Koalas sleep a LOT

Lire la traduction Française

Magnetic Island is so-called because way back then, when Captain Cook passed the 10 km wide little speck of land, his compass started to play funny games. He thought at once that the isle itself possessed some strange and magical magnetic fields and so named it. As it happens, his compass must have been a cheap one, because nowhere on the island can you find strange vortexes of magnetism… Oh well…

So we spent an entire week on this small rock. They have very few things there, only one market with overpriced food, only one gas station with overpriced petrol, only one pub with overpriced beer (that tastes pretty bad). One thing they do have though is a LOT of wildlife, enough that they built an animal sanctuary where I worked at for 7 days.

They call it a sanctuary, but it’s more like a small petting zoo for the Australian fauna. You get to take a picture of you holding a koala, a picture of you holding a salt water crocodile, a picture of you holding a wombat… You get the idea. When we talked to the ranger before coming to the island, he had hyped it up to being a really huge park where we could help save injured animals and really make a difference with the local wildlife. As it turns out, I was just cleaning up Koala poop and trying not to get slapped in the face by a young crocodile’s tail while it was trashing around, really not happy with being picked up and passed around for the 3rd time that day, knowing that some dumb kid will, without fail, poke it in the eye.

There was one thing that stood out from that week though. The aboriginals have this belief that everybody has a Dreaming, a spiritual animal with which they have an unusual connection. It that is true, then surely, my dreaming is the cockatoo. There were two different ones at the sanctuary. Shadow, a red-tailed black cockatoo and Captain, a sulfur-crested white cockatoo. Shadow systematically bites everyone who tries to touch him. Captain, will get pet by women, but will not let any males, young or old get close to him. The head ranger even tried to wear a wig one day and see if he could fool him. No such luck.

As it happens, to everyone’s surprise, I could, without hesitation, pet both these birds. None of the rangers had seen anything like it before. I just came up to them and got to stroke their feathers and even massage them a bit. Weird.

So here are quick facts I’ve learn during my week there:

-Cockatoos can live up to 80 years.

-Male salt water crocodiles can get as big as 6 meters and eat people. They can go in fresh water as well. They can also be found 2 000 km out into the ocean.

-Blue-tongued lizards can drop off their tails when in danger. It takes a full year to grow a new one and they can’t drop that new one until it’s fully grown.

-Koalas are not born with the bacteria that enables them to eat the toxin in eucalyptus leaves, their only source of food. They have to eat koala poop for the first 2 months of their lives to gain it.

-Baby wombats are REALLY cute

-Snakes don’t have any ears. Screaming like a little girl won’t make them go away. So stop it.

See HER view
See His and Hers Pictures