8/8/2019 Rottnest Island - The humble thirsty Quokka

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15/10/10 8:19 AMFremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

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Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia 

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Friday, October 15th, 2010

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8:01a Rottnest Island - The humble thirsty quokka

There’s little doubt that the one thing that most foreign day-visitors to the island have on their to-do list is to see andphotograph a live quokka Setonix brachyurus. In daylight there’s usually one or two hanging out beneath the trees oppositethe old cemetery. The tourists jostle like a pack of paparazzi to digitize them for posterity. They’d be very rich marsupialsif they had a dollar for every time they’d been photographed. The ones near the settlement are sort of used to humans, butthey still call the shots about physical contact. They remain timid and mostly don’t like to be touched. Away from thesettlement they are usually even more shy, and in the daytime their presence might be noticed only by a rustling noise inthe undergrowth.

 Rottnest’s quokkas are facing a long hard summer in 2011

Jill and I believe the quokka numbers were down when we wandered about the island a couple of weeks ago. We didn’tsee as many animals compared to previous visits, and there were noticeably less fresh droppings at their popular hauntsnear the main settlement and at lesser known places we visited such as Barker Swamp. Last summer was one of the drieston record and while the animals can extract moisture from vegetation they still enjoy a drink of dew and/or fresh or evenbrackish water. It can be tough going because the official policy has long been to let them fend for themselves - a ‘survivalof the fittest’ mentality that seems to have ignored the consequences of a diverse range of unnatural disturbances to theecosystem in favour of 'scientific' observation. So as the planet warms and he very few remaining barely-potable watersources go putrid or dry up, then so be it. Furthermore, the island has a trace element deficiency and the lack of copper inparticular has a serious impact on quokka metabolism during long droughts. They tend to lay down and die, even after adrought has broken. We saw dying quokkas when we were on the island in April this year, after the first rains.

The coming summer is possibly going to be drier than last year. With the global warming phenomena well recognised wefear for the the long term future of Rottnest’s quokkas. We’d like to see some fairly simple pro-activism - a few reliablewater stations established at various strategic places on the now weed infested island using back-flow protection andautomatic low maintenance drip-nipples similar to what we’ve had set up for our hens for over twenty years.

Here’s a nice picture I took last week of a mother quokka snoozing in the morning sunlight with her joey in her pouch.Will they make it to the end of summer? Where they were lying is usually moist at this time of year. Instead it was bonedry.

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8/8/2019 Rottnest Island - The humble thirsty Quokka

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15/10/10 8:19 AMFremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

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 A mother and pouched baby snoozing in the morning sunlight 

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