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About Healthy Wildlife

An independent guide to living with Australia’s backyard wildlife, written in Western Australia. It isn’t a council, government or charity site.

Updated 9 Oct 2026 2 sources

Is this the old council

wildlife site? No. It’s a new site with a new owner, at an address that used to belong to someone else.

Who had the address before. From March 2017, healthywildlife.com.au was home to Healthy Wildlife, Healthy Lives, a project of the Eastern Metropolitan Regional Council (a group of Perth councils) with Murdoch University and Lotterywest. EMRC The address later lapsed, and we registered it in October 2026.
Nothing here is theirs. Every page on this site is new and written from scratch. We haven’t reused the old site’s words, charts, photos or logos, and we aren’t connected to the councils, Perth NRM, Murdoch University or any wildlife group.
Looking for the old project? Its pages are still online, kept by Perth NRM, at healthywildlife.perthnrm.com. Perth NRM
Why some addresses look familiar. A few of our pages sit at the same addresses as the old ones, such as /feeding-magpies/, so old links still land on a page about the same thing.

fact: at the original source, with a date. If someone who should know hasn’t published it, it doesn’t make the page.

Primary sources only. State wildlife agencies such as WA’s Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA), the law itself, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA), the Australian Museum, the RSPCA, WIRES and peer-reviewed research. Never second-hand summaries of them.
Every fact links to its source. Tap the small tag beside any claim to jump to the sources at the foot of the page: what each one says, and when it was last updated.
Dated, and checked again. Each page shows the day its facts were checked. We recheck them at least once a year, sooner when the rules change.
The official figure first. Where sources disagree, the state wildlife agency’s figure leads, labelled as theirs, with the others beside it.
The law, quoted. We quote the Act or the agency’s own words and say it’s our reading, not legal advice.
Spotted something wrong? Email hello@healthywildlife.com.au. We check it against the source, fix the page and update its date. For a sick or hurt animal, ring your state’s wildlife helpline instead: email is too slow.

do. A few lines we don’t cross, because crossing them would harm wildlife or ask you to take our word for it.

Send you to your state’s wildlife helpline, a wildlife carer or a vet when an animal is sick or hurt.
Point you to licensed people for trapping, moving or removing native animals.
Credit every photo, and say when we’ve changed how one looks.
Tell you on the page itself if we ever earn money from a link or a sponsor.

Give vet advice, or try to diagnose or treat an animal.
Tell you to trap, move or keep a native animal yourself.
Sell or promote bird seed, wildlife feeders or wildlife “treats”.
Publish made-up reviews, or rankings and badges with no written criteria behind them.
Use made-up pictures and pass them off as real animals.

from: real animals, licensed and credited.

Licensed for reuse. Photographers share our photos under Creative Commons licences, mostly through Wikimedia Commons and iNaturalist. Each page credits its photos at the bottom, and we keep a record of every licence.
Changes are labelled. We crop and resize photos for the web. Where we’ve done more, like the torchlight possum on the home page, the credit says what we changed.
No ads, no sponsors. There are no ads, affiliate links or sponsors on the site today. If that changes, it will say so where they appear, and we won’t take money for anything that goes against the advice here.

EMRC e-newsletter, April 2017 Eastern Metropolitan Regional Council: the Healthy Wildlife website was launched on 3 March 2017, with project partners Murdoch University and Lotterywest
Healthy Wildlife, Healthy Lives the old project’s pages, hosted by Perth NRM