G'day, guys! Welcome to this episode of Aussie English! Today have special guest Nick Bean with us, who is the president of MangeManagement.org.au. So, Nick, can you tell me whereabouts you're from in Australia and how you ended up in the position that you currently have working your arse off to save a lot of wombats around Oz?
Thank you, Pete. Great introduction actually. I'm living in north east of Melbourne, in the rural section and we do have a lot of wildlife around, I've been here 13 years I think, 14 years. How I got involved with wombats is kind of...actually today is kind of significant. Today we have the 10th anniversary of the Black Saturday bushfires.
That's very true.
And as a side effect of that what happened was in the months after the fire which was about a kilometer... well it got to within about just over a kilometer from my place. Therefore, the creeks and everything up further north got burnt out.
Do you want to quickly give us a bit of background, what was Black Saturday?
Look, I was kind of new to the whole bush fire aspect. I looked a little naive I sort of watched it bubbling away in the distance, dropping cold sticks about the size of a biro on us, two hours before the fire got near us and I'm thinking is this really bad or just a bit of a burn sort of thing? You know, anyway. Fortunately, one of my neighbors was an ex CFA MFP fireman and he'd been through the 62 fires which came through here and so he was very well versed in bushfire habit or behavior. So, I spend a lot of the day with him at the fence line watching the fire and I want to do things like put water out and wet things down and so forth, but Johnny my neighbor just said no, no look just just calm down. If it does this, we will do this, if it does this, we will do that. So he had plans in his mind, you know, plan A, plan B, plan C sort of thing and he has a very calming influence which was I still remember the feeling of nervousness through my body, I was just trembling, I wanted to do things, but I didn't know what to do.
I can't Imagine being in that situation and for listeners who don't know, Black Saturday was the worst ever bushfires in Australia, right? 109 people?
173.
173? We lost a lot of lives, yeah, that was it was insane, wasn't it?
It was.
So, you were there during that?
So, it was coming towards us, you could see it and then you could hear it too. That was the other thing, it was quite distinct and late in the afternoon the wind changed and it blew further north, I guess, and that's what really saved us here, but didn't help the Kinglake and other people, unfortunately.
That was the reason it was so deadly, right? People were sort of in a position where they thought they were ok and the wind changed and thei fire changed direction and caught a lot of people off guard, right?
So, yes if you look at the original fire the way it was hitting it was like a long cigar shaped sort of fire, it's quite narrow. It would have come through probably just north of my place here, actually, if it'd continued from that route. And in some respects probably not a bad thing because it was a long narrow thing. Then you had the wind change which came from a 90 degree angle and it blew that narrow cigar shaped fire across to the east in a big...the hole front, you know, the whole long depth of it became the front, basically.
That thin cigar line, effectively the whole width of it suddenly became the entire fire that was going forward in that direction.
And just went north east from there. So, that was what really did it so, but and then after that, well, you know, we spent the following weeks watching the tank escape past year, because I was still putting out spot fires two weeks afterwards basically so, old trees that were still burning, but anyway.
There were hundreds of fires too, right? I think I mentioned that on the podcast recently talking about bushfires in Australia and that when we have a bushfire like Black Saturday, it's not just one, usually it's hundreds.
Yeah and it's the effect of spotting, I mean, from next door from here we had Healesville at the back, Healesville in Chum Creek, up through that region they had fires, Murrindindi was what they called it. So, there's the Murrindindi Kilmore fire which is this region and then you had the Marysville fire which is further east from here basically. So some of them were started by embers, some were started by people, some were just started by, you know, things failing if you like so, there's a whole combination of things and then you had fires up near Bendigo and down in Gippsland and yeah, like you said, there was hundreds of them, unfortunately.
It was pretty crazy, you see that satellite photo, right? Of the state and there's just plumes of smoke everywhere from all these different locations and it's like...
So, actually from there so what happened with wombats from that perspective was they had nothing to eat. So, we're near Diamond Creek and for the next few months wombats would come wandering down our direction because we still had grass and things to eat and then I remember from about May to about October we had... I'm near a main road and we lost five wombats in that period to road kill. So, they'd... the population density increased, we had a lot more wombats wandering around, we had a lot more that were killed.
No kidding? So, they'd all migrated out of where that bushfire had come through and obviously they'd survived. How did they survive the bushfire if it took out all the food and everything?
