Wallaby Project Pictures

I’m not really sure how to structure this entry…it doesn’t make sense to do it chronologically, really, because most of these pictures were taken on just two days when I had the time. And there’s not much of a theme, either: they’re all just…pictures of various things. They go pretty much no way at all in describing or explaining accurately what it was like to be there, the good or the bad parts.

I have more imaginary pictures in my head than real pictures on Flickr: this is me, crouching down in the big pens picking up poo and listening to my iPod as the sun beat down on me, taking off layer after layer of clothes as the day warmed up; this is me, falling into the hole the wombat dug right by the door of the shed; this is me walking out under the stars and watching the bats; this is me learning to feed a baby kangaroo and not let too many air bubbles get into its gut; this is me wheezing for three hours after feedout from the hay dust; this is me having a hard time with the diet of white bread and meat and lard; this is me, trying to scrub at the dirt that got ingrained into the flesh of my feet and didn’t really come off until I spent three hours a day underwater on the Great Barrier Reef; this is me feeling the hours and days stretch out until I had a hard time remembering being in Melbourne or Sydney or any of the other places I’d been so far; this is me laying on my bed and shivering with misery and loneliness; this is me taking comfort in the fierce grip of a koala on my shoulder; this is me making cups of tea and sneaking extra sweet potatoes to the outside babies; this is me, sprinting after the joeys at six in the morning through the dewed-over outback grass as they bounded away one morning out towards the cow pasture; this is me, wondering if I have done the right thing in leaving early.

But since I can’t show you those pictures I may as well just show you the ones I did manage to get while I was there. There are a thousand more images I’d like to show you (like holding the koala or the time one of the chickens tried to fight one of the joeys) but these will have to do.

Okay, so the first things you see when you drive up in the ute to the project site are the various fields and sheds and trailers and cars and everything.

And then usually you see something like this:

This is Alice. She’s an agile wallaby and she’s currently enjoying a lovely slice of sweet potato, more on which later.

Here are a couple of the “outside babies,” two red kangaroos and a wallaroo, I think. The outside babies were ones who had been raised at the project and were now wild and free. Some were wilder than others and would only come back to the project if they were extra hungry or sometimes if they were sick; others liked the free food (they ate a mix of hay, barley, sweet potatoes, and macropod pellets but they almost always left the hay and would only eat the good stuff) and would come in every afternoon for feedout, like these guys. You were supposed to know every animal by species and by name—I was never quite sure of the way to distinguish physically between a gray kangaroo and a wallaroo, for example, which got difficult when you’re making up specific bottles for specific animals and giving them in the dark.

The main thrust of the project was the recovery and rehabilitation of a local bridled nailtail wallaby population. Bridles used to be the most numerous type of macropod in Australia but for a while they were thought to be extinct. They’re highly endangered now; one of the project founders told me that he thought that they would probably end up losing this population altogether and that the project was acting as a “rest home” for the ones they did have. There had been, apparently, some disputes with local government about the status of the project and whether they could apply for further funding and so forth and so on.

These guys were pretty skittish but they loved sweet potatoes, so I would usually sneak a couple of extra slices in my pocket and try to hand-feed them when I was in the pens for the afternoon feedout.

Here they are, riffling through their feed troughs for the good stuff. Earlier in the day one of the volunteers would have refilled their water, rinsed out the troughs, raked the feeding station, and collected a huge bucket full of little dry poo pellets.

I don’t know if you can get a sense of how big the pens are; the bridles were in six pens, four for boys and two for girls (they were separate because the project didn’t have a breeding license or something), and it would take about an hour to clean each pen. They were nowhere near as tame as the other animals so you’d always be hearing these skittering sounds while you were bent over with your bucket and look up to see one of them bouncing away from one of the little hides they hollow out in the tall grass.

As much time as I spent cleaning up after the bridles, though, I can’t say I really got to know them. They didn’t have names and we couldn’t hold them, unlike with the various babies that lived in the hospital and in the lounge. Those babies weren’t the focus of the project, in that most of them weren’t endangered like the wallabies; they were just animals that had been hurt somehow and needed some help.

