A wombat will steal your heart and then just as quickly leave you for a solitary life in a hole in the ground! Who knew these cuddly little creatures, with their wet button noses, are a relative of the koala. They have the same elongated faces, and the hard surface, cartilageneous plate on their bottoms. I guess it makes for safer sitting. The fur is course though, more like a raccoon than the teddy bear fur of the koala. Not that I've cuddled a raccoon or a koala, but at the wildlife park, you can hold a wombat in your arms and cuddle away.
Melissa or Meredith or whatever her name was had been rescued when she was very young. We won't talk about what happened to her mother but many of the rescued marsupial babies are still in the pouch when they are brought in. Once they have been weaned by a surrogate they are brought to Trowunna for safe keeping until they can be released. They have to be weaned off cuddling and allowed to become anti-social / solitary before they give them back to nature. They are often released at Cradle Mountain where we hiked a couple of days ago amid hectares of wambat friendly terrain. It's mostly a scrubby buttongrass -- bushy hay-like mounds that provide protection for wambat burrows. There is wambat poo everywhere and not a wambat to be seen, even at Wambat Poo lake. I'm sure glad I got to know one at the wildlife park. If you are a fb friend with Margaret (ask if you are not) she has apparently posted the video there. I don't have one. I was too busy getting a Valentine's Day cuddle!
We are in Strahan tonight on the west coast, and about a third of their annual three metres of rain has fallen since we got here. But we did get a mostly dry trip out to the rainforest on a tour boat for five hours today. I toured the infamous Sarah Island -- deemed in its day to be one of the harshest environments for convicts in Australian history -- and was deluged with rain in the last five minutes. But worth the trip, to be on the water, get a decent lunch, learn some things, and not have to drive at all.
Dinner time. The restaurants close at 8pm am and then everyone goes to bed. How civilized.
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