23 January

To me this is one of the most exciting things happening in the world right now. The rediscovery of the importance of big animals - megafauna. Big animals have been under assault for centuries, often by hunting but also because of misguided ideas about the ecological damage they supposedly do. But big animals are nature’s earthmoving equipment, without them our landscapes fall apart. All of Australia’s megafauna disappeared tens of thousands years ago. But now we have feral megafauna - camels, donkeys, horses, buffalo etc. - inhabiting our landscapes. And they may be fixing our landscape, while we see them as a pest. There were over 600,000 feral camels in central Australia not many years ago, we culled about 300,000 of them, thinking we were helping the landscape. That may have been a mistake. Also fascinating is that as countries or continents push their own megafauna to extinction, they often then pop up somewhere else. We’re playing swaps with our megafauna.