Here’s Wiggles the wombat, undisputed queen of the project and kind of a pain in the ass. She broke my baby Bolt’s arm with a bite one time (she apparently got jealous when he and his brother were brought in or something) and she smelled and, as aforementioned, she was always digging a hole under the doorstep to the volunteer shed and always trying to break in so she could pee in our packs. This was known as her couch and heaven forbid you crowd her by sitting on it when she was sleeping there. She slept on the bed of the people who owned the project and got many more endearments than their children did. I was not a big fan of Wiggles.

This is Klingon, the tragically misunderstood koala. I am looking at him askance on this picture (it’s my second full day there and I’m learning how to replace his eucalyptus leaves) because two seconds ago he was reaching out with his razor-sharp claws to maul me…or so I thought. It turns out that Klingon, like so many of us, just wanted to be loved. They were trying to acclimate him to people so that he could be on display at a zoo and so for a while he’d been held every day, usually during feedout time when his branches were being replaced. I didn’t get a picture of it, but that tree he’s on actually has wheels on it, and it can be backed up against the large plastic tube thing that held his branches. To replace the branches you had to coax him onto the wheeled tree, skreet it out away from the tube, grasp all the branches you could and huck them out to where we let them dry before taking them out to the wallaby pens (so they could have sun shelter), run to the cold room to get several new armfuls of branches, and replace them in the tube, and then wheel him back so he could eat. For some reason a couple of weeks before I got there they’d stopped holding him during this whole process—usually one volunteer would hold him and the other would switch out the branches—and he didn’t understand why no one would give him any love, so he’d swipe out at whatever wary volunteer was in there in her tank top and manky beige bra, making her think he was trying to kill her. No, no, no. He just wanted to be held as he’d been in the past. Once I figured that out I tried to hold him for twenty minutes a day at least (wearing a sweatshirt) and it’s to my lasting disappointment that I didn’t get a picture of this because it was really cool. His claws were super sharp though and I had some marks from them on my shoulders, even through the sweatshirts. Also, he didn’t want to stop cuddling until he was good and ready, thanks very much, so I’d have to call out plaintively, “Uh, guys? Can I get some help with the koala? Guys? The koala? Hey, y’all? I have…I need…the koala…guys?”

There were domestic animals there too; there was a huge flock of cows in the far pasture (but we didn’t have to feed them except when we cut sweet potatoes and they got the tops and tails) and dogs and cats and things. Here are Minnie, Missie, and Cooper running around outside by the supply field as the sun sets. Cooper, the black and white one, was everyone’s favorite and liked to come up and hop up into your lap and wriggle into your arms. I’m really not a dog person but damn that was cute.

Here is a chicken, for your chicken-viewing enjoyment.

And here is Daisy, one of the three cats on the place that had to be shut up at night for fear of dingoes, for real. She was nice and purry and would sometimes let me hold her in the freezing cold mornings as we drank our first cups of tea and got ready for the first baby feeds of the day.

Speaking of which, here’s an approximation of the schedule we followed every day. It was actually a little out of date by the time I got there but it gives you an idea.

Okay, and finally, finally, as a reward to those of you who have made it through this far and scrolled down faithfully, here are the two babies with whom I spent the most time, Nuts and Bolts.

Bolts is the one with a cast on his arms—thanks to Wiggles, might I remind you—and was my responsibility in terms of feeding and “toileting” (which is a euphemism for “rubbing his cloaca with a tissue until he peed and and pooed copiously upon it”) and diapering (so he wouldn’t suck his own testicles when he was in his pouch) and generally looking after him when he was outside with his bigger and more gregarious brother. Here they are, scratching themselves.

Their mother had been killed by a hunter; when he went to pick her up he noticed that she had two tiny joeys in the pouch and couldn’t bring himself to kill them too, so he brought them to a rescue organization (there are a lot of those in Australia, it seems) and they were brought to the project. Twin joeys, apparently, are very rare and one of them always dies because the pouch isn’t big enough for them both to fit into when they get older and bigger. They had been the same size until Bolts’ arm was broken; he was more delicate and weaker and followed his brother everywhere. The way to get him to come to you was to pick up Nuts and he’d come bounding after you.

