Moses and me

I mentioned my past life in studying wildlife, so here is an old photo I found in a frame under my bed. It was taken for the newspaper in Townsville when I was doing research at James Cook University. What you see pictured is me, in the days of frizzy hair, with Moses the juvenile rufous bettong.

Moses was actually my first casualty to be hand-reared. Initially I was clearing traps starting early in the morning, but marsupials get stressed being handled in daylight and I ended up with so many captures I was out on the trap lines well into the morning - and macropods (ie kangaroos) throw their pouch-young when under stress. I'd tape the pouches over once I was done, but a couple of times a pouch-young was tossed in the flight after I let them go regardless. So I soon switched to night trapping to prevent this happening (and if they did drop them at night they'd come back for them, but not during the day), because I was too stressed myself over pouch-young being left behind. All that to say, you can't usually just hold a rufous bettong like that. They are otherwise known as "furious bettongs", because they have wild little temperaments, and see that one long toe nail? - I have a few punctures from kicking adults with even longer ones.

Rufous bettongs are basically gone from NSW, but they hang on in the far north above the 27 degrees isotherm, beyond which foxes and rabbits don't do well. Before I went to Townsville I actually did some work in Armidale aiming to train captive-reared bettongs to be afraid of foxes before being released into the wild, in an attempt to reintroduce them in NSW. But that is another and rather ridiculous story (it involves a stuffed fox on a skateboard) and as a far as I know they have not been successfully reintroduced down here.

But back to this photo, the actual accompanying newspaper article didn't even mention me, it was mainly about my colleague and friend Karl Vernes and the Ph.D research he was then doing on the relationship between northern bettongs (different species, and they are smaller and nicer), fire, underground truffles, dung beetles and eucalypts (the natural world is a complex system). I just had to pose for the photo with my cute little friend.