World Numbat Day Arrives in the Numbat's Best Year in Decades

A numbat eats termites and very little else, up to 20,000 of them a day, licked out of shallow soil galleries with a sticky tongue about 10 centimeters long. Its other common name, the banded anteater, gets the diet wrong. Ants end up in a numbat only when they happen to be in the way of a termite.

The animal has also, as of July 2026, left the Endangered category on the IUCN Red List. World Numbat Day falls on the first Saturday of November, and 2026 is the first time the day arrives with the species listed lower.

A Volunteer Group Set the Date

World Numbat Day belongs to Project Numbat, a Western Australian conservation group, and its origin is on the record. The first one was held at Perth Zoo on Saturday, November 7, 2015. The group used it to launch a numbat calendar for 2016, built from work donated by local artists and wildlife photographers, with the proceeds going to numbat conservation.

The day after, Project Numbat wrote up the evening and set the rule: from then on, World Numbat Day would be the first Saturday of November. That makes it a floating date. It is November 7th in 2026, November 6th in 2027 and November 4th in 2028. Any calendar printing a single fixed number for it is reprinting one year.

An Anteater That Skips the Ants

Numbats are small, just under 500 grams for an average female and about 600 for a male, reddish to gray-brown with black and white bands across the back and rump and a tail like a bottlebrush. Everything about them is built around one food. The teeth are blunt pegs, because nothing they eat needs chewing. They are too small to break into a termite mound, so a numbat finds termites by smell, scratches down to the galleries the insects use to travel between nest and food, and works them with its tongue.

That diet sets the shape of the day. The numbat is strictly diurnal, one of only two Australian marsupials that are, because the termites it can reach near the surface move in daylight and warmth. In summer it forages after sunrise, retreats to a hollow log or burrow when the soil heats up and the termites go deeper, and comes back out in the afternoon. In winter it rises late and works only the warmest few hours. It never needs to drink. The termites carry the water.

The diet also explains why numbats live alone. Termites are small and scattered, and a home range of 25 to 50 hectares holds enough for one animal. That makes the numbat the opposite of the sugar glider, another small Australian marsupial, which nests in groups of up to seven adults. The pangolin, which took on the same insect diet in Africa and Asia, went further than the numbat did and gave up teeth entirely, collecting its prey on a tongue that in the largest species is longer than its body.

Down to About 300

The numbat once ranged across southern Australia, from Western Australia through South Australia and into parts of New South Wales, Victoria and the Northern Territory. By the late 1970s roughly 300 were left. Only two natural populations survived, both in the southwest of Western Australia: Dryandra Woodland near Narrogin and Perup Nature Reserve near Manjimup.

Introduced foxes and cats did most of the damage, with habitat clearing and changed fire patterns adding to it. Numbats evolved alongside raptors, snakes and goannas, and their defenses suit those predators. A numbat that senses danger sits up to look, then freezes or bolts for the nearest log. That works against a hawk. Against a fox or a cat, an animal that forages in the open by day and relies on keeping still has very little going for it.

How It Came Back

The recovery rested on four things: fox and cat baiting around the surviving populations, predator-proof fenced havens, captive breeding at Perth Zoo, and moving animals to new sites. Baiting produced large increases at the two original populations. Fenced sanctuaries gave reintroduced numbats ground that a cat could not reach. Australian Wildlife Conservancy now protects four populations inside fences that keep feral predators out. One is Scotia in New South Wales, which received 43 founders in 1999. Another is Mallee Cliffs National Park, the largest feral predator-free area on mainland Australia, where 15 numbats were released in 2020 and 31 more in 2021 and 2022.

It was not a smooth climb. A 2015 study of the Scotia and Yookamurra sanctuaries, by Matt Hayward and colleagues, set its results against a sobering background: Western Australian populations had stayed flat or fallen through 25 years of reintroductions between 1985 and 2010. Inside the fences the picture was different. The team estimated about 169 numbats at Scotia and 44 at Yookamurra, and found the animals sheltering in burrows dug by other reintroduced species. Zoo-bred numbats released at Scotia died at high rates, mostly to raptors and starvation, which is part of why translocation is slow, careful work. The conclusion was the simple one: keep the introduced predators out and numbats can establish across their former range.

The fence is the same tool that brought the northern hairy-nosed wombat from about 35 animals to around 400 behind 20 kilometers of predator-proof fencing in Queensland.

Near Threatened Is a Step

On July 9, 2026, the IUCN moved the numbat from Endangered to Near Threatened, skipping Vulnerable altogether. The wild population is now estimated at 2,000 to 3,000 animals.

The national listing has not moved. Under Australia's federal EPBC Act the numbat is still Endangered, and the gains depend on upkeep: fences checked for breaches, baiting kept up, fire managed so a single blaze cannot take a population. Drought, disease and rising predation all remain risks. Tony Friend, a research associate at Western Australia's Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, has warned that without continued effort the numbat will slide back to low numbers or into extinction.

The numbat raises four young on its teats for six or seven months without a proper pouch, rarely lives past five, and spends its whole waking life chasing the next shallow gallery of termites. It came back because people kept foxes and cats away from it for decades. That is what the first Saturday of November is marking this year, and it holds only for as long as the work does.

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