Here I am, flush with the success of having learned how to pick up and hold a joey when he’s not in the pouch. You come up behind him and grab the base of his tail and sort of flip him around so that you’re holding him like a baby. I wish I had a picture or a video of how they would get into the pouches; you hold it open high enough up off the ground so that he doesn’t hit his head but low enough so he can get in, and he dives in headfirst and does a somersault. It’s, obviously, very instinctive behavior and we could get them to come from halfway across the field if they saw us hold the pouch open.

Here we are on our first day together; one of the other volunteers had been caring for him before I got there and we’d spent a couple of days transitioning him from her to me before she left the project. It was fairly stressful for him because he had been with her for weeks and in general was a little weaker and so he had diarrhea for several days afterwards, which, let me assure you, was delightful to clean out of his fur and was also a sort of stunning shade of green.

I spent a lot of time making (and washing) up bottles, not only for Bolts but for the other “outside babies” who still got them once or twice a day if they needed them. The pouched babies were on something called Point Six milk, which refers to their having gone through sixty percent of their pouch life, and the other ones were on Point Seven, which, you guessed it, referred to seventy percent of their pouch life, even though, oddly, the outside babies weren’t pouched at all. Mixing the special milk was this very big complicated ordeal that I was never very good at. For that matter I wasn’t particularly good at putting the old-fashioned rubber teats on the glass bottles, either; they were always slipping out of my grasp and it was also a very big deal if you wasted any of the milk because it was so expensive. There were a lot of very big important deals at this project, and I was always feeling as though I couldn’t measure up to the expectations thereof. I didn’t enjoy that bit at all.

I did like feeding Bolts though. He was on four feeds a day but also ate grass (and tiny rocks, for the bacteria and salts on them) outside, fairly constantly. One of the pictures I didn’t get was one of him with a bunch of little yellow flowers sticking out of his mouth as he contentedly chewed away, cutest thing ever.

That said, this may be one of my favorite pictures I have have ever taken, anywhere, of any thing. Look at that face.

Here are the twins again, out by the supply fields. I am shirking my duties here by taking a picture instead of preventing them from going and chewing on the chicken wire.

Okay, one more Nuts and Bolts picture. I was sort of stunned to learn how receptive (and reactive) they were to human mood, and how aware they were of what the various humans were doing. If I got up to go into the lounge they would look up and then bounce after me, causing whoever else was out there to have to corral them back so that they wouldn’t get in there. In this picture they’ve come over almost just to check in, it felt like—Bolts in particular would sometimes get tired and just want to come over and lean into my leg or put his little hands on my finger and rest for a while. One time I lay down on a towel and they immediately hopped over to see what was going on, also taking that opportunity to chew on my hair. It was just interesting—you wouldn’t think that essentially wild animals would connect in those ways to humans, even humans who were feeding them, but they did.

Here’s Bindi, who I’m ninety-five percent sure was a wallaroo. Don’t be fooled by the calm façade she’s presenting here; she was very gregarious and would be at the door of the shed every morning at five-thirty as you stumbled out, wrapping her arms around your thigh and begging for a feed, as you mumbled OKAY BINDI LET GO DANG GIRL I CAN’T GIVE YOU ANYTHING IF YOU DON’T LET GO OF MY LEG. When we cut sweet potatoes she was right there to steal from the buckets.

And here’s Julius, another red kangaroo and my favorite of the outside babies. He would come up to me for sweet potatoes (the kangaroos, let me tell you, they love the sweet potatoes) and I tried to keep a couple in my pocket for him. Here we see him washing down his arms to keep cool, which is behavior that will be familiar to anyone who has seen that one episode of Planet Earth.

