Echidnas

Lots of tourists come to Australia. hoping to see a kangaroo, a koala and a platypus. Those three are easily seen at Taronga Zoo, but forget about seeing the koala and the platypus in the wild, but you may get lucky with a kangaroo or wallaby, though there are wild wallabies within 10 km of the centre of Sydney, if you know where to look. (See the
Manly to Spit walk for more on the swamp wallabies of Dobroyd.)

That aside, how about the lesser-known echidna, like the platypus, a mammal that lays eggs? Scientists first suspected that ther platypus and echidna laid eggs in about 1804, because the females that were dissected showed no sign of a uterus. Proving this took another 80 years, and the death of more than a thousand echidnas.

There are quite a few to be seen on North Head, and we believe there are 19 at the moment. All the same, you would need to walk the tracks for several days, and know what to look for...

I have been having something of a love affair with echidnas, as you can read here in my writing blog.

You are more likely to see signs of echidnas having been digging, and it is always my habit to drop an Australian 50-cent coin in a photo for scale, because these are 32 mm across.

In the image you see on the right, there is a coin, and to the right of that. you can see a snout drag, where the echidna has backed off from feeding on ants in the hole above the coin.

To be honest, your best chance of seeing an echidna is at Taronga Zoo.

Then again, there are several engravings of echidnas in Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park, and when I get around to doing that entry, I will reveal the least-endangered one's location on the Centre Track. As you can see, it is fairly faint, and only shows up because I poured water over it. (As they get regular rain, pouring water on the engravings is acceptable.)






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