Well that was the catch. They survived the fire by being in the burrow, which is a wonderful location and I wish I had a burrow.
Very insulated, right? The temperature stays pretty flat...
It's actually kind of humid in a way, everything is perfect. So, they all came wandering down looking for food which is fair enough and they found food down here but they found an increase in population. So, it just I mean they kept wondering. So, as I said, we lost five in five months which was very... I've never had that before. So, I was really quite angry, I guess, because we'd lost so many animals just from road kill and yet there's nothing I could do about that, but then we moved five years later than that or five years from there and five years ago I remember heading out for a bike ride up, on Australia Day, of all days, at about 8:00 in the morning. It was a fairly warm morning and I'd gone about one and a half kilometers up the road and I could see a car stopped and something in front was just ambling across the road and I realized was a wombat and I realized it probably had mange and I thought well I've got to do something. I can't just let this continue. So, that's what, I got off my bike I was in my lycra. I called a friend who runs a wildlife shelter up the road. She came down and gave her a dose of something, I can't remember what it was now, but we gave it a dose, and that became my first wombat and I started to treat and I nicknamed him Curly because he had no hair basically.
And you were just able to as a person who is obviously just an average citizen in the public, you're allowed to nurse wombats or did you have to do some kind of special training to be able to do that?
Well, we left him in the field so, we do treatment in the field and by doing that, if yes, if I'd captured him which would be illegal because I'm not a wildlife carer.
Even if they're sick? Even if they're sick or?
Correct, yeah, so you have to be a registered Wildlife Care with DELP, which is the government body in Victoria. So, we basically treat them in field because it's much easier in some respects too, for various reasons, but yeah that was my first one so we did a thing, a technique called 'pole and scoop'. So, basically you have a poll probably five feet long or a couple of metres long and I have a little scoop at the end, I put the Cydectin, which is the stuff we used to kill the mange, and you just poured along the back of the body where the hair is and it soaks into the skin and it's a bit like using revolution or one of those things for dogs and cats.
The flea treatment, right? That you in the back of the...
Same principle, it gets into the bloodstream, it kills things that are latched on if you like and that's how it works so, it's no different to treating wombats as well.
So what is mange? For those listening who are thinking what on earth is this disease that these wombats are getting? What is mange, exactly?
Mange is a little parasite and it burrows the female, burrows into the skin. She's very small, you can't see her, but she burrows into the skin and then she would lay eggs under the skin, those eggs hatch, they come out they mate on the outside of the skin if you like. They then burrow back in and it's a constant burrowing act process that destroys the skin and hair and they end up with... it's not so much they die from there, they die from secondary infections. Bacterial things, a whole range of things.
Is it also exposure to the elements? Because I see quite a lot of these animals with mange tend to lose all their hair because they get this sort of festering wounds on their outside, rashes on the outside of their body.
You get a couple of problems you get in summertime you get blowflies line basically and that's a pretty terrible thing.
I think you'd mentioned that in our video you said one it being flyblown I think, and I was like what? Wombats can get flyblown. 'Cause grew up going to my grandparent's farm and they had sheep and we'd talk about a sheep getting flyblown and that's why they had to remove the tails from the backs of the sheep.
Yeah, that's why they docked them. Yes.
So, that can happen to wombats as well?
Yes. So, we've got open wounds, the flies will lay their eggs and then off they go, basically. So, it's a combination of things. Summertime is very difficult to treat mange because you've got a couple of things happening you have very poor nutrition in the grass and the wombats suffer from that. If they are normally healthy and they don't have mange, it's not a big drama. They eat, but they don't...They lose weight. If they have mange, it compromised their body and it makes them more difficult to bring back up to a healthy state. And that's usually late summer, early autumn when we've got very poor grass or food around. So, the best time to treat mange I find is usually winter and spring, really, when it's a bit moister and it's a bit easier to deal with them anyway. Not some issues.
Is this something that's just unique to wombats, this kind of mange or is it something that all marsupials or all Australian mammals can pass from one another?
Well, mange was... in humans it's called scabies.
Yeah, yeah.
It was wonderfully produced in this country by early settlers on themselves and on dogs and cattle and that sort of thing. So, basically it's quite a common thing in some of the rural outback communities in Western Australia, for example. Scabies is quite a big issue. It's interesting you treat it slightly differently on people, you have to have a cream with a pyrethrin or some chemical in it which kills the mange mite, but you literally have to cover yourself from head to toe.
