Pub landlord is stunned after discovering nightly bottle shop intruder was actually an extremely endangered Australian animal
- Publican has been left stunned after discovering identity of night-time intruder
- CCTV vision showed rare and endangered northern quoll scurrying around store
- Cairns hotel owner said shop's alarm kept waking him in early hours of morning
- Was only after combing through the footage he discovered why it was going off
- The animal is rarely seen in urban areas and is found only in northern Australia
A publican was stunned after discovering a rare and endangered northern quoll was repeatedly breaking into his bottle shop in the middle of the night.
CCTV footage from Cairns' Bungalow Hotel in far north Queensland showed the creature scurrying around the bar's liquor store.
The hotel's director Stewart Gibson said each night for the past week he had been woken up in the early hours of the morning by the store's security alarm.
CCTV footage from Cairns' Bungalow Hotel in far north Queensland showed the creature scurrying around the bar's liquor store
'To my amazement [there was] nothing... lights were off, no fans moving, I couldn't pinpoint it,' he told 9News.
'It happened again Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday night.'
It was only after close examination of the shop's security video that he discovered the alarm was being triggered by the rare native cat.
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'I think he's living in the ceiling at the moment. Hopefully soon we can get him down, humanely, remove him and put him back out to his own habitat,' he said.
Mr Gibson said he contacted authorities who told him the quoll would be moved to a more suitable location.
'I'm sure he'll be much happier in the bush,' Mr Gibson told ABC News.
'There's better food there than chips and gravy.'
AUSTRALIA'S ENDANGERED NORTHERN QUOLL
Northern quolls can only be found in Queensland's far north, the Northern Territory and Western Australia and are rarely found in urban environments.
They are mostly confined to rocky escarpments and the eucalyptus forests of inland savannahs.
It is the smallest of Australia's four quoll species - the others being the spotted-tailed, eastern and western quoll.
The northern quoll is declared critically endangered in NT and endangered in WA.
The rare northern quoll has declined dramatically in population in the past century since the introduction of the cane toad to Australia
The quoll species is also listed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species.
There are thought to be fewer than 100,000 of the small marsupial left in the wild.
In the Northern Territory alone, their total population is thought to have dropped by 20 per cent over the last century following the introduction of the cane toad.
