Monday, August 29, 2005

The things you didn't know about Road Kill


A suger glider

Ouch!

Tasmania has shed a new light on road kill. Full of marsupials who are nocturnal by nature, each morning you might see as many as 10 dead animals on the side of the road within a 10 mile drive.
We went to veiw a home for sale. We didn't like the house but the lady living there showed us her orphaned sugar glider. A suger glider is very similar to the flying squirrel. She had rescued it from a dead mother's pouch. Appearently it is very common to find marsupial offspring still alive in the pouch of a animal after being hit by a car. The realitor who was showing us the house continued to tell her story of how she rescued three little marsupials last spring just by stopping and checking road kill. Well...the kids heard this and that was all she wrote. They were determined to look for baby marsupials hidden in the pouches of the road kill.

Here we are checking out a huge wambat. There was no baby in the pouch. Actually there was no tummy left at all. It was all pretty horrible. It was our first and last road kill examination.