You don't have to use the 5-foot pole, fortunately.
Some people you might have to, but anyway.
And obviously it's very contagious because it is passed on by touching, right?
Yes. So, clothing, bedding, this sort of thing, but in the case of the wombat burrow what can typically happens is the wombat will share a burrow with another wombat. They'll have, actually they'll have multiple dens in the burrow, but they'll block mites and the mites can live for about one or two weeks off the host.
These are mites that are mange or they are separate parasite?
So no, it's a parasite. The mange might can then come off and then fall on the ground and then just lie there for a while and the next host comes along, like the next wombat then it will pick it up. So, that's one of the common ways. There's an issue where people might try and euthanize a wombat because it has mange without treating it. The problem there is you end up having a burrow that's empty, so the next wombat will come along "oh, there is is an empty burrow, I think I'll use that one".
That makes so much sense, you would never really think either there's an empty burrow full of insights that's not being defended. And so what would happen if you if you treat one wombat and it goes back to its burrow that is full of these parasites, will those parasites die either by jumping on the wombat and being poisoned or just from lack of exposure to wombats they can jump on?
Both actually. So, basically we treat them so that the life cycle of the female mange mite is about four weeks and they can live off hosts for, let's say, one of two weeks so, let's say you do a treatment program for eight weeks, you're going to exhaust the burrow of mites and you're going to kill the mites on the hosts so, if you do it to a number of burrows, then you're going to increase that sort of range of feed burrows if you like.
So, you won't get like reinfection kind of thing happening again.
Yes, there has been some very interesting research done in the last 10 or so years which does show that there is a immune reaction to the mange mite. Now, what that means is that when you have a wombat with mange and you treat it, the next time, and it's completely clear of mange, the next time it might pick up some mites they have far less of a chance of reinfecting the wombat. So, it's kind of interesting, actually.
That's kind of like a vaccine then at the same time.
Exactly. So, when I've been speaking to some of the top researchers in the country about it, at least a couple of them have said yes she could have a technically a vaccine that could do that and you could have a wonderful one shot treatment, but he's going to spend 10 or 20 million dollars on a vaccine for wombats? I don't think there's going to be too many people out there, unfortunately. I'd love to.
What's the sort of prognosis for wombats if you were to do nothing, compared to doing what you are doing currently? Are you aiming to hopefully completely eradicate mange or is it something you just need to manage? Obviously, hence the name.
I think, look, I think for the next...I'm going to say, maybe 10 years it's kind of a status quo of just treating them and trying not to make it get out of hand. A good example of it going out of hand is a national park down in northern Tasmania called Narawntapu National Park. Now, probably 10 years ago had, I don't know, 250 wombats. I was down there about three years ago, they were down to 60 wombats, I believe they are probably less than 10 wombats in the national park down there now and they've surely been eradicated by mange. So, what will probably happen then, it goes through cycles, you'll find that the wombats will die out. There'll be no mange, the wombats will come back in from outside areas, the population will build up again, but it's kind of that's a very extreme example of it happening. So, the other problem is that it's not just mange it's killing wombats. Let's go back a step. The life cycle of a wombat is roughly that say 15 years in the wild, 15 maybe 18 years if you're lucky. In that timeframe, the female she has a joey, about every... and only one joey, there are occasions where you might see twins, but it's very rare. Let's say they have one joey every two and a half to three years. So, in their breeding last cycle, which might start at the age of four, they might have five, maybe six wombats in total.
So, they're actually quite different from say kangaroos which are also marsupials and have a completely different breeding cycle, where they can, I think they can have like three offspring happening at one time, right?
They can only wonder if they can have an embryo that's attached to the teat. And so, a wombat actually have two teats. A kangaroo has four teats. So, a kangaroo will actually have one in the pouch attached to it to the teat all the time and then it'll have a second out of patch joey that will still feed from one of the other teats. And so, yes, it can keep that going. And it can also regulate the growth and the speed of the embryo. So, it's kind of interesting, depending on the food and that sort of thing.
This is how they come back, right? Like rats, you know, after a drought or something because they have diapause, right? Where they can just effectively hit pause when there is no food and it's really dry and then get it going again when it's...
