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WOMAN: Being in the boulder fields
is like being, sort of, held in the hands of the mountain.
It's this, around here, a big bowl of rocks,
and once you're in the rocks,
you can feel them enclosing you.
And looking down into the cracks,
you're thinking of the little pygmy possums
crawling around on the rocks.
It's a very ancient landscape.
There's bent old trees growing around,
little heathy bushes with flowers and butterflies,
and little streams running through the mountains,
and wet areas where you find other animals
living along the edges of the streams.
The rocks kind of dominate.
You've got these big tors up on the peaks,
rocks in the bottom of the valleys
that have piled into heaps over the millennia,
and it's in these very little, unique areas
where the mountain pygmy possums live.
The mountain pygmy possum is rare. It's an endangered species.
There's less than 2,000 in the wild.
But in specific places,
like the rocky areas around the ski lodges in some of the resorts,
they're quite abundant,
so that you can see them quite easily by putting camera traps out,
and we've even been able to sit there and watch them at night
just by waiting for them to come to the baits.
These are gorgeous little animals.
They're only about 35 to 40 grams -
so, bigger than a house mouse, a bit smaller than a rat.
Most people come to the alpine areas in winter to ski
and they're not aware of mountain pygmy possums
being in the environment that they're skiing over,
but they're right underneath their feet,
sound asleep, hibernating during the winter.
And what we're finding with increasing temperatures
is that the survival of the possums has decreased.
Climate change is impacting the length of the snow season
and we need to do all we can to stop the environment from warming.
Millions of years ago,
the whole of south-east Australia was snow country.
Now there's only a little bit left
and we've got these very unique little animals
perched on top of our mountains,
and we need to make sure
that they stay here for aeons more.