Some Australian baby animals are cuter than others, and some are so ugly they turn the corner back to cute.
I am not an Aussie, I’m a Saffa, and while the ambush of nightmare inducing Australian animals and insects fascinate me, I had a hard time processing what I was seeing when someone showed me a Facebook pic of a baby Wombat (see #1 below). I thought the poor ‘thing’ suffers of alopecia and then I laughed, deciding I was duped with a creative photoshop session by someone wildly imaginative… and a little cruel.
In Africa, even the ugliest animals have cute babies – like this baby hippo… awwww
The photo featured at the top of this page is of Joey Anzac the baby kangaroo and Peggy the wombat. The two have apparently become inseparable after sharing a pouch together at the Wildlife Kilmore Rescue Centre in Victoria, Australia.
But it was that certain little wombat that had me combing the Internet; were Aussie baby animals normally cute or more readily hit by Mother Nature’s ugly-stick?
1) Wombat-face ugly
I must admit, the more I looked at Karmann the wombat, the more I fell in love and felt slight pangs of resentment that my babies weren’t wombats too! Well, sort of … A face only a mother could love, hey.
2) But ears some pretty little bilbies
Thanks to Disney, big eared babies like their Dumbo are especially cute. The bilby is small, large-eared marsupial that lives in semi-arid areas of the Australian outback. They are critically endangered, with just small colonies of this marsupial left in a few pockets of land.
3) Just echidna, I really am cute
Wow, if wombats weren’t shall we say ‘surprising’ at birth, the echidna most certainly is… We keep things like this covered up in Africa.
4) Hello, baby possum
While some see possums as a pest there is no denying that they clean up to be pretty darn cute! Possums are good swimmers and excellent climbers.
Momma possum gives birth to as many as 20 helpless baby possums – but usually fewer than half survive. The babies crawl into the mother’s pouch as soon as they are born, where they stay until they are ready to face the world on their own.
5) Koala un-bearably cute kid
Koala joeys are pretty darn needy and are only weaned at about a year old. But how could a mother ever let go of such an adorable bundle of fluff?
6) Dingo-on, give me a cuddle
Dingoes have had some pretty bad press but this little guy is, in my opinion, certainly Australia’s prettiest baby animal.
7) Tasmanian devilishly gorgeous
Will someone give the guys at Loony Tunes a picture of a Tasmanian devil? As a child from a conservative home I was deathly afraid of sharing the planet with an animal known to be a ‘devil’! And to make matters worse, this little guy couldn’t harm a fly…
8) Kangaroo or Chihuahua?
Kangaroo joeys are pretty cute but don’t tell me they aren’t related to Chihuahua’s. They look more like a Chihuahua than a Chihuahua.
9) Two platypus and not too platypus
I was comfortable to discover the this pic of platypuses – they looked like the picture books we had at the library. But…. then I came across this….
After my kids told me they wanted this:
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