We Have Some Really Cute Animals

Australia's native fauna is among the worlds oldest and most diverse

Here a "Joey" pokes his head from mom's pouch to investigate what she is
doing, the joey will hitch a ride with mom until he/she is nearly one third her
size before being banned, while carrying their joey the female roo can still get
up to nearly full speed.

Kangaroo's at full speed are a picture of poetry in motion, not as fast as some
of the real speedsters, but pretty damn quick just the same.

Echidnas, these were taken at Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo, I have a couple of
shots of them in the wild, but they are usually scurrying away as fast as their
little legs will take them, so I settled for this one.

These guys really push the time machine back to its limits, they are one of only
two egg laying mamals in the world, the other is the platypus, guess where they
live? yeah Australia.

Echidnas are covered with sharp spines, they live on a diet of ants and are very
well adapted by nature, they have a long snout and tongue to rumage for their
food, and extremely powerful digging claws on each foot, an alarmed echidna
can and will bury itself in the ground in a matter of 30/40 seconds.

This little lizard goes by the name of "The Thorny Devil" which is something of
a case of bad publicity, they are so cute and docile that you can pick them up to
study them and they just sit and wait for you to put them down again.

They are fairly rare, live in the desert type country that we have so much of
and survive on a diet of ants too, it's just as well we have plenty of ants, and
believe me , we do.

The Wombat is another of the fairly common animals in Australia, but as with
a lot of our native fauna, they are mainly nocturnal, so go by un-noticed by
most.

This fellow was coming out for the evening just a little before dusk on a sand
dune at Wilsons Promitory in Vic. when I took the photo.

This is the animal that gave birth to the saying; "he's just like a wombat, he
eats roots and leaves"