Free Mountain Tails by Sharyn Munro Page B

wallaby’s birth and child-care system is incredibly complex. Wallabies have four teats inside their pouch, but only give birth to one young at a time. The females must be quite keen on this courtship business, despite their nonchalant demeanour, because they are ready for sex soon after the birth, and the mating usually leads to a fertilised egg.
    The newborn’s suckling sends a pause signal to that new egg, in which state it remains until a few weeks before the suckling joey is ready to vacate the pouch for good, which is after about ten months of joyriding.
    Rather like a full city car park, where the entry gate doesn’t open until a space is newly vacant, only then does the egg resume its development. Pregnancy lasts three to five weeks, and while that one’s growing, the evicted joey is being weaned, at arm’s length, so to speak.
    It’s a miracle how the newborn gets to the pouch: only about 25 millimetres long, it looks as unformed as the very early human embryos we see in ultrasound pictures. This naked pink ‘grub’ has nubs of forelimbs, and a sense of smell apparently, and somehow works it way up the mother’s tummy fur and into the pouch, where it latches on to a teat and doesn’t let go for six months. The teat functions rather like an umbilical cord, because from its sustenance the baby continues to develop as if it were in a womb.
    Even with a new one in the pouch, the mother still lets the older joey stick its head in and suckle until it’s over a year old. It uses its own special teat, since new and old joeys receive custom-designed milk from their individual teats. As I said, cute, and beyond clever—an extraordinary animal!
    The mothers’ club members meet on the north-facing grassy slope. In the morning sessions they sunbake without a care for danger or dignity, their legs sprawled apart, leaning right back on their tails to expose their pale furry tummies to the warmth of the early sun. In the hotter afternoon sessions they take to the shade of the edging trees, stretch out wearily, lolling sideways, yet with heads erect to keep an eye on their restless young who catapult about like overwound clockwork toys.
    These toddler joeys are always on the verge of tipping over; they leap about way too fast for their ability to manage their disproportionately long tails. In mad circles, they race into clumps of bracken, disappear, then spring out again further along, wide-eyed and bursting with energy.
    As the pouch-bound joey grows, it’s not unusual to see mother and joey eating in tandem, the baby practise-grazing on what it can reach from the safety of the low-slung pouch as the mother slowly levers her way across the grass. If she stops and sits erect to check me out, the baby might withdraw until all I can see poking out are its black nose and eyes, ears hidden inside the furry parka hood of its mother’s pouch.
    Bigger joeys, spending more and more time out of the pouch, each try their mother’s patience by interrupting her grazing to demand a drink of milk. When she decides that it’s had enough, she pushes it aside and resumes grazing. At other times I see a mother holding her wriggling joey still with one dainty black paw while searching for fleas in the soft baby fur with the other. The joey cringes exactly like a child does when you want to wipe its face or comb its hair.
    When the alarm goes up for the group to take flight, which they do in a very helter-skelter, every-wallaby-for-itself kind of way, these toddlers often rush to get back into the safety of their respective pouches, but it’s a terrible headfirst scramble and squeeze, and usually the mother takes off with a tangle of tail and long black feet and paws still hanging out. At this size they have to do a sort of somersault in there to fit and to get their heads back around to face the pouch opening.
    Or else the joey doesn’t notice her leaving, since she doesn’t