. Since 2019, the bilby has also been reintroduced to a special enclosure in the Currawinya National Park, on the border between New South Wales and Queensland.
Bilbies are nocturnal, so they stay in their burrows during the day, emerging at night to feed and mate. They never tend to roam far, usually staying within 250 metres of their burrows. This means they can return to their burrows at intervals in the night, if they need to rest or hide from predators. When bilbies are above ground foraging for food, they can be heard making soft snuffling and grunting noises.
As solitary creatures, bilbies tend to live and forage alone, only seeking the company of others when they’re mating. Male and female pairs can sometimes live together with their young. Some bilbies also display social behaviours, and there have been several cases of female bilbies choosing to live together in pairs.
Bilbies are known for their incredible digging abilities. In just three minutes, an adult bilby can dig a spiral-shaped burrow too deep for predators to reach them. Once the bilby is inside the burrow, it will often back-fill it, making it an even safer place to hide. The burrows also have several different exits, in case the bilby needs to escape in a hurry.
Bilbies regularly repair and maintain their burrows, and often live in the same burrows for many years.
One of the greatest things about bilbies is that they help the environment in hot, dry parts of Australia. Their digging aerates the soil, and vegetation falls into their burrows, where it decomposes. This means seeds can germinate and more plants can grow, keeping the ecosystem balanced. As bilby numbers are falling, this process is threatened, potentially harming the environment.
The bilby food chain position is in the middle - bilbies are both predators and prey. They’re omnivores, so they eat a wide range of different foods, including:
Despite their poor eyesight, bilbies are good hunters, because their excellent hearing and sense of smell lead them to food sources. This is why they always move with their noses to the ground.
Incredibly, bilbies don’t need to drink water, as they get all the hydration they need from their food. This is why they’re so well suited to living in a desert environment. They have long, narrow jaws which allow them to crunch their prey, and they also use their tongues to lick up seeds from the ground. This causes them to eat quite a lot of dirt, too!
Bilbies have a number of predators which use them for food. These include foxes, snakes, eagles and even domestic cats. They also have to compete for food with other animals including cattle, sheep and rabbits. The rapid increase in predators and competitors is one of the main reasons why bilbies have become endangered over the last century, and why they can no longer live in many of the areas they used to populate.
Bilbies don’t mate for life, and they usually live alone. They’ll search for a partner several times a year. An adult female bilby can have up to eight babies a year, usually giving birth to between one and three joeys at a time.
The gestation period for bilbies is very short - just 12 to 14 days. Once the joeys are born, they live in their mother’s pouch for about ten or 11 weeks, then spend another couple of weeks living in the burrow. The mother bilby forages for food for them during this time, before they’re ready to leave the burrow and make their own way in the world.
A female bilby can start having babies from the age of just five months old. The bilby life cycle is between six and ten years, with most bilbies in the wild living to about seven years old.
There are many bilby conservation efforts taking place in Australia, as bilby numbers in the wild are now estimated to be fewer than 10,000. Conservationists are reintroducing bilbies to designated predator-free areas to improve the bilby food chain position and help their numbers to grow.
One of the most important things we can do to save the bilby is to educate people about these wonderful animals. This is why special efforts are being made to popularise the Easter Bilby instead of the Easter Bunny, to make sure children and adults are aware of the bilby and care about its protection.
Here at Twinkl, our in-house teachers have created a wide range of different resources and activities related to bilbies, to help children learn about them. If you’re a teacher or a parent, here are a few ideas for you to take a look at.
As all our resources are created by teachers, you can rely on them to be accurate, enjoyable and aligned to the curriculum.
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