It was a playdate with a difference when two adopted wallaby joeys from the Australian Reptile Park and Aussie Ark met up recently.
The meeting was engineered by Reptile Park keeper Seleena de Gelder and Aussie Ark Operations Manager Dean Reid.
The two said hand-raising joeys was an intensive process and it was crucial for their social development that they interacted with their own kind.
The playdate allowed the rescued joeys to learn the skills of how to be a part of a mob.
At first they were hesitant to interact, but after a few minutes they began to warm up and shared their first little hops together.
After a short while of hopping around, the joeys sat down for “lunch” and enjoyed a warm bottle of milk together.
“It was so rewarding to have the opportunity to bring Matilda and Rocket together,” de Gelder said.
“Since both joeys were rescued at such a young age, they unfortunately hadn’t socialised with other rock wallabies just yet.
“Now that they’re both beginning the weaning process, socialising the pair is critical, so a play date was the perfect idea.”
Reid said allowing the joeys to engage in supervised playtime gave them the best possible start in life.
“We want them to thrive and be prepared for a successful reintroduction with their kind when the time is right, and Seleena and I are happy to report that they absolutely adored each other,” he said.
“The outcome of the play date is exactly what we wanted.”
The pair had a rocky start to life, with Matilda the yellow-footed rock wallaby being rescued after her mother could no longer carry her due to a prolapsed pouch, and Rocket the Brush-Tailed Rock Wallaby becoming an orphan at the age of five and a half months.
They are being hand-raised under the devoted care of de Gelder and Reid, ensuring their growth progresses healthily and surpasses every milestone they would have achieved if raised naturally by their mothers.
Together, the Australian Reptile Park and Aussie Ark have established vital conservation breeding projects to help save the threatened species.
Yellow-Footed Rock Wallabies and Brush-Tailed Rock Wallabies are both part of the Petrogale genus, with the yellow-footed species being listed as near threatened by the IUCN and the brush-tailed species subsequently being listed as vulnerable.
Yellow-Footed Rock-Wallabies were once found throughout NSW, Queensland and South Australia, but have now disappeared from NSW and Queensland with their numbers in the wild estimated at being as little as 5,000.
The Brush-Tailed Rock-Wallaby is found from South-Eastern Queensland to Western Victoria, roughly following the line of the Great Dividing Range.
The population of wild Brush-Tailed Rock-Wallabies is in decline – with fewer than 20,000 expected to be left in the wild and as few as 10 in some fragmented populations.
Source:
Australian Reptile Park