Marsupial Spotlight: Wombat

Sometimes, you can condense an animal down into a single word. With foxes, you can say clever. With mules, you can say stubborn. In the case of the Australian wombat, the word "fat" suits them perfectly. A wombat who can't properly "shake it" should really be ashamed of itself.

Wombats look like very large rodents with a lot of meat on them. Generally, their body size is about 40 inches with a short stubby tail. They can actually be much bigger though. Domestic wombats--if treated well and fed regularly--can get pretty huge. I'll get into that a little later.

The wombat is a burrower which is just awful if you have a garden nearby. As big as they are, these are not small holes to deal with. They are not macropods; however, they do have pouches that are inverted so as to not scoop up dirt during the burrowing activity. You may remember me bringing up a similar feature on my earlier bilby spotlight.

These marsupials are strict herbivores. Their diets consists of grasses, herbs, roots, and the like. Because of their surprisingly slow metabolism, they can take up to 14 days to digest their food. This also makes them move very slowly--similar to a sloth. The only time they will move quickly is when they are threatened. At this point, they will suddenly go from a ridiculous crawl to a 90 second 25MPH sprint.

It's hard to imagine so much fat running that fast, isn't it? Well, I would suggest not getting in his way. A running wombat tends to be very bowling ball-like. It will knock down and trample anything in its path. Even chain link fences have been known to have holes in them due to this big ball of running chub. Just stay out of its way.

Similar to the boodie, the female wombat--once mated--will give birth in only 21 days. She will only have one offspring as well. A young wombat takes 15 months to wean, and it will become sexually active in 18. Nice and slow, that's how it's done.

The biggest wombat in the world goes by the name of Patrick. Although, I could not figure out how long he was, the pictures suggest he is almost as big as the woman who cares for him. What I do know, however, is his weight: 84 pounds. He is charmingly fat, and if there is anything we can love about a wombat is that he is wonderfully chubby.

There are wombats in fiction. In the Australian book series "Blinky Bill" by Dorothy Wall, there is a wombat character who goes by the name Mister Wombat or Wombo as the lead koala likes to call him. There was also a video game for the nearly forgotten Sega Saturn called Willy Wombat. I can't really tell you much about this game since it has fallen into so much obscurity, but I will provide a picture regardless.

In the 2000 Sydney Olympics, a reoccurring, unofficial mascot kept showing up. It was Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat. This character was more of a tongue-in-cheek gag, but it was still popular. You have to understand that some wombats can be quite annoying to people--what with them bowling over people and destroying fences. This is really how the character came to be.

To quote a character from the video game Metal Gear Solid 2, "Laugh, and grow fat!" The quote really sums wombats up for me. I honestly love how they look, and would adore the chance to give those chubby things a big ol' hug. As characters, I do not think they would be ashamed of their bigness. They would encourage it! They would speak up about all the joys of being large and see themselves as more beautiful for it! This is really what I meant by charmingly fat.

So that's it for the wombats. Although, there are three breeds of them, they are all similar enough to close the book on this particular marsupial. I just want you to know that I really do love them. I already love rodents, and the prospects of a big, fat, lovable one is right up there on my "glorious list." They have easily made it into the marsupial hall-of-fame, and I was very happy to write a blog about them.

Thank you for reading my blog. If you enjoyed it, you can comment below, or you can email me at tooie@tooiekangaroo.com. Ha! Ha! Ha!

Patrick

Patrick

From "Blinky Bill."