Tim The Yowie Man explores the secrets of the echidna

One of the pleasures of walking in the bush is encountering an echidna. I recently stumbled upon this one crossing a dirt track near Maloney's Beach in Murramurrung National Park. Now echidnas have no teeth and instead use their long snout for foraging and digging and then their tongue which is up to 18 centimetres long to slurp out ants termites and other insects from under leaf matter and also from under and inside logs. Peekaboo! I see you! Those ants aren't going to last long. If you look closely an echidna's hind legs point backward allowing them to more easily push soil away when digging and sometimes they even stand on their two hind legs. Of course this one's just after even more ants but it's those quills that often cause some people to call them spiny anteaters. It can't be easy to scratch yourself. Lucky they also have elongated claws for grooming between their sharp quills which are actually an enlarged and toughened form of hair. Oh and those little white tags that the echidna's scratching they're probably ticks commonplace on echidnas so too are fleas. If you do observe one in the bush and get a little too close as a defensive mechanism an echidna will roll up into a ball of radiating quills to protect themselves or sometimes even dig themselves to safety. So next time you're out and about keep an eye out for echidnas but bear in mind when they are in the forest they are often hard to spot.