Ninja Bandicoots and Turbo-Charged Wombats: Stories from Behind the Scenes at the Zoo

By Hazel Flynn

Why are 1000 trees needed for every koala in a zoo?

How do you check a tree-kangaroo’s pouch for joeys?

Why is a wombat’s poo square-shapped?

And how do dogs help look after ‘extinct’ bandicoots?

In these behind-the-scenes stories, you’ll discover what it’s really like to be a zookeeper today and learn fascinating new facts about some of Australia’s most loveable and rare creatures.

Real zookeepers share their funny and moving adventures, from looking after an orphaned koala to saving tiny frogs from extinction.

Many Australian animals are endangered, and in this book you’ll also discover how you can help save them – it’s easier than you think!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Jan 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781743821138

Hazel Flynn

Geraldine Doogue (who wrote the foreword and conducted many of the interviews) is a renowned broadcaster and journalist for the ABC and the host of Saturday Extra

Book preview

SECTION

Introduction

Have you visited your local zoo or animal sanctuary lately? If you have, you might have heard a zookeeper tell an amazing tale – perhaps the one about the orang-utan who figured out how to unscrew the bolts on his enclosure, or the young female elephant that enjoys the digeridoo but hates bagpipes, or the gorillas who love having music by Beethoven played to them. But zookeepers do a lot more than entertain visitors.

Keepers develop close, respectful relationships with the animals they care for. They also train them so that the animals don’t have to be poked or prodded against their will. These days, lions, tigers and bears willingly cosy up to the side of their enclosure so their keepers can check their paws for sores, feed them medicine or even give them an injection. Likewise, emus, which are usually difficult creatures to weigh, now jump onto their scales, while wombats walk willingly into their boxes for transport.

Zoo staff also work way beyond the zoo grounds. Out in the bush, zoo scientists are rescuing Endangered species like the Baw Baw frog, figuring out how to breed them in the zoo and then returning them to the wild.

In this book, we take you behind the scenes at Melbourne Zoo and Healesville Sanctuary, a zoo for Australian native animals located on the outskirts of Melbourne. Turn the page to meet dedicated zookeepers and zoologists who work there, and find out how they are safeguarding the future of the animals they love.

1

Forest Fairies and Frozen Fur

Leadbeater’s Possums and Mountain Pygmy-possums

Eric Wilkinson had always loved the bush and learning about nature. At the age of eight he read a story about Leadbeater’s Possums in a magazine called Wild Life. Though none had been seen for almost 40 years, the man who wrote the story wasn’t prepared to give up on them. Charles Brazenor worked at a museum in Melbourne and when he went through specimen drawers no one had opened for years, he found a taxidermied Leadbeater’s Possum that had been donated long ago and completely forgotten about.

Charles put a massive effort into trying to track down the person who had found the possum originally, hoping they might help him find more that were still alive. He didn’t have much more to go on than the surname Wilson and the location – a town in the Dandenong Ranges – but he travelled out there and knocked on the door of every person named Wilson in the whole district. He didn’t find the person he was looking for, but he did hear from someone who had known Wilson and could tell him the mountain where the possum had been found.

At last, a promising lead! Charles spent many days and nights slogging up and down the densely forested mountain, hunting for any sign that the little possums still existed. He found nothing. But there were other mountains to explore in Victoria’s Central Highlands, where the elusive possum had once been so plentiful.

In order to enlist others to his cause, Charles wrote the article that young Eric would later read, calling on all good nature lovers to send him an urgent message if they thought they’d ever sighted a Leadbeater’s Possum. But no messages came. Ten years later, the Leadbeater’s Possum was officially declared extinct.

Charles Brazenor went on to become the director of the museum. Eric grew up and studied at university to become a geologist specialising in fossils. After graduating he went to work as an assistant at Charles’s museum. When they weren’t working, Eric and his friends liked to go out into the bush and observe the birds and animals, keeping note of what they had seen and taking photographs when they could.

LEADBEATER’S POSSUMS: FAST FACTS

They are:

Mammals: The mothers make milk for their babies.

Marsupials: The tiny babies go straight into their mother’s pouch after birth and stay there until they are big enough to move around on their own.

Nocturnal: They are active at night.

They were originally known as: Bass River Possums.

Their scientific name is: Gymnobelideus leadbeateri. The first word comes from the Greek for ‘naked’ (gymno) and ‘dart’ or ‘arrow’ (belideus). They got this name because they resemble Sugar Gliders (Belideus) in the way they move from tree to tree, but they lack a gliding membrane (making them ‘naked’). The second word recognises Museum of Victoria taxidermist John Leadbeater, who preserved the first specimens.

Their babies are called: joeys.

Their average lifespan is: five years in the wild, up to 13 in captivity.

The biggest threats they face are: loss of habitat due to logging and bushfires.

Their conservation status is: Critically Endangered.

