Numbats One of the most attractive of all Australian animals is the numbat, a marsupial about the size of a squirrel. It has a long, flattened snout, head and body. Numbats have reddish-brown, black-tipped fur with white stripes on the back. Numbats have a dark stripe around their eyes that looks like a burglar's mask. They measure about 45 centimetres, including their bushy brownish-grey tails which stand up in the air. Their head and body are about 25cm and their tails are about 18cm. Numbats have four claws on each of their small front and long back feet. Numbats move their back feet together and then lean forward to move their front paws together. If they move in a hurry they make a series of leaps. Numbats are very light. They only weigh 500 to 600 grams. Numbat family made by Michele The numbat is an exclusively Australian marsupial that has no close relatives anywhere. The numbat has two other names: the walpuri and the banded anteater. Numbats once lived in the southern part of Australia, but since European settlement it has disappeared from almost all of its former home and now lives in a few scattered places in far south-western Australia. The numbat is very rare and on the brink of extinction (there are only 2000 left). What's even worse is that in the past few years the decline in numbers has accelerated. Death by foxes, drought, or frequent bushfires are all possible, how to prevent them are still uncertain. To try and stop this people are breeding numbats in captivity and releasing them into national parks and in places where they were once common. The numbats that are still alive live in eucalypt forests, especially wandoo jarrah. Numbats are unusual among Australian marsupial in that they sleep by night and are active during the day. Numbats eat in the morning and late afternoon but, especially on hot days, often rest in a hollow log, under fallen timber, or some similar shady place during the heat of the day. Numbats will also choose to sleep in the same kind of place. The numbat is the only marsupial that eats only insects - mostly ants and termites. An adult numbat will eat about 20 000 insects every day and must spend most of the daylight hours feeding. A numbat finds the insects by smell, scrabbles away the soil with its sharp-clawed forepaws, then uses its extremely long, sticky tongue (which is about 14 cm) in a rapid flicking action to gobble the insects from their homes. Though the numbat has teeth (very small and poorly developed), these are not used in feeding, instead the termites and ants are swallowed whole. Surprisingly, they don't need to drink. Very little is known of the numbat's social and reproductive behaviour. Adults are apparently solitary and non-territorial, coming together only to mate. Breeding begins in December and the usual litter of three or four young are born between January and March, but details are sketchy. Unlike most marsupials, the female numbat has no pouch. The youngsters (which are about one-centimetre-long) use their jaws to clamp firmly to their mother's teats (of which there are four) and their claws to hold onto her fur. When they grow fur of their own, the mother transfers them to a grass- and leaf-lined chamber at the end of a shallow burrow, about one or two meters long, that she digs in the soil. Here they are left for a time while she looks for food, but as they develop further she carries them with her, the babies clinging to her back. By the following October they have been weaned and finally wander off, fully independent, sometime during November or December.  © 1997-2001 Lauren Ritchie.