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Wildlife in my Life: Stumpy the Black-tailed Wallaby
We asked around for advice and received many conflicting bits of information. Some people stated that she must have been malnourished, even though there was plenty of good tucker around. Others have told us that there’s no way wallabies will eat that particular plant. The reality is that Stumpy samples everything new, regardless. Some get sampled and then left alone, others get razed to the ground. Meanwhile Stumpy is getting chunkier and has a beautiful glossy coat. Finally, after much trial and error, we have worked out how to keep Stumpy away from new plants with individual tree fencing. Friends joke that we’re farming wire cages, but we tried all manner of cages before finally settling on circles of chicken wire around each new tree brought onto the property. The wire incidentally is 1800 mm high at 1.4 gauge. We tried lower and cheaper wire but she was up to the challenge! We’ve now learned how to live with Stumpy and even managed to utilise her powers for good and not evil. As we’ve been improving the top soil through organic methods, she spends more time around us performing useful tasks such as keeping the grass down (with the help of the wombats) and pruning all the lower branches in our orchard. It’s a win-win really as all of her scats are going into further soil enrichment. Stumpy is living proof that not all relationships that get off to a bad start end up badly! |
Like an uninvited house guest, Stumpy, our resident Black-tailed wallaby, appeared out of nowhere three years ago, found the living was good, and decided to move on in. The first we noticed of her nocturnal activities was the nashi pear. We were proud of this tree as it had grown quickly and was approaching three metres. The top half of the nashi pear disappeared one day — it was completely ripped off the tree. We found it, not too far away, having been thoroughly munched. Within two months the entire orchard of over 50 fruit trees had been sampled to a greater or lesser extent. We set out like detectives searching for the bad guys until we finally caught Stumpy in the act performing a manoeuvre that a martial arts master would be proud of.