On one of these night trips in 1961, not long after he got the museum job, 22-year-old Eric was sure he’d seen a Leadbeater’s Possum. One moment it was there, and then it was gone. But the instant he caught sight of it, a feeling like electricity shot through him and the hairs stood up on the back of his neck. He was certain of what he had seen, but could it really be so? Was it possible? Had he really just spotted an ‘extinct’ animal?

With his mind still racing, Eric got back in the car for the drive home to Melbourne. Five minutes down the road, a nightjar – a brownish, medium-sized bird that’s active at night – flew across the car’s path and landed on a branch. Eric got out to observe it, and there, on the same tree, was a Leadbeater’s Possum! This one didn’t move. He got a good long look at it through his binoculars.

At first glance a Leadbeater’s Possum could be mistaken for a Sugar Glider, except for the tail. The Leadbeater’s tail is shaped like a baseball bat, narrow where it joins onto their body, then flaring wider along its length. That’s exactly what Eric could see through the magnified lenses. There was absolutely no doubt about it. These elfin creatures had eluded humans for half a century and now young Eric had stumbled on two in one night! No wonder that even in his seventies, his voice still cracked with emotion when he described it.

MOUNTAIN PYGMY-POSSUMS: FAST FACTS

They are:

Mammals: The mothers make milk for their babies.

Marsupials: The tiny babies go straight into their mother’s pouch after birth and stay there until they are big enough to move around on their own.

Nocturnal: They are active at night.

Their scientific name is: Burramys parvus. They were given this name, which means ‘small rock mouse’, by Scottish-born amateur palaeontologist Robert Broom in the 1890s. Broom never saw the possums. He only had pieces of Ice Age fossils to go on; the animals themselves were believed to be long extinct.

Their babies are called: joeys.

Their average lifespan is: one to two years (for males) and one to three (for females) in the wild; eight to 10 (for both sexes) in captivity.

The biggest threats they face are: loss of habitat due to the building and expansion of ski resorts and roads; climate change; and feral predators (cats and dogs).

Their conservation status is: Critically Endangered.

Eric’s discovery should have marked a happy new beginning for Leadbeater’s Possums – they hadn’t been extinct after all, they had just stayed out of sight all those years. The Victorian government even made the possum the official state animal. But the truth is these special little animals are now dangerously close to really disappearing forever.

There are two separate surviving populations of Leadbeater’s Possums: one in a lowland swamp forest near Yellingbo in the Yarra Valley, and one in the Central Highlands near Marysville. They face different types of threats.

Farmland has expanded around the Yellingbo habitat, leaving just a ribbon of forest. This naturally damp swamp area has been damaged by the farms’ water needs. In its natural state, the swamp would regularly flood and drain, but now emptied of water for farming, the trees have begun to die off. And that means the possums that lived in and fed from those trees have also died off.

More than 20 possum families have been lost. From a once thriving population there are now fewer than 40 possums left. These small numbers mean it is very difficult to successfully produce offspring that will grow up and have babies of their own. So Zoos Victoria has taken in some of the Yellingbo animals to care for them and try to develop a captive breeding program, with the aim of releasing young ones back into the wild. As the world’s foremost expert on these possums, Dr Dan Harley, says, Taking them into captivity is not a step to be taken lightly, and reflects how dire things have become in the wild.

This program began in 2012 but so far no babies have been produced. Possum keeper Paula Watson has been working on it from the beginning. She says all the conditions are right for the possums to be mating, but it’s just not happening: We’re a little bit suspicious it’s the males that are not doing the job, which could be diet-related. So we’re working on the diet side of things now. Trying to navigate the ins and outs of a breeding program is very tricky. You need a lot of patience.

CRYPTIC ANIMALS

Both Leadbeater’s Possums and Mountain Pygmy-possums are known as ‘cryptic’ animals. But that doesn’t mean they’re good at solving tricky crosswords. In biology, describing an animal as ‘cryptic’ can have a couple of different meanings. For scientists who specialise in analysing DNA, ‘cryptic’ refers to animals that appear to be identical but turn out to be two different species. Examples include the African elephant. Studying its genes proved it is actually two distinct species (now referred to as the African elephant and the African bush elephant). But for zookeepers such as Paula Watson, ‘cryptic’ means animals whose appearance or behaviour (or both) makes them extraordinarily hard to spot in the wild. Spiders that look like ants and cuttlefish that change colour to blend in with the ocean floor are cryptic because of their appearance. For the possums, it’s more about behaviour: being nocturnal and either extremely fast, quiet and hard to spot (Leadbeater’s); or spending most of their time hidden from human sight in boulder fields (Mountain Pygmy-possums).

Paula has always loved being around animals. At a very early age she decided she wanted to help them in whatever way she could. She says, I don’t know where it came from, but I always liked being outside and playing with bugs and watching baby birds. I used to keep snails as pets, and when I was about 10 I made an insect hospital from a little cardboard box divided into different wards with cotton-wool beds and tissue sheets, and I had a whole set of rules and regulations for it that I wrote in my diary.

After finishing school, Paula studied veterinary nursing, then worked