The bandicoot book series

Bandicoot diary

April 2006

RAISING STUMPY

I got home last Thursday to find Gene had taken a message from the veterinary clinic. They had been given an injured baby bandicoot and wanted The Bandicoot Lady to take care of it.

Off I went with the cat carrier and a soft calico shopping bag. The vet nurse said they had de-ticked the baby, washed its scratches, and given it antibiotics and "by the way, it doesn't have any tail".

"So you want me to foster it until I judge it is big enough and well enough to go it alone, then release it somewhere?" I asked. Yes, that was the plan.

I got home with a (now reeking) bagged bandicoot baby and quickly converted a large box into a bandicoot nursery. I put a smaller cardboard box filled with leaves and dry grass in one corner, and lined the bottom of the big box with a plastic bag, well weighted down with flat newspapers. Add a double handful of shredded newspaper and we were ready to go. Oh, and a small water pot and a shallow dish of bandicoot trail mix (bunny pellets, muesli, peanuts and raisins).

Baby bandicoot was released from the bag and immediately shoved its way under the bed-box and began to throw it around. I gently pushed him into a corner and managed to insert him into the doorway of the box, then put the spare stove rack on top of the larger box and left him to settle in.

I washed out the calico bag, which was highly whiffy, and went back to see how the baby was doing. He was doing so well that he was out and running around the room, whose door I had luckily remembered to shut. He got tangled up in the floor-length drapes and I was able to catch him and put him back in its temporary home. I then moved it to my office, a smaller room, where it would be easier to ensure its isolation and recapture should anything else happen. Realising he'd probably escaped through the tuck-in handle flaps of the big box, I taped them shut. (Note to self: never make assumptions about bandicoots' escaping abilities.)

Next morning I discovered the baby wasn't using the bedroom box, but had wound up all the shredded newspaper into a ball and burrowed into the centre, as they do in the wild with leaves and dry grass. I removed the unwanted box and left the baby with clean water and food and went to work.

I came home to find note on the den door "CAUTION! Small wild animal on the loose." Gene said when he went to check on the baby at lunchtime, the cake rack that I had put on top of the stove rack was askew, and there was no baby in the box. He'd searched the room but no luck. (Note that this box is over two feet deep and the baby, even sitting up on its haunches, measures about five inches.)

The two of us then proceeded to search the room again. This room isn't quite as big as a single bedroom. It has a desk on legs, a bookcase, built-in window seats, three wooden file cabinets that are almost flush to the floor, and a small rollaway air-conditioner, plus a couple of stacks of file boxes and a narrow cardboard box that stands in as a wastepaper basket. Not a whole lot of places to hide, you'd think.

After ten minutes, it was clear the bandicoot was not in the room. Not a trace of him anywhere. Not a single noise of tiny claws. Nada, zip, zilch. Gene was sure the little beast had not slipped out the door when he had come in at lunch time, and swore he had to be here somewhere. So I put three peanuts and three raisins on the rug and left the desk lamp on and went away.

About 8 pm I carefully opened the door and found the three peanuts were gone and heard the skitter of claws on polished wood. Calling for Gene, I knelt in wait by one of the file cabinets (clearance less than 2 inches) Gene carefully slid a piece of wooden molding into the space and drew it along toward the left and front, and out came an angry, dusty, little beastie. I grabbed him but couldn't get to my feet, because my legs wouldn't unfold, so I hugged him to my midriff and my good tan jumper. He endeavoured to burrow into my ribcage. "Don't let him bite you with those little chisel teeth!" Gene admonished, without giving any guidance as to how I should avoid this possibility. (I felt a bit like the Spartan boy and the fox by this time.)

Bandicoots seem to be just one big muscle, and this 250 gram baby was very, very strong, pushing and prying and nearly escaping my grasp. Gene tried to get me on my feet but couldn't get a good grip, and I couldn't let my arms be pulled up for fear of losing my prey. Eventually I was able to twist around to slip the little animal back into the box, and Gene clamped the two racks back in place and brought a heavy 2 x 4 of jarrah (Western Australian hardwood) to keep them down.

Sunday I went in early with the baby's breakfast. What a surprise, no baby! It had tipped over the water pot, the water had run into one corner of the box and softened corrugated cardboard, which had given way to the bandicoot's determined burrowing.

I searched all over the room and was certain that the baby was gone for good. Nevertheless, I left the box where it was, with new food and water, and shut the door carefully. When I got home that night, the baby bandicoot was back in the box, burrowed into the nest ball, and sound asleep. Getting another piece of 2 x 4 jarrah, I laid it along the weakened side seam of the box, blocking the exit hole. Noises coming from the box later indicated that the tiny Count of Monte Cristo was furious to discover that its escape route had been blocked.

Monday I went to my paying job at 7 a.m. and then on to an evening meeting. When I drove into my yard after ten-thirty pm, I saw the light in my office was on. This was a bad omen: I didn't think Gene had left the light on so the bandicoot baby could read itself to sleep.

