Babies on Board

Wild Life Goes Native this spring with fun facts on your fave Australian animals.

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Did You know?

• All marsupial babies are called joeys and spend their early days hanging out in their mothers’ pouches drinking milk.

• Tasmanian Devils and wombats have backward-facing pouches – this helps keep dirt off the kids while mum’s busy digging holes.

• Australia is home to both of the world’s only monotremes (egg-laying mammals) – the platypus and echidna. The infants of both are called puggles.

Tassie Devils

Tasmanian Devils sure grow fast. Not much bigger than a grain of rice when born, the cranky critters are close to being fully grown (the size of a small dog) in around six months! Nature’s own cleaners, devils provide an important service by gobbling up rotting road kill. Powerful jaws allow them to eat up every stinky scrap – flesh, bone, fur and feathers! Yum yum...

Echidna

After hatching out of its egg, a baby echidna spends the next 8-12 weeks in its mother’s pouch. Then it gets too prickly to stay and she kicks it out (ouch!). Echidnas are covered in two types of hair. A short, coarse coat keeps them warm, and an armoury of longer prickly hairs, or spines (similar in composition to fingernails), protects them from predators.

Platypus

Platypus mothers drag damp grasses and leaves under their curled tails into burrows to make nests for their eggs. Ten days later, the newly-hatched platypuses emerge vulnerable, blind and furless to suckle on milk released through patches on their mother’s skin. They are born with teeth (what the?), but these fall out at an early age leaving horny plates later used to grind up their food.

Wombats

Strong, stout, sturdy and able to move many things out of their way (including farmers’ fences!), it’s no wonder wombats have earned the nickname ‘bulldozers of the bush’. Digging extensive burrows with their front teeth (which never stop growing) and strong claws, wombats consider burrows located under trees and above creek beds as prime real estate.

Baby Roos

Kangaroos weigh less than two grams at birth and spend the first three to five minutes of life following a path its mother licks in her fur to reach the safety of her pouch. Kangaroos are the only large animals that use hopping to move around, with the turbo-charged Red Kangaroo able to reach speeds of up to 70 kilometres per hour over short distances (20 kilometres per hour over city speed limits!).

Koala

The closet living relative of the wombat, koalas spend most of their lives up trees. These chilled-out climbers spend 18 hours a day resting and sleeping, and about three hours eating. Koalas are one of only two mammals able to survive on a diet of eucalyptus leaves (the other is the Greater Glider) and because they get more than 90 per cent of their water from these leaves they rarely have to drink.

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