- The Torricelli Mountains of northwestern Papua New Guinea are home to a wide variety of wildlife, including three species of tree kangaroos.
- Recently, construction of a road that could potentially be used by loggers has pushed closer to the border of a proposed conservation area that, if gazetted, would be the country’s second-largest.
- The Tenkile Conservation Alliance, a Papua New Guinean NGO, has worked with communities for around two decades in the Torricellis with the goal of improving the lives of humans and wildlife living in the mountains.
- Now, the group’s leaders fear that the road could jeopardize a tenuous recovery by several of the area’s threatened tree kangaroo species.
About twice the size of the average house cat, these arboreal marsupials (Dendrolagus spp.) are related to the better-known bounders of Australia and Tasmania. Tree kangaroos have also long been a staple in the diet of forest-dwelling communities across Papua New Guinea. Conversations with village elders in the Torricellis suggest that a single hectare in the mountains may have housed 10 or more animals, or about four per acre — a striking density for what’s thought to be a pretty solitary animal.
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