The Kangaroo.
They take their rest chiefly during the day; and they are very wary. Even when they sleep, lying on their side, the ears are constantly moving. The hearing of the kangaroo is very acute. I was told that, in trying to sneak near them, the cracking of your ankle-bones they hear at a distance of one hundred and fifty yards. They always feed with the head with the wind, and thus are not easily surprised. When startled, they give a rap with the foot on the ground, to give notice to the others. They fight also a good deal, uttering a sort of grunting ha ha, catching hold of one another, hitting with their fore-paws and kicking with their hind ones, but never killing one another. Their usual feeding-time is in the night. As to the mode of breeding, the blacks are not sure whether the kangaroo is born or not. What they have found to be the case is this: a small, small kangaroo—the size of the first joint of the finger—hanging on the teat in the bag. The teat seems to be grown together with the mouth, and is gradually separated on the growing of the young one: the little thing, pulled away from the teat, dies.[1] The kangaroo feeds its young only by means of the teat; when they grow bigger they eat grass. The old kangaroo, when hunted by dogs, throws its young one out of the bag to save its own life, but dogs generally do not care about the young ones, except they are already pretty big. Number of young—one. Breed once a year. The breeding-time begins about June, and in about six months the young leaves the bag, but even after that the young will stick to its mother for years. The strength of the kangaroo is in its tail; when broken, it can neither fight nor run much. The kangaroo makes no proper nest, but, in the heat of summer, he scratches a hole in the ground to fit his own body, to lie in to keep himself cool. When resting or sleeping in that hole, he keeps throwing dust on his head with his fore-paws to keep off flies and other insects. The red kangaroo catches the big flies that come near him; and if these flies have come from a man just then sneaking near him, he smells the presence of the man in the fly, and makes off at once.
The white and red kangaroo, sleeping very fast, have their own way to guard themselves against being surprised. They make their young ones keep watch, and these young ones sit up, looking like a log. You would not distinguish them from the same.
- ↑ The blacks and the whites, as a rule, are ignorant of the mode in which the young of the kangaroo is placed in the pouch. From the observations of naturalists of the highest repute, it appears that, after parturition, the mother opens her pouch with her fore-paws, and uses her mouth to carry and place the young one on the nipple. A very young kangaroo—say twelve hours after birth—is only one inch and two lines in length, and is nearly transparent. I have myself detached a young one less than two inches in length from the nipple of a dead kangaroo—killed in a kangaroo hunt; and to me it seemed impossible that the mother could have carried and attached it to the nipple; yet there is irrefragable evidence of this being the mode in which it is placed in the marsupium. It is stated that in one instance a very young kangaroo, forcibly removed from the nipple and left in the bag, was replaced by the mother. The fœtus itself could not regain the nipple.
The account taken down by the Rev. Mr. Hartmann is very interesting. The natives evidently rarely or never investigate for the purpose of satisfying curiosity or gaining knowledge that would not be of use to them.
