Life and Death

The wild is an unforgiving place with predators, disease, accident, drought and famine all playing their part in keeping the balance and controlling numbers. Add human settlement into the picture and things become more hazardous. Macropods, being most active at dusk and night are particularly prone to death by automobile. Along the sides of every road are the mummified and scattered remains of kangaroos and wallabies who jumped too soon or too late. These are the ones that have had a ‘clean’ death but many more crawl into the bush to die, or uncommonly, turn up on the veranda still trying to live. The female concerned had been one of this group of Agile wallabies that feed here regularly.

We could see she had some head injuries and a broken jaw and so could not eat and despite constant efforts dipping her muzzle in the bucket of water, most moisture ran straight out. As with most females she had a joey in her pocket although it was too small to see. She made great efforts to attend to it, peering into her pocket but was unable to lick it clean.  

Obviously she needed either vetinary care or a quick ending – but with a wild animal this is easier said than done. We phoned Jenny, at the local wildlife sanctuary and she arrived later in the day. She said, sadly, that the injury was not treatable but we would have to try and catch her.  The usual method is to grab a weak wallaby by the base of the tail and put it in a sack – keeping well out of the way of a punch from their hind legs.  However, this wallaby was not debilitated enough and bounded away – very fast. Using a dart gun to tranquilise her was not an option as it is not instantaneous and she would be untraceable in the thick bush before she fell over.

This left the alternative of asking neighbour William to shoot her on her return, the next morning.  William is a man of many parts -farmer, fire fighter, handyman, mechanic and experienced hunter. He warned us beforehand that shooting at such a close range made it difficult to be accurate. It took 3 quick shots before he was sure she was dead.  The veranda was a terrible mess with blood and bone splattered everywhere and flooded with gory water where the bucket had been holed.

The other wallabies had all fled at the first shot and we were so worried that the smell of blood would scare away them away permanently. We spent a long time scrubbing the deck and sweeping up contaminated leaves and gravel. We knew that we had done the kindest thing for her, but it was a miserable day.