Tasmania – Marsupial Break
OK, I can probably guess what you are all thinking: “Tim, do you really mean to tell us that you went all the way to Australia, and didn’t photograph anything but bugs? What about all the kangaroos and other interesting mammals? Are you out of your mind or something?”
Well, as a matter of fact, I am out of my mind I do have a few non-bug pictures. Tasmania is absolutely lousy with wallabies in particular (wallabies are basically small kangaroos, about the size of a small dog or large cat). When Sam and I went outside after sunset, we could hear them out in the apple orchard, hopping around (THUMP! . . . THUMP THUMP . . . THUMP!). Unfortunately, they are nocturnal, so it was pretty hard to get a picture of them with my camera equipment[1]
But! It turns out that my parent’s next-door neighbor does wildlife rehabilitation work, and at the time she had several that she had been raising (they had been found in the pouches of mothers who had been killed by cars) and that had become pretty tame. And, she kindly invited us over so that Sam could see some Australian wildlife up-close and personal!
Mainly, she had several wallabies:
One of them was really friendly, and liked being petted quite a lot:
(And Sam liked petting them quite a lot, too, so everybody was happy all around)
Their fur is a bit wiry, but with a very dense, soft undercoat.
There had been a couple of possums, but they had evidently been rehabilitated just a few days before, and had gone off into the woods somewhere. The wombat was still around, though – it had made a burrow under her chicken coop.
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[1] Photographing wildlife in the dark takes some fairly specialized lighting, which I didn’t have. Also, since my insect macro camera is pretty big and unwieldy, I ended up taking most of what wildlife pictures I have with our little point-and-shoot. The ones in this post were taken in dim light near sunset, so they came out a bit grainy. Other wildlife around includes platypuses in the pond, but they spend almost all their time either underwater or in their burrows, and are practically impossible to spot, let alone get a picture of. The Tasmanian Devils were around, too, but they are not only nocturnal, they also didn’t seem to come into the yard. The parrots did come out during the day, but I could never get close enough to them to get pictures that were any better than a green-and-blue blur. And while we did find a dead possum, I don’t think anybody really wants to see that.
[2] Somewhat surprisingly (to me, anyway), there are wild populations of wallabies that have gotten established outside of Australia. They probably wouldn’t do to well here in Michigan, though – they wouldn’t have any adaptations for the deep snow or the nearly complete lack of edible plants in the winter.
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Kids petting wallabies … does it get any better than that?