Wildlife in Victoria

Koala

A wallaby watching us watching him.

Cape Baron Geese

Today we took a tour of Phillip Island, an island southeast of Melbourne where there is a large amount of protected land and forest where people can walk along boardwalks and see the wildlife. We saw many wallabies, which look like a smaller kangaroo.  They eat grass, eucalyptus, and other plants.  We also saw a few koalas which, over 30 million years, have evolved from a common ancestor with the wombat (which we didn't see today).

Koalas evolved to eat only eucalyptus leaves, which are 50% water.  Therefore, koalas don't need to drink.  However, the leaves are low in nutrients.  In fact, the koala's diet of a pound of leaves a day has about as many calories as a bowl of cereal.  The animal has adapted to this low-nutrient diet by sleeping 20 hours a day and by having a cranial cavity filled only 60% by it's brain (the rest is cerebral-spinal fluid).  In other words, the koala conserves energy by thinking less.

Also in our journey today, we saw many birds including cape baron geese, magpies, purple swamp hens, black swans, egrets, herons, and ibises.  We also saw sheep, and watched one get sheared.  At the end of the day, we watched penguins come out of the ocean after a day or more of fishing to go back to their boroughs for the night.  They leave and return to land during the night because the predatory seabirds can't see well in the dark.  The penguins we saw were actually called "little penguins," and are truly the smallest species of the bird.  They are on average about a foot tall and weigh about one kilogram.  (Their weight doubles after extra feeding before molting.  They need to survive for about 17 days before returning to the ocean, while their new feathers grow in.) By the way, little penguins are the only type of penguins with blue feathers.