It's a wonderful adaption to such a harsh environment like Australia, basically.
Except that wombats don't have it, obviously, they are a bit slower.
Yeah, there has been research in South Australia where they have the southern hairy nosed wombat and it shows that after a drought, the following year, they have a great reduction in the number of newly born joeys so, their population is... it lags by about 12 months. So, basically what I was sort of getting to was with the life cycle, you might have five wombats that are born for that female and let's say you might lose one to mange, you might lose one to road kill and one two people either shooting or dog attack or something like that. So, realistically for a breeding pair of wombats they might really only have two, maybe three young that replace them. So, it's a very slow cycle, unfortunately.
So, how do most of them end up dying? Is actually a quite a lot at least around humans where it's not natural deaths. You know, these diseases that have been introduced like mange, it's road kill and it is dog attacks and hunting as well.
Yeah, dog attack and people just shooting them. In north east Victoria, unfortunately. So in South Australia and New South Wales wombats are protected species, in Victoria they are protected to a point. There are certain areas around particularly north east Victoria where you don't need a permit to shoot wombats, basically. So, if you have land and you feel that wombat is doing damage to your land, you can simply go out and just shoot them if you wish. Certain areas you need to get a permit from DELP and you can look at the Dell website under, I'm trying to think of the name now, there is a page on their website that shows the number of permits and animals actually culled each year basically so, wombats have gone up from, I think, fifteen hundred a year, 10 years ago to about 4000 a year or something like that.
In numbers or in...?
Permits to shoot.
Oh, really? So, it's doing that much damage to farms, is it? Because I assume that it's not people just going out there and having fun is shooting random wombat, is it?
You do get that. But basically that the permit system is you have to prove wombats doing damage to your property. Unfortunately, that can also stem from, if you like, so maybe most damage is usually around fences, they have to get through the fences so, the problem is that most farmers will fence down to the ground and therefore it doesn't create a pathway for the wombats, so the wombats are going to dig under.
I can get around, this is easy!
I'll just dig, that's what I'm born for. And they don't allow for that and therefore the fences get damaged.
There are some people who use these swinging logs and swinging gates to let wombats through, but not let the stock through and it works quite well.
I lived in Canberra last year for six months and there was a reserve right near our house and they had a bunch of those and then the kangaroos were using them all the time and there were echidnas and stuff around and it seemed like the animals kind of worked out pretty quickly.
How to get through?
That against you and that there was no... When they when they had those there was no obvious damage to the fences from kangaroos digging under them or pushing them up or getting caught in the fences with their legs and carking it. So, it seems like a pretty easy solution.
There are solutions around whether people are willing to do it and I think it's a generational cultural thing. So, some people just have certain fixed opinions about things and, unfortunately, wombats aren't high on the list of things so, yeah that's one of the big killers, is basically culling of the animals, whether it's legal or legal sort of thing.
And when they're getting attacked by dogs, is that people's pets that they're just letting out and about or is that wild dogs that you guys or we have up in the forest there?
Predominantly pet dogs if you like, some wombat might go on someone's property and then they've got a dog, goes out and bites it. Wombats actually do bite each other, it's not a problem as such.
I thought they were pretty vicious, I remember going to Wilson's prom when I was a little kid and I was like 5 and asked my Dad "can I chase the wombat?" and he's like yeah, go for it and see what happens. So, I chased after it and it didn't run just turned around and chased me off the boardwalk into the intertidal river and I remember just being so shocked, being like why is this friendly, lovely little Australian critter chasing me and he's like you got to be careful, man, that they'll bite you. They've got...I think they are like a really bony plate in their bottom, right? That they can use.
They do and that's what they use for attack and protection. And so what they'll do is, if they do attack each other, they end up biting themselves on the back because they turn around and use it as a defensive play and their teeth are designed to scrape. So, they tend to make a bit of a mess on their back and it looks pretty messy. It's fine. It's always been like that. The trouble with dogs is dogs tend to go for the head and neck and also their teeth are designed to puncture so, they puncture through the skin rather than scrape and that's when you get maggot problems and then you... yeah, it gets messy.
It's not so much that they're killing the wombats, it's they're wounding them and then that leads to more problems down the road.
Look at it technically it's kind of actually hard to kill a wombat from their perspective.
I was thinking, they are little tanks, right?
Yeah. So it's a secondary side effect that, unfortunately, does them in. So...
