The Wombat

So I love wombats. Ever since we read the wonderful kids book, Diary of a Wombat, to Jake and Julien I have liked the idea of wombats. Now that I have made the acquaintance of one, I feel more strongly about them. This weekend has been really beautiful in Melbourne, and yesterday we drove out to Healesville Animal Sanctuary with Tyler, Jenni and Brett. Healesville is about an hour out of the city, right in the middle of the Yarra Valley, which is wine country. It looks like Napa Valley, but with a lot of grazing sheep where there aren't vineyards. The Animal Sanctuary is full of native animals. The Pink cockatoos were sitting in the trees. The Kangaroos were lying around. The Ibis trolled the picnic tables looking for scraps of food. One tried to take Lucy's cheese out of her hand. The koala bear slept wedged between branches, but for a moment stretched and we saw that it was curled around its baby. We saw a birds of prey show and an Aborigine man demonstrate boomerangs. Jenni and Brett brought a delicious picnic and good wine and Jake and Tyler bought hand-made boomerangs. But the wombat really did it for me. This guy was not in his burrow, but waddling around his enclosure and then he came right up to us, looked us over, and leaned against the fence, as if he were having a visit.

Wombats, as it turns out, have very little fear of humans. They are strange, enigmatic creatures. Once thought to be simple-minded, it turns out they have the most developed brain of any marsupial. They are intelligent but very obstinate. Shy but inquisitive. Playful but solitary. One website mentioned that when running, a wombat "may indulge in shoulder rolls and somersaults." One doesn't think of a wombat running at all, but although they are generally slow-movers, when they need to they can cover 100 meters as quickly as an Olympic sprinter. Though small, they can summon immense reserves of strength. Wombats are dense and powerful, and this, combined with their stubbornness, make them prone to plowing through obstacles rather than going around them. Their primary defense is an exceedingly tough rear. When in danger, a wombat jumps into its burrow and uses its bum to plug up the hole. With almost no tail and a very solid rump, there is nothing for the predator to get hold of. Brett told us that if you run into the back side of a wombat, it can total your car. In fact, on the drive up to Healesville we passed a wombat highway sign. Collisions can be bad for everyone involved.

Not surprisingly, I suppose, wombat poop is as weird as wombats. Their droppings are cube-shaped and called "scats." Each wombat's scats have a unique smell. With terrible eye-sight and an excellent sense of smell, wombats use their scats like bread crumbs in a forest. They leave scats outide their burrow so they can find it again and also so they can tell if the burrow belongs to someone else. Wombats give birth to underdeveloped young that stay in the pouch to nurse for two years. The pouches are backward-facing so that they don't fill up with dirt when the wombat digs and burrows. And my favorite wombat fact: they sometimes sleep on their backs with their legs up in the air, and they snore. What's not to love?

Photo credits: my camera died before we met the wombat, so this photo is from the internet.