In the beginning, Rachel begat Chandler [and Milhouse and Quincy and Theodore...]; and Chandler begat Woodrow; and one of them begat Franklin (who turned out to be more of a Franklene). And Franklin begat Jefferson. And Jefferson wasn’t very well on my birthday, as this shot shows:

You can see that there’s a lump on the left side of Jefferson’s face and his left ear is very droopy. The blighter was still tucking away the food, however, so whatever was causing these symptoms didn’t seem to be inhibiting his appetite! We couldn’t help but notice, however, how small he is:

That’s him with his mum, Franklin(e), months after he left the pouch (though he was in there an awful lot longer than any of the other joeys [of which there have been about 8 in the past three years] we’ve ever had dealings with). She’s towering over him (and eating the breadcrumbs off his coat!)

Well, we called WIRES, the Australian Wildlife Rescue Service, and they basically said it was a gum abscess, probably caused by a grass seed getting lodged in the wrong place. Their prognosis was that it would either burst and the fellow would probably then go on to make a full recovery; or it would harden into a permanent lump, in which case he might go on to make a full-ish, if somewhat disfigured, recovery; or, he might be in such pain (as the floppy ear suggested) that he would begin to starve, his mother would abandon him, and eventually he’d die. She also happened to call him, in passing, a swamp wallaby… we’d always thought they were red-necked wallabies, but looking at the various pictures of the two types on the web, we reckon the WIRES lady knows what she’s on about!

Well, the prognosis of permanent disfigurement or even more permanent death wasn’t exactly encouraging, so we wondered whether we could capture the thing, whisk him off to the vet and then put him back without anyone noticing… but the WIRES lady made it pretty clear that the minute you take one of these things out of the wild, they have to spend months being looked after by hand and can only be released back into the wild after a very long familiarisation process. So that really wasn’t an option.

Fingers crossed it was, then.

A week ago, I noticed Jefferson drooling at the mouth. It could have been rabies, I suppose, or something equally disgusting… but my guess was that his abscess had burst and he was dealing with the puss-y consequences (sorry: maybe this blog post should have started with a Parental Guidance rating!) Again, the drooling didn’t seem to be interfering with his eating too much, so that seemed a hopeful sign. And sure enough, here’s the latest shot of our little friend:

Sorry about the quality of that photo: it was taken at near-midnight! But you can see, I hope, that his ear’s now fine and perky once more, and the lump on his face is mostly gone. He remains an awful lot smaller than any joey we’ve ever seen at this stage of their life before, but he’s feisty (fights for his place at the food bowl!) and his mum still appears to be looking out for him, grooming him and making sure he’s OK… which isn’t exactly standard wallaby behaviour (at least, not what we’ve ever seen before), but maybe suggests his long-term prognosis is now OK. All a bit of a worry, therefore, and not the straightforward progression from pouch to salad-muncher we’ve seen with all his previous macropodian brethren, but reassuring nonetheless.

Tags: wallaby
This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.