And so when we're driving along Australian roads and we see them on the side of the road, I'm sure some of the listeners will have seen that especially around forested areas, around Victoria and New South Wales. How does that eventuate? How do wombats... why do they just cross the road and decide to dance in front of cars? What's the situation there and is there a way to get around that?
Good question! We're looking at some technical approaches using sensors to indicate...There is research being done in a couple directions. One is to convert, so you might have heard the term smart roads what they want to do with some roads is to add electronic sensors in them and they can be used to relay information to cars. This is probably way down the track, and one only approach is, we're talking to a professor about it, was to add information about things on the road. So, whether it be a wombat or a tree or something like that.
So, anything when it puts pressure on the road there's some kind of signal that gets sent to cars that are coming in that direction.
And it could convey it to the car or something like that.
That's way down the track. There's other things where they do wildlife detectors in some countries like Canada and some of the Scandinavian countries for Mooses and these sorts things where they're big animals and they have detectors either on the car or along the roadside that just flash when there's something there, so there's things like that, but look, wombats are just...they're very smart animals, actually, surprising, but they're very stubborn.
Yeah. And is it that they have their kind of territory and they know, you know, my I've got a field over here that I go and eat in every evening and they just cross the road at night, don't understand what a car is.
No, they try, and they do use pipes. I mean, we've got some pipes around here where wombats do cross under the road your guess is two or three feet in diameter, it's big thing and not only wombats but foxes use it and that sort of thing.
So, you don't want them to use it, there should be a sign saying "use the road".
And they do.
There's quite a lot of foxes on the side of the road, probably more than wombats to be honest which is probably a bad sign.
So, look, I mean, wombats had seen winter, I must admit, when it's wet road it's sort of...and they got very black skin or fur, it's hard to see them on the road, I understand that, but I just slowed down at night and just take it easy, anyway.
Is that where most of those road kills are occurring as well? It is it dawn or dusk or during the evening like the night when it's dark?
Yeah just during the night when it's dark so, although that said, wombats will come out during the daytime in winter when it's an ice cool day. So, the other aspect actually, that's interesting, a lot of people assume that wombats are nocturnal and if you see them during the day, they must have a problem. No, it's not the case. Wombats are a bit like us from the aspect that in a nice cold winter's day when the sun is out you like to go for a bit of a sun bake and I've had plenty of wombats that I've gone up to on the roadside thinking oh, they've been hit! And only to find, when I'm about to turn them over, then he looks up and wonders what I'm doing, and I realise he's just out for a sun bake, and I thought, ok...
So, they're just sitting there, actually warming up on the road?
To the side, usually in the side of the road and that's why I think they've been hit by a car or something, but no they're happy just to go for a bit of a munch during the day, plonk themselves down for a couple of hours in the sun, get out go for another munch. So, during winter they're quite... They're happy to come out, put it that way.
Far out! And so, have you done much in the area of rehabilitation of any of these guys one on one and could you talk to us about what it's like, what their personalities are like?
I must admit, I tend to do a lot of infield stuff, because I'm not registered to the Wildlife Carer, I can't get involved with them directly, but we do have some wildlife carers around who do get involved with them and we have two at the moment actually at a friend's place one of them is for Bruno and he's a big boy. And then there's a younger one which is oddly enough called Mr Bean.
Because he's the funniest one, is he?
Oddly enough he is named after me.
Gotcha! Gotcha!
I actually rescued him in August from his dead mum and here was just a little pinky in the pouch and basically we managed to cut him out of the pouch because it's pretty tight. I think the story might be on our Facebook page somewhere, anyway.
So, what's the situation there? What how how did you end up rescuing a baby?
Oh, okay. So, what happened was on an August 23, I think it was, it was about zero degrees, I'm driving to the train station. There's a body on the side of the road, a wombat, and I thought ok, I'll stop and check and I carry a can of blue spray paint cause I spray them when I check them to say it's been checked so, no one else checks it.
I was going to ask you that too, because his year down in Canberra we were driving along and I'm like "what the... some some arsehole has spray painted every single one of these dead animals on the side of the road" you know, some graffiti artist has gone.
I'm just tagging.
One of my friends is like no man, that's someone comes out and checks every morning to see if there's a new freshly killed animal and why are they checking these animals?
