Nature diary: wombat fortunes

A medium-sized mammal with a distinctly square bum ambled in front of Ted’s car and disappeared into the dark forest.

A wombat! A common or bare-nosed wombat – in Porcupine Ridge! There are plenty of wombats around Trentham, Glenlyon, and throughout the Wombat Forest, but in 15 years of living in Porcupine Ridge I had accepted the fact that while we have koalas, the wombats didn’t occur this far north. However, it seems the fortunes of wombats in western Victoria are changing.

In early 2016, a wombat caused quite a stir as it was photographed in the Gunbower Forest, literally hundreds of kilometres from the nearest population.

Peter Menkhorst, from the Arthur Rylah Institute  stated “The most westerly population of wombats on the Great Dividing Range is around Trentham and Daylesford, where the Campaspe begins”. 

After seeing my Porky Ridge wombat, I searched online and found a fantastic website called WomSAT. This website is an initiative of the University of Western Sydney, and encourages people Australia-wide to record their wombat sightings. 

On this map, there were at least eight sightings of living wombats between Bendigo and Daylesford from 2015-2016, in Harcourt, south of Bendigo in Sedgwick and a big concentration in the Baynton area to the east. I had a chat with my Connecting Country work colleagues Bonnie and Jarrod who have been documenting an increase in wombat sightings all through the Harcourt and especially Sutton Grange area – one property had a network of burrows with 50-60 entrances.

So what is going on? My Mammals of Victoria book, also by Peter Menkhorst, states that wombat distribution on a local level is “probably most dependent on the availability of suitable burrow sites in association with food supply”. The wombats do not like dense forest, but any open habitat seems to do – with habitats ranging from alpine heathland, to forests and coastal scrub and tea tree heath. Most of the burrows noted by Bonnie and Jarrod have been on creeklines which are tributaries of the Coliban River.

Wombats destroy fences, dig-in dam walls and other mischief when going about their daily activities. These habits meant wombats were declared vermin in 1906, and there was a bounty on them from 1925-1966. This put the already diminishing western Victorian populations on an even deeper downward spiral and they disappeared from anywhere north of the Great Dividing Range.

An increase in wombat numbers has been noticed since the Redesdale fires, part of the devastating Black Saturday fires, which may have caused a dispersal of wombats into previously unoccupied territory. The days of bounties are over but, according to the Dept of Environment Land Water and Planning, anyone can still apply for a permit to scare, remove or kill wildlife that is deemed to be causing economic hardship. In 2016, 270 applications were made, and a maximum number of 3975 wombats killed.

They point out that the actual number killed may be less. One can only hope these new populations are regarded as harmless and benign.

Cars and dogs also take their toll on wombats. Those wombats that manage to avoid these threats may find themselves afflicted by sarcoptic mange – a hideous parasite that they catch from foxes.

The mites cause mange-affected skin and swelling around the eyes – and the wombat gets very sick indeed, and eventually dies. Happily,  wombat lovers and advocates have discovered that they can add a pesticide ointment to a flap on an affected wombat’s burrow and this treatment saves the wombat without it having to be captured and taken to a shelter.  So if you are in open forest along a creekline north of Daylesford keep an eye out, a wombat family could be your new neighbours.

                                                TANYA LOOS