Bilby
Name of Bilby
Eastern Bilby: Macrotis Lagotis Sagitta
Marsupial
Bilbies are a rabbit sized bandicoot; their fur is a greyish/bluish colour. They have a very good sense of hearing and their very big ears allow them to lose heat. They have a long snout, strong claws and a black and white tail. The female is smaller then the male. The bilby usually grows from 30cm to 60cm with a tail approximately 20cm.
The Bilby gets most of its moisture from the food it eats to help it survive the arid conditions. Its diet includes lots of small insects (e.g. termites, ants, beetles, witchery grubs, centipedes and grasshoppers) types of fungi, roots and seeds. The Bilby gets most of its liquid from food rather than from drinking. They use their sharp claws to rake a lot their food out of the sandy soil, and their long noses and slender tongue to eat their meals mainly when the sun is down.
The Eastern bilby is found in east in the hot
area of Queensland and New South
Wales among hummock and tussock grasslands and acacia shrub lands. They live in a range of habitats from clayey, rocky soils with little ground cover to red ochre soil areas with acacia shrub land. Queensland’s largest remaining group of Bilbies lives in one area west of the Diamantina River in the State’s far west. They probably used to live as Far East as the Western Darling Downs in south-west Queensland. In the rest of Australia, the bilby is restricted to parts of the Great Sandy, Gibson and Tanami desert
in central Australia and the Pilbra and west Kimberley in Western Australia. In South Australia, the Bilby is extinct. The Bilby lives alone or in a pair.
Unusually the female has eight teats in her backward facing pouch but usually has only two young. Bilbies breed all through the year and gestation takes two to three weeks. After being born Bilbies live in the pouch for seventy to eighty days. When Bilbies are out of the pouch the mother will keep suckling for a further two weeks. When the bilby is six months old they start to look after themselves. When the young are in the pouch the mother returns regularly to feed them.
Feral animals and farming have been destroying their habitats for many years. Grazing animals, such as rabbits and cattle damage their habitat, making it hard for them to find and dig burrows. They’ve also been killed by feral animals. Diseases have caused it to become vulnerable.
http://home.iprimus.com.au/readman/bilby.htm
http:www.wires.org.au/animals/bilby.htm
www.env.qld.gov.au/environment/plant/endangered/st.bilby.html
Emu Plains, NSW, Australia