Bilby

Fascinating facts about the Bilby

• A bilby's ears are so oversized they make up nearly a third of its entire head length — satellite dishes built to hunt in the dark. They rotate independently, pinpointing a beetle larva underground from 30 centimetres away through soil and leaf litter. This hearing is so acute that bilbies navigate pitch-black desert nights by sound alone, never needing to see their prey.
• Bilbies dig spiral burrows up to 2 metres deep with an engineering precision that serves triple duty: shelter from Australian heat that hits 50°C, escape routes from predators with multiple exits, and nurseries for their joeys. Each bilby maintains several burrows and moves between them, leaving behind permanent infrastructure that other species — from small reptiles to rabbits — occupy for generations. One animal rewires an entire ecosystem's real estate.
• A bilby's hind legs bend backwards compared to most mammals, creating a kangaroo-like stance that lets them bound up to 40 km/h across sand. Yet they're not built for distance — they're sprinters, ambush hunters that explode from stillness to grab a beetle mid-burrow in under a second. This explosive power comes from muscle fibres packed with spring-like proteins.
• For 60,000 years bilbies shared Australia with humans who burned the landscape in precise mosaics, preventing dense scrub and keeping hunting grounds open. When European colonisation ended these fires and introduced rabbits and foxes, bilby numbers crashed from millions to fewer than 10,000 in fragmented pockets. Today they're absent from 99% of their historic range — not because of what humans did to them directly, but because we stopped doing what Indigenous peoples had done continuously.
• Bilbies have a gestation period of just 12 days, among the shortest of any marsupial, followed by 80 more days in the pouch. They can breed year-round if conditions allow, producing up to four young annually. This reproductive flexibility was perfectly tuned for a climate of boom-or-bust rainfall — rapid population recovery after rain, minimal losses during droughts — but modern fragmented habitats don't offer enough time between dry spells for populations to rebound.

At a glance

About the Bilby

In the arid expanse of the Australian outback, a small, enigmatic creature emerges under the cover of darkness, its oversized ears twitching like satellite dishes as it navigates the desert landscape with an air of quiet determination. The bilby, with its soft, velvety fur and large, round eyes, moves through the spinifex grass with a gentle, loping gait, its long hind legs propelling it forward with a soft, almost ethereal quality. As it forages for seeds and insects, its very existence seems a testament to the enduring power of adaptation in one of the harshest environments on Earth.

Discover more wildlife