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MAN: Mount Borradaile is a very unique area.
It's all the best of the Top End all condensed into one,
which means all these different ecosystems
and different animals and birds living in them.
(BIRDSONG)
And then, of course, we get to one of the most important things -
Leichhardt's grasshopper.
This grasshopper lives on the one plant its whole life.
The bush is called a pityrodia,
that only occurs in four places in the Top End in the world.
I was a farmer in years gone by.
And for someone like me to like a grasshopper, that's very unusual,
because grasshoppers are really nasty things to a farmer.
Forget they're part of the environment
and you have to have them anyhow.
But these guys don't do that - they live on this one plant -
they don't do any damage.
And they are spectacular. Their colours are fantastic.
The tip of the wings look black -
that only occurs on their last moult.
And they continually moult right through,
and only get their wings on their seventh moult.
And that takes close to a 12-month period.
Burning has to be carried out,
because if you don't burn at all,
you get a build-up, and a build-up becomes very flammable.
And what happens if a fire does start,
then it creates a lot of damage.
The grass over-shades the egg areas,
and the egg areas don't hatch.
Also, the plant itself becomes very rank.
So, if you burn it, it becomes fresh growth,
and the next year, we'll find a big hatching of grasshoppers.
But the idea is to do some burning, but rotate our burning site
so we don't burn the same place every year,
and animals can get away from it.
So, it's all about management.
What the Leichhardt grasshopper shows to me
is what can happen if you want to preserve species.
We have taken an animal from virtually on the edge of extinction.
We look back and we've seen how our whole bushland has changed
to what we hope it looked like hundreds of years ago.
And it gives you a great feeling to see that -
to see the bush being regenerated, being looked after.