Speaking of sweet potatoes, here I am getting ready to wheel another wheelbarrow over to the sweet-potato-cutting station (out by the rainwater barrels and the clothesline, if you’re curious). Every three or so weeks they’d take the ute and the trailer over to a farmer who would let them have the potatoes for free, and every couple of days we’d cut three wheelbarrowsful, or nine buckets worth, to mix in with the various feeds for the next three days. Most of the animals wouldn’t eat them if they were soggy or stale (hello, princesses) so everything had to be kept in the coolroom and we had to cut a couple of times a week. Fortunately there was a machine to do this but we still had to cut out the rotten spots by hand and it normally took four or five people to do it. Even the dogs at this project loved sweet potatoes and would come begging when we were cutting, but no, of course I don’t have a picture of it.

Only eight and three-quarters buckets left to go…

Some more random pictures before I finally wrap this behemoth up:

Here’s where I slept. Not shown: gigantic splinters in the blanket, all of which lodged themselves in my tender flesh as I slept every night.

Okay, DON’T LOOK, LINDA, but here…well, the rest of you can figure it out.

This is a huntsman spider and even though I am generally pro-spider (which is good, because they were everywhere: on our beds, in the shower, in the pens, everywhere) I have to admit this one threw me for a minute and I was pretty glad it wasn’t hanging out over my bed.

While I was there, two convicts from the local prison had escaped and were apparently in our area…there were helicopters overhead for a couple of days and we kept getting calls from various people to tell us to lock up the gigantic storage containers at the supply fields so that they couldn’t hide there. I wasn’t too worried, personally, but everyone else was pretty nervous. The woman who owned this car—the dent is from a collision with a full grown kangaroo—left her keys in the ignition in the hope that the convicts would just take it and that she could get a new car from insurance. They were caught a couple of days later, just walking along the side of the road, when some plainclothes detectives offered them a ride and then arrested them when they accepted.

Here I am trying to open a bottle of ginger beer as some lorikeets eat the remains of my disgusting meat pie lunch during an excursion to Marlborough, a town about a half an hour away by car that consisted of a post shop, a convenience store, and a pub.

When Australians (and New Zealanders) refer to “pie” they don’t mean something with cherry filling and a lovely lattice top. No, they mean a very damp and greasy pastry filled with weird, flavorless meat combinations. I actually managed to spend a year in the southern hemisphere without eating one of these abominations and I can cheerfully attest that I plan to spend the rest of my time here following that same plan.

Closeup of Bolts’ toes…check out the double toenails on the side there, which he used to scratch behind his ears.

Baby roos, in the pouch, are always sucking on their mother’s teat, which releases a constant infinitesimal stream of milk. When they’re in artificial pouches they do the same thing, usually with a corner of their nappie or the pouch liner, but, in this case, with the cord of my camera. He’s just about to lick the tears off my face on that last night I was there as I bawled into his soft baby fur.

Oh, man, I am so sad in this picture. I’ve called Melanie and called the train station and sat through dinner in silence and said something about “communications difficulties” to the project leader and packed my bag up, and now I’m just sitting in the hospital, which was also the office and which, like every other room there except for the volunteer shed, stank of cigarette smoke, crying and crying and crying. The next day as I was wandering around Rockhampton before my train left I went into the tourist information center which had, as you might expect, some postcards with kangaroos on them and I couldn’t handle it and teared up and had to leave immediately. It’s sort of amazing, actually, that looking at these photos doesn’t hurt but instead is cool and makes me smile. I think—I hope—that’s an indication that I left at the right time. That last morning before I left the sunrise was gorgeous, and I wondered then if that was some sort of sign—I couldn’t tell, though, if it meant I should stay or I should go.

Now I know I did the right thing, that I went to really good people, in Innisfail and Cairns and on the boat and in the rainforest, and that I had an amazing experience with the animals on the project. It didn’t go perfectly, which I hate because I always want everything to go perfectly, but the bad things couldn’t outweigh the good, couldn’t even come close to the good things, even though I had to actually leave to get away from those bad things.

And it was, that last day, it was a really beautiful sunrise. The last thing I saw was the two babies hopping near the big barrier fence, watching me go.