September is platypus season, and the Royal has twenty to prove it

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In May 2023, ten platypuses were carried into Royal National Park south of Sydney and released into the Hacking River, the first of their kind in the park for more than fifty years. This autumn the team from UNSW Sydney's Platypus Conservation Initiative went back with their nets and torches for the latest survey, and the tally now stands at twenty known animals. Four newcomers, named Absinthe, Duckie, Hydra and Dawn, went in this May to widen the family, and the ones already there have been busy. A juvenile called Gili was the first platypus born in the park in living memory, fathered by a founding male called Prometheus, and a young male hatched in the most recent breeding season joined the count this year. Associate Professor Gilad Bino, who leads the project with Dr Tahneal Hawke, put it simply: this is no longer just a reintroduction, it is a recovering population. Dr Hawke says the surveys show several age classes, breeding across consecutive seasons and animals using the river the way a river should be used, which is exactly what the team hoped to see at this stage.

Best of all, people are seeing them. Visitors walking the Hacking River have been reporting platypus sightings of their own, something that simply had not been possible in the park for two generations, and Dr Bino says that public connection, people seeing platypuses back where they belong, is one of the most rewarding outcomes of the whole project. It is also the perfect month to try. September and October are platypus season, when the animals are out and about in early spring and sometimes visible in daylight, and for the fifth year running the Australian Conservation Foundation and UNSW are asking anyone in eastern Australia to take part in the platy project: pick a creek or river, find a quiet spot on the bank at dawn or dusk, sit still for an hour and log what you see, including nothing at all, because an empty hour is data too. In Canberra, where Upper Murrumbidgee Waterwatch logged thirty platypus and rakali sightings in the first half of the year, more than usual, the community's Platypus Month surveys have just finished with the animals looking settled and stable. A bill, a ripple, a line of bubbles heading upstream. This month, that is all you are looking for.