KANGAROOS AND DANCING BIRDS
AUSTRALIA is a country where every other animal carries its baby in its breast pocket. It has one hundred and ten different varieties of marsupials, or animals which have in their bellies pouches in which they carry their young. Some of these animals are taller than a man and some are no bigger than your thumb. Some climb trees, some gallop over the plains, and some spend more than half their time in the water. During my travels I have seen certain varieties in their natural surroundings and I have examined and photographed others in the zoölogical gardens. Every city here has its zoölogical garden, and every town has its museum, so that there is no trouble seeing the wild animals of Australia, either stuffed or alive.
What interests me most is the kangaroo. Before I came here I had an idea that all kangaroos were alike. I now know that there are forty-nine varieties, ranging in size from the great gray kangaroo, the male of which measures from nose to tail tip more than seven feet, down to the kangaroo rabbit and kangaroo rat. The Sydney and Melbourne zoos have specimens of nearly every kind. In them I saw kangaroos taller than I am, jumping around in fields inclosed by wire fences. They had enormous hind legs, which sent them flying through the air as though they were on steel springs. They can leap thirty feet at a jump, and gallop over the country faster on two legs than a horse can on four. But, as they tire quickly, horses can overtake them in the end.
The largest of the kangaroos are the red and the gray varieties, which are found all over Australia. Horses and dogs are bred for the sport of hunting them. The dogs are a cross between the greyhound and the deerhound, fleet of foot and very fierce. When brought to bay, the big kangaroo is dangerous and will attack a dog or a man. With its back against a tree it waits for its enemy. A dog that comes too near is grasped in the kangaroo’s forearms, hugged tightly to its breast, and disembowelled with a rip of one of its clawed feet. The ivory-like claws on the kangaroo’s hind feet are three or four inches in length, and cut like knives. The kangaroo can swim as well as run, and when chased, it will, if possible, take to the water. If a dog follows, the kangaroo tries to drown it by holding it under water.
The kangaroos go about in pairs. One usually sees a male and a female together and the little head of a baby kangaroo is often spied sticking out of the pouch of the mother. When it first sees the light of day the baby kangaroo is not more than an inch long. It has no hair and is almost transparent, like an earthworm. Its mother puts it into her pouch, and there it lies and sucks until it grows big enough to come forth and eat grass. Even then it crawls back into the pouch whenever it is tired or at the least sign of danger, poking its head out now and then to see if the coast is clear. It leaves the pouch for good after eight or nine months, when it weighs eight or ten pounds, and has become too heavy for the mother to carry.
The opossum is the only one of the Australian marsupials to be found anywhere else in the world. Quantities of the fur are exported, to be used as trimming on women’s coats.
Except for the opossum and opossum rat of Patagonia, marsupials are found only in Australia. We import quantities of Australian opossum fur as trimming for women’s coats.
Most kangaroos are plain dwellers and grass eaters. Carl Lumholtz was the first to discover a variety that lives in trees. He found them through the blacks of northern Queensland, and with their help was able to get several specimens. There are some in the museum at Sydney and I am told that others have been sent to several museums in Europe.