I looked into Gene's den on my way up the hall. Before I spoke, he said, "Loose, and running back and forth on the windowsill, the last I saw. No, don't ask how it got up there. I tried to catch it ,but it is so strong; every time I got my hands on it, it wrenched or oozed or pried itself free. I was afraid to hold it too tightly, I might have broken its ribs."

I slipped quietly into my study. There was a flash of greyish brown, and with more luck than skill, I pounced on the bottom of the curtain where it touches the window seat, and grabbed the tiny animal. It opened its tiny primitive jaws and showed its tiny pink mouth full of tiny sharp teeth, but didn't bite me. I popped it back in the holding pen, re-taped up the hand-holes on the side of the box, and re-positioned the oven rack, the cake rack, and the 2 x 4. "Gene, we can't go on like this--maybe I should just let it go now and let it take its chances with owls, foxes, other people's cats, and snakes," I said, pouring myself what I felt was a well-earned drink.

He opened the porch door and waved his hand into the darkness. There stood the strangest thing I'd seen in a while, a brand new cage made of aviary wire and 2 x 2" inch wooden posts. It was nearly six feet tall, about a foot deep and three feet wide.

It's a measure of how tired I was that I merely gawped at it and asked "Are we planning to have a pet heron?"

"Try and imagine this flat on the ground, with the door as a lift-up lid," said my patient husband. "But let's not try and move the creature tonight; Wednesday morning will do."

"If he or she hasn't escaped again," I mumbled, heading for bed.

As of this morning the prisoner is still with us. I am about to prepare the palatial cage for residence. I am hoping Houdini, as we've begun to call it, is a female, because it will be easier to settle her on our property once she's big enough to go out on her own. If she is a he, that may entail taking him into the woods and trying to find a suitable area, since the males have territories five to seven times larger than the females, and one doesn't wish to cause trouble in local bandicoot politics.

May 2006
Stumpy, the tailless baby bandicoot, has been settled in the palatial cage and seems to have adapted to it reasonably well. As best we can tell, the baby is female. She has an old wine carton filled with torn paper, wood shavings and home-made hay (grass from the side driveway, cut and dried in the sun) as well as some of the cotton wool from her temporary home in the old television box when she lived indoors. She is eating well, like all young ones preferring the 'dessert' items over the health food. She gets a bowl of bandicoot muesli, which is made of oats, raisins, peanuts, rabbit pellets and such other things as we have handy-brown bread, a few cat kibbles, sunflower seeds and the like. She also has a small heavy water pot; despite studies that show bandicoots capable of going for weeks without water, all the bandicoots I have observed like to have a drink of water most days. Having a bandicoot in a cage on the porch floor is messy: we have put down a mat of old newspapers, and there are leaves and wood shavings in the cage itself, but there's still a lot of spilled food and water and baby bandicoot puddles

September 2006
Wild bandicoots have been visiting Stumpy's cage frequently. One small one, about her own age and size, pushes and squirms his way under the cage, which is up on bricks, to eat what falls from her food dish.

October 2006
Stumpy is as ready for rehabilitation as she's going to be. We purposely have not tried to tame her, so that she won't have unrealistic ideas about 'nice humans'. Today I caught her in a pillow case and managed to transfer her into a wooden box with a door cut in it that we positioned under a dense shrub below the bottom patio. We blocked the door for a while, put some food and water nearby, and later opened the door and crossed our fingers that Stumpy would integrate herself into the ecosystem of our half acre.

Later: no sign of Stumpy. Can she already have come to grief?

Later Still: Stumpy must have taken off for the woods across the street, or another yard, as we haven't seen her for three days.

November 2006
After seven weeks, Stumpy suddenly appeared at the feeding station in the front yard. Hurray! She looks well, no obvious injuries.

What happened next:

Stumpy was pregnant and we got some interesting photos of her pouch opening, due to her having no tail. Lying on my stomach on the kitchen floor one day, I snapped the camera a millisecond before a tiny face peered out at me. Then one sad day in 2007 we found her unmarked dead body on the lower patio. No baby/s in the pouch, and no way to tell where the nest might be. Also no way of telling if she were struck by a car and managed to stagger home to tend her baby/s, or ate something nasty in someone's garden, or was bitten by a snake. All of these things are common ends for Bandicoots.

However, after her passing we did see two new small bandicoots around the yard, and we hope they are her babies which survived being orphaned. It's a hard, cruel world out there for little marsupials.

February 2008
Stumpy’s babies have grown up and are both daughters. The other night one of them trotted through the back door and into the living room to inquire why there were no peanuts on the back porch. It was clear that she had a pouch full of something—either one very big, very active, baby bandicoot, or several small ones. I lay on the floor trying to get a look into the pouch but only got a crick in my neck for my trouble. Her sister was also observed with a full pouch a few weeks ago, so the Stumpy Family is well set to survive into the future.

For more stories, please follow the links:

The Querulous Quenda
Besieged by Bandicoots

For short stories about Arthropoda (spiders and scorpions) please visit our Stories page.