ANIMALS AND ROADKILL

This baby wombat is running away from us. They can run at frightning speeds, and have a hard, armour-like plate on their backside in case a predator wants to grab them from behind. The are sooooo cute. They make little building blocks of square poo to mark their territory.

The Kangaroo is actually not too happy with us. Would much rather be having his beauty sleep. The animals here are mainly nocturnal marsupials. And it is teeming with animals here. So the sad thing is, there is a lot of roadkill. A LOT. It appears that they use the same areas to cross the roads, and in some places you can sometimes find fresh roadkill every couple of metres.

Another thing that is big here, is greenies. People are actually very focused on conservation, much much more than in Africa. So a lot of the greenies also don't believe in killing animals. I was shocked out of my wits to find a very nicely presented, hard cover, glossy cookbook called "Roadkill Recipes". Believe me, wombat stew, platypus steak with coriander, the lot. Apparently it is OK to eat meat if you did not kill it was not killed on purpose. Just dust off the grit. Well, we've had kangaroo mince and it is not all that bad, so perhaps if I was a greenie lus for a bietjie vleis I would also swerve towards something crossing the road at night. Jokes aside (the recipe book not being one!) - if you hit something you are supposed to check in it's pouch for a Joey (baby). Some of the animals are pregnant whilst nursing another one in the pouch. Some of the babies are about the size of a Jelly Baby when they are born (looking very similar). They crawl up and into the mother's pouch and stay there until they are big enough to hop around on their own. SO different from the Big 5!