And well, if it's a female so, this one in particular I rolled over and I thought a female, I can see the pouch, the pouch is bulging slightly and it was moving slightly. So, it's got a live one in it. So, then I called a friend and she came down and likely she's a nurse so, she's used to cutting things.
And she was carrying a scalpel, was she?
Pretty much, she's got the full kit in the car and we managed to extract that one. He was quite chilled by that stage, so we wrapped him up in a blanket and then took him straight up to a wildlife carer in St Andrews here called Mara and she had everything ready and she started to feed him. We initially thought he might pass away in the first half hour. It was really touch and go.
Just from hypothermia or?
Exactly from the cold and the lack of food and that sort of thing. But by the end of the day she had him feeding well, he warm and she has a little crib with the little head heat pad in it so, it keeps warm up. It was remarkable, and now he's...what, he went from a 300 gram pinky and now he's about five kilos and he's a bouncing boy.
Far out, he's bigger than a cat then now...
Well, they're very solid. So, he's probably the same size of a cat, but far more solid.
Like a cat in the shape of a brick, right?
Exactly. Yeah.
But I've seen and I've heard that they're actually quite easy to not necessarily domesticate, but to get used to humans because I've seen those videos with people caring for them and they'll be out in the garden running around and the wombat is chasing them around. is that a... Is that something unique to them? Is that a behaviour that they do?
Well, they're very smart because both Bruno and Mr Bean, even though they are very young, Bruno is a slightly bigger wombat, but they're both toilet trained. There... In their pen, there's a toilet area and after they've had a drink or their food they then go into the little box with the kitty litter if you like and do what they have to do and then come back out. I was really impressed, actually.
The next step would be training and like those people who have a kitty litter holder that go on toilets, right? So, they try to poo in the toilet.
We're working on it, yeah.
Is it true that they have square poo?
They do.
And why is that the case, more importantly?
I was afraid you were going to ask me that. There is a good documentary about it actually and I can't remember what it was about.
A full documentary just on that question?
Yeah I should know these important things, actually. Unfortunately, I just treat them from mange.
Far out! Because I remember walking around again in this in this reserve in Canberra, and just seeing those square like cuboid poos everywhere and being like oh, I guess there's wombats around here, 'cause nothing else does that.
But what really impresses me is when you see a little stump or a log or something and they manage to poo right on top of it. I mean, that really blows me away that.
Far out. So, do you think people who stop on the side of the road to check these animals, are they making a big difference in the grand scheme of things in other words are a lot of the animals that die in the road is that taking a big toll on the actual population?
Yeah, I'd say there's probably depending on the zone, I mean, for example North of Melbourne there are some big housing developments going on and that's had a huge impact on the population of kangaroos, for example, and probably wombats as well.
Is it because they die on the roads, but they're also clearing the land that they like to eat on?
Yeah. So, predominately it's the clearing and disturbance, but secondly it's the roadkill that is a big issue too. So, it's a big problem, some areas it might be as high as you know 30 percent of the deaths of these animals is through probably roadkill to be honest.
Far out, no kidding.
Yes, look, depending on how much cleared land. So, where I live there's a lot of cleared land around. So, things like wombats probably will graze, but there's not much creek areas to go and hide if you like. Whereas if you go further up to the national parks nearby, they're obviously very dense and they'll have a much greater density and wombats and that sort of area basically.
And hence you'll see those signs everywhere, the yellow signs built with a wombat on it saying drive slow. So, what should people do as well if they see those signs and they're driving through those sorts of areas. What should they do in terms of how they drive and also if if they were to hit a wombat or see a wombat on the side of the road that doesn't have your tag on the side of it, what advice would you give to people in that situation?
Look, generally if I'm going to a location, for example, if I'm driving up to New South Wales through the mountains, I will actually load into my phone a number of wildlife rescue organizations that might be in that area. So, if I do something, do see something, I have got the ability to contact someone hopefully and maybe get some assistance or some help.
So, is it just their phone numbers or applications or something?
Probably their phone numbers. So, in the case of wombats, for example, more commonly what I would do if actually difficult to extract a joey from a pouch, it's done under supervision because you need to actually cut the teat, but make sure it doesn't suck the teat down.
