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Published: February 14th 2012
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Australian ibis
Total trash bird...just kidding...sort of. Healesville Sanctuary I spent yesterday evening with two newly minted friends of mine, Sacha and Anna, and this morning Sacha is driving me to the airport to pick up Kristy (we had different flights over.) I met Sacha and Anna just four months back in the Yucatan for yet another international conference (restoration that time). And they graciously offered to let me and Kristy stay with them while we were in Melbourne. Turns out they’re a pretty darn cool couple. I’m liking them even more than I did before.
After depositing Kristy’s bags at the house, we decide to get outside and see some critters. And so Sacha takes us to the Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary, about an hour and half’s drive from Melbourne to the northeast. The dense metropolis ends abruptly, spilling us into pastoral scenes and vineyards. We stop to grab lunch and I boldly order baked beans on French toast, an odd twist to a British stand-by (beans on toast.) It’s…so-so.
The Sanctuary is all about Australian flora and fauna. It’s spacious and the fact that it’s surrounded by largely wild country makes the cages and pens constrict less (at least, for those of us passing
Walking a dingo
Oh yes, a dingo on a leash. through.) Australian ibis strut about like pigeons, picking around the picnic tables and crapping all over. Along the pathway between the various stations, we spot an echidna snuffling in the grass. It’s also known as a spiny anteater and that’s mostly what we see, a ball of gently curved pale-tipped spines. It’s related to platypuses and so is yet another anomaly mammal that lays eggs. I watch in shock as young, pretty keepers take some dingoes out for a stroll along the paths. The dingoes look so much like lanky town dogs. I dance a little jig when I hear my first kookaburra laughing in the eucalyptus trees around the sanctuary. Kristy calls it a belly laugh and it’s hard not to join in. We all giggle at a pot-bellied sleepy koala who’s perpetually in danger of toppling from his perch in a eucalyptus viewing stump. Sacha IDs plants for us along the way, tasting, tearing, and smelling leaves like a true plant person. (I learn a wattle is the Aussie name for an acacia tree.) Another young (again female...is there a pattern...?) keeper tells us the publicity story behind the adorable Tasmanian devil pups she's handling in the research
Sleepy koala
This was the one about to totter off his perch. We stood and watched for at least ten minutes, laughing every time he shook himself awake to save himself. center. Tasmanian devils are being ravaged by this strange and frankly downright scary cancer called "devil facial tumour disease." And it's transmissible by touch. Right now, the devils' normal antipathy to their own kind is helping keep them alive. The pups at the sanctuary are being hand-raised to be two publicity devils to raise sympathy for the research money that is being pumped into saving this species (it's that dire) and to investigate this odd transmissable cancer. And by the way, the pups are frickin' adorable. They work on me!
And here I fall We leave the sanctuary right as it starts to close. We’re leaving later than we had expected but Sacha really wants to give us a taste of an eucalyptus forest so we strike north to the Toolangi State Forest. Sacha used to work here, leading educational tours. As we up the narrow two-lane highway, with Sacha taking the turns like a race-car driver (seems Kiwis and Aussies drive similarly…), I fall silent.
This is my first eucalyptus forest. A sight I have dreamed about ever since I moved to California and saw the lovely, sweet-smelling euc groves planted in the ag lands.
They were used for windbreaks, fast-growing and extremely tall. They are patently non-native but it’s hard not to want to touch them, breath them in. And here is a forest of them! I am
moved…to a place I don’t know but am comfortable in. I wasn’t aware I was looking for this place but here I am and here it is.
White peeling trunks, fragile-seeming in their slender paleness. But abundant and tall and sweet-smelling. Each euc has a different perfume. And there are over 700 species across this continent! As we’re driving, I see relatively little undergrowth (and a dead wombat on road. Sad. Very sad) but further into the forest, we come to a more tropical patch with massive fern trees. And there’s more underbrush with this species of euc. Sacha tells us these forest are mostly recuperating ones, secondary growth with a wildly lavish ferny undergrowth. Most of this area was cleared by the timber industry and the forest service still has a rather old-fashioned, controlling view on its property.
I am immensely glad we took this detour. I hadn’t quite expected this.
Eatin’ kanga We have to head back because it’s getting
dinnertime and Anna is waiting on us. On the way back, I tease Sacha for his Aussie shortenings (like Kiwis!). Pelican turns to peli, sunglasses to sunnie, breakfast to brekkie (one of my favorites that I start adopting), and kangaroo to kanga. We pick up some kanga at the grocery store on the way home. Yep, that’s right kanga steak. They sell it at regular stores!! My first criteria for eating meat is sustainability and Sacha tells me he thinks that if more Aussies ate kangaroo instead of beef, they’d have far fewer ecological problems with their meat industry. I believe it.
We cook up the kanga steak for dinner at their cute suburban house. It’s a lovely house with spacious rooms, a great backyard deck, and a garden with chooks (chickens!). The kangaroo smells gamey when sizzling but it has a mild but full meat flavor. Nothing especially distinctive but nice. I’d eat it again!
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