Smart Animals

These clever critters know when it’s time to arrive – and leave

One Saturday evening, there was a knock at my door. My friend Jacqui was standing there holding a bloodstained towel wrapped around something. “I saw him being hit by a car and roll to the side of the road,” she said. “It’s an echidna, he may have lost a leg.”

Birds are my usual specialty. I know a lot about the local native varieties that live around the caravan park I manage. The Parks and Wildlife officers and tourists often drop off injured birds to me to nurture back to health, but I’d never handled an echidna, a mammal also known as a spiny anteater.

I took the bundle, carefully unwrapped him and, to my relief, saw that all four legs were intact. There was blood streaming from his nose. A few hours later, I arrived home from the local vet, armed with a small oxygen tank and mask attached to the echidna’s nose, who was nestled inside a cage.

The next morning, I removed the oxygen mask. He seemed alert and his condition was much improved. Luckily, we had an empty aviary in the garden, and inside it was a large

bath. I figured the bath was the best place to keep him. I placed lots of leaf litter in the bottom of the bath for him to dig and bury himself in, as well as worms, grubs, slater beetles and a shallow dish of water.

When I checked on him the next day, all the leaf litter was piled up at one end of the bath and a large hole had been dug along the side of the aviary. There was no echidna. I eventually found him attempting an escape under our front gate. He was obviously ready to go home, so Jacqui and I drove to the spot where she’d found him and placed the cage on the ground, and watched as he happily waddled off.