So, what we often do is we're going to cut the teat, you put a safety pin through there, then you cut the teat and then the safety pin will stop it from being taken in by the joey, but also pouches can be quite tight so, you do have to have a pair of good scissors to cut the patch open without cutting the animal, but instead of doing all that what I'll often do is actually take the whole body and stick it in the back of the car.
That was what I was about to ask, you just load it into the back of the car, and be like whatever, like I can see something moving so, the whole thing goes into the car. Just hope you've got a UTE and not a station wagon.
I'll probably ring up a wildlife carer nearby and say look, I've come across a wombat, this has happened a few times, I'll take the whole body with the joey in and let them.... It's also better insulated too, if mum's still warm, it's going to stay warm. So, that works out well.
And so would you recommend too these people when they're driving through these areas to be more vigilant than usual?
Yes. Yeah and look areas that I find that wombats and wallabies for example tend to be more active usually around creek areas where it's moist, a creek crossing, were you get dips in the road that go down to a creek. It's highly likely we're going to get a much greater density of animals in that area, basically. So, I'm more vigilant too the side of the road so, I'm always looking alongside the roads to see what movement there is, this sort of thing and at night I just slow down. It's difficult in some areas, but you know, I'd rather not hit something and just damaging an animal it's also damaging your car and you might be incapacitated.
That's it too, right? If you hit something like an echidna or a wombat, unfortunately a lot of Australian animals aren't really made to be run over by, so it's not going to do your car a lot of good so, even if you don't care about the animals, it's kind of like care about your own car as well to slow down. So what happens, to sort of finish up the interview, what happens to someone like Mr Bean? What will happen in his near future?
Ah, well that's interesting because Mr Bean has an issue with his teeth and his teeth aren't... so wombats have teeth that continue to grow through their lifetime, they don't ever wear out, basically.
So, they are Australians kind of rodents, right? Like the equivalent of like a land Beaver, you know?
Yes, exactly. Their teeth are designed to keep growing. In the case of Mr Bean his teeth, or a couple of his teeth are misaligned and the trouble is as he gets older, he won't be able to eat and he will basically, if we let him back into the wild, he'll probably starve.
What happens? You need the teeth to align, right? So that they chisel one another down to stay sharp so that they can keep eating if they don't align the teeth or just keep growing.
Exactly. So, fortunately in about two week's time there's a vet up near Canberra. Doctor Ralph Howard, or Howard Ralph? Sorry, if i get that wrong.
Two first names.
Yeah, I know, it's really messy, especially at this time of night. He is willing to do the surgery to make the correction so, that's going to happen in a couple of week's time so, we shall hopefully see how that goes, anyway. If it goes well, he'll be looked after for another year and then he goes into what they call a soft release where he goes into a caged area out here, in the bushy environment where he'll have a door attached where he can come and go as he pleases. So, he'll get used to his environment and then come back and we can still feed him and look after him and then he'll go back out there during the night. So, that's how they do it a soft release, anyway.
Does that tend to happen most of the time where they will just eventually disappear completely or do they sometimes say man, this deal is just too good to give up, this hotel free!
No, wombats are funny. They get to about the age of three and they just sort of turn completely and off they go. That's it. They might come back on occasion, but they're very.... I wouldn't say solitary; they just suddenly change. So, they'll be out there enjoying the wilderness and that's about it, really.
Suddenly notice the ladies and they're like yeah no, the free food, you can keep it.
Exactly!
Far out. Well, Nick, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. How can people find out more about Mange Management and I take it you guys take donations if people want to help out and they're in a position to?
We take donations. We have a Facebook page which is Mange Management and we also have a website. The website is mostly about treatment and we encourage people to try and treat wombats themselves, either using the pole and scoop that I mentioned or a burrow flat which is a device that sits over a burrow and can dose the animals as well. So, we encourage individuals to do it, mainly because there just aren't enough of us to do it. So, even if people engage so, either process have a look and see what you think, anyway.
So, what happens there? If you want people to help out what do they need to do in order to say they're living in a location where they know wombats are found locally and they find out there's mange on some of them, what do they need to do in order to get a kit or get some of the gear to help out?
We've got about 30 pickup points around Victoria and you can go and pick up a kit which is free and it's got instructions, it's got all the gear in it to at least get treatment going and then that's usually the starting point anyway and then I can converse with this, ring us, email us whatever and we can give them assistance anyway.
Brilliant! Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Nick! Really appreciate it.
Ok, Thanks, Pete.