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Washington, United States
loves: you win if you guessed "pets" and "museums". Also books, art history, travel, British punk, Korean kimchi, bindis, martinis, and other things TBD. I will always make it very clear if a post is sponsored in any way. Drop me a line at thepetmuseum AT gmail.com !

Saturday, April 03, 2010

the easter bunny down under

Australia! Where Christmas is during the summer, and the water going down the sink might swirl the opposite way from up here in the US, but maybe not too. And where the rabbit is not a native species, and some would like to replace the Easter Bunny with the similarly-eared but endangered Easter Bilby.

The bilby (Macrotis lagotis) is rabbit sized, rabbit eared, has a long pointy nose and a long tail, and light gray fur with tan patches like a pale tortoiseshell cat. They don't drink much water, getting most of their moisture needs from their food: larva, tiny animals, fruit, bugs. They live in western Queensland. Efforts to breed them in captivity and reintroduce them to their native areas are going successfully. Want to see one and learn more? Look on this page.

"But how much fun is Easter without a chocolate bunny?" you ask. Oh, I bet it would be loads of fun with a chocolate bilby! (When I lived there as a little girl they had chocolate frogs called "Freddies." I loved them - especially in the dessert called "Freddy in a Pond," which was a frog at the bottom of a bowl of lime Jello.) And then you should visit easterbilby.com.

Happy Easter to you all, Museum friends!

3 comments:

Quill and Greyson said...

Happy Easter!!!!

Everycat said...

Hope you had a Happy Easter Curator!

Those Bilbies look terribly tasty, oh sorry the ape is here, I mean - they look terribly CUTE.

We'd never heard of Bilbies!

I hope they manage to flourish once again.

(wouldn't want the feral cats going hungry)

Wicked Wuudler ;)

parlance said...

That guy I blogged about regarding the preservation of dingoes reckons unless we let the dingoes set up natural packs and leave them alone, the bilby will shortly be extinct. He says the dingoes don't hunt too many bilbies in comparison to feral cats and dogs.