The Burrowing Bettong
Tass
Guest Writer | |
The burrowing bettong -- an awesome little thing, really. It's like a little
kangaroo, and, as you might have guessed, it lives in Australia, specifically the Semiarid
region and islands off Western Australia. It searches for food at night.
The boodie, a nickname for it when it was commonly seen on the mainland,
lives in huge burrowing systems, with sometimes even a hundred other boodies.
These cute lil kangaroo-thingies, LoL, now occupy less than one percent of
their former range, managing to live on only a few islands where they are
safe from cats and foxes and live undisturbed. But if we destroy the little
islands on which the little animals manage to survive, where else can they go?
Burrowing Bettong (Bettongia lesuer)
Size: Length of head and body, 35 cm; tail, 30 cm.
Weight: Males, approx. 1.3 kg; females, 1.0 kg.
Habitat: Semiarid regions on islands off Western Australia.
Surviving number: Estimated at less than 5,000.
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