The wonderful Platypus
Who could imagine a sleek-furred, duck-billed, web-footed animal whose babies hatch from eggs and are suckled on milk?
The platypus is one of the bushland’s hardest to discover secrets. It may take many hours watching by some quiet, unpolluted creek on the eastern coast of the continent to see the v-shaped ripple that shows where a platypus swims.
Its dense fur keeps it warm and dry as it submerges, eyes and nostrils shut, to hunt along the creekbed; its wide rubbery bill detecting tiny electrical signals given out by the small aquatic creatures apon which it feeds.
The female platypus lays two soft shelled eggs in a burrow dug in the creek bank.
