Echidna Tours

Emu

Kangaroos watching us watching them.

Time for this joey to get a job and move out?
 

Today we went on a tour with Echidna Walkabout.  Our tour guide was Scott and he was one of the better guides we had on our trip.  We had about 7 people on our tour and Scott drove us out of town to a nature preserve.  As Scott got out of the van to open the fence to the preserve, we saw a mob of kangaroos in the field next to the preserve.  These were the bigger kangaroos.  Some looked to be six feet tall.  A couple of males stood up to each other. Balanced on their tails they used their short arms and actually boxed each other.  I had to laugh out loud as I witnessed this through my binoculars.  Hilarious!  Their hearts were in it for a real fight; this display was more for show.  Around the field we saw a total of about 50 kangaroos.  Scott drove us into the preserve and he would stop every so often to hike.  We saw and identified 30 birds on this day.  We had a delicious lunch at a picnic table including eucalyptus tea made from freshly picked eucalyptus leaves.  We saw a black wallaby, a brush tail possum, a ring tailed possum, several koalas, and we heard a kookaburra.  Scott would hike through the brush looking in the trees for possums and koalas and down at the ground for echidnas.  We hiked a lot.  After a while I noticed that Scott would hike through the most difficult passages because he wasn't looking where he was going - he was searching for animals.  I was getting tired so I quit following him and just headed in his general direction using the clearest path.  That was much easier for me.  He did find us an echidna.  I saw it out of the corner of my eye scooting through the leaves but it ran into a ditch and hid under a pile of leaves.  We could see the tail of it and we could see the pile of leaves heave up and down with it's breathing.  So we didn't get a real good look at it and no real photo opportunity but we did see an echidna in the wild.  Scott says (and many other guides agreed) that the echidna is their favorite animal.  More about echidnas later.