The Bilby (Macrotis lagotis) is a medium-sized marsupial that is best known for its rabbit-like ears. It has long, silky blue-grey fur and a long tail that is black with a white tip. The bilby is light and delicate in build but with strongly clawed toes for digging burrows.
Bilbies are solitary, nocturnal animals, spending daylight hours in their deep, spiral shaped burrows and emerging at night to forage for plant roots, bulbs, fungi, grass seeds, termites, ants, beetles, insect larvae and spiders.
Dalgyte and Ninu are just two of the many Indigenous names for the bilby. It is also commonly known as the greater bilby, to differentiate it from the extinct lesser bilby Macrotis leucra.
The bilby is a threatened species under State and Commonwealth legislation. In Western Australia, the species is listed as Vulnerable fauna under the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016. Nationally it is also listed as Vulnerable under the Commonwealth Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 and internationally is on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as Vulnerable.
Historically, the bilby was found across most of the arid and semi-arid areas of mainland Australia. Since European settlement, the species has experienced a large decline. In Western Australia, it is now restricted to the Gibson, Little Sandy and Great Sandy Deserts, and parts of the Pilbara, Dampierland, Central Kimberley and Ord-Victoria Plains bioregions. It also occurs across to the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory, and there are disjunct subpopulations in the Channel Country and Mitchell Grass Downs bioregions in Queensland.
The bilby continues to occupy a wide range of vegetation types, with the major vegetation types defines as:
- open tussock grassland on uplands and hills,
- mulga woodland/shrubland growing on ridges and rises, and
- hummock grassland (spinifex) growing on sandplains and dunes, drainage systems, salt lake systems and other alluvial areas.