A little golden creature darted across a dirt track in the Gibson desert, just in front of the four-wheel drive.
Pintupi woman Yalti Napaltjari, travelling with a group of Aboriginal rangers from the Kiwirrkurra Indigenous protected area, gave a yell and jumped out.
Her cry of “kakarratul!” alerted the others. Rarely seen and barely studied, the kakarratul, or northern marsupial mole, is a creature well known in Pintupi culture but never spotted, spending most of its life in sand dunes under ground.
Napaltjari caught the little animal and brought it back to the group. It looked like a handful of silky yellow hair, as if a well-conditioned toupee had somehow become autonomous.
“It’s so amazing, it’s so beautiful, with this golden fur ... it’s so different to any other kind of colour,” Kate Crossing, a land management program leader with the Central Desert Native Title Services, told Guardian Australia.
Crossing was with the rangers who were looking for bush tucker in the Kiwirrkurra bilby survey area.
They had been driving at bilby-spotting speed near Marruwa, a place of Aboriginal significance on the West Australian side of Lake Mackay, which straddles the border with the Northern Territory about 1,650 north-east of Perth and 500km south-west of Darwin.
It’s kakarratul territory and the group had seen its tracks and tell-tale mounds before but never spotted one live.
They are about the size of a guinea pig but long rather than fat, with a pale pink snout and paws. They eat insects and look astonishingly like the African golden mole, to which they are not related. As the Australian Geographic’s John Pickrell noted, it is convergent evolution at work.
“We were just lucky,” Crossing said. “We were in the right habitat where it definitely is.”
Napaltjari passed the mole around the group (“It spent the whole time trying to dig so we could really feel how strong those front paws were,” Crossing said) before putting it down on the sand a short distance from the track.
“It moved along the surface just for 10 or 20cm, which was great because we got to see that track and see it live, which makes it easier to recognise, and then it just burrowed straight down,” Crossing said.
Video of the mole, posted on the Tjamu Tjamu Aboriginal Corporation Facebook page, showed the animal digging frantically for 30 seconds before completely disappearing from view.
The kakarratul (Notoryctes caurinus) and related itjaritjari (Notoryctes Typhlops), or southern marsupial mole, which is found in the Great Victoria and Simpson Deserts, are so elusive that they were until recently considered endangered.
Dr Joe Benshemesh, marsupial mole researcher with Latrobe University, wrote in Australian Geographic in 2010 that the animals were seen above ground on average fewer than 10 times a decade.
But a new survey technique, which involves digging a series of one metre deep trenches to take a cross-section of any mole burrows, determined that they were abundant.
A 2009 survey found evidence of up to 80km of backfilled mole tunnels per hectare in key habitat areas.
It was removed from the threatened species list under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act in 2015. However, the Threatened Species Scientific Committee advice recommending that removal said scientists still had no idea of the population, breeding habits, or life-span of marsupial moles.
It noted that while trench surveys showed they were apparently widespread, “researches have been unable to convert indices of abundance to population estimates, and there are no robust estimates of population size or trends.”
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