Thank you to everyone who kept a look out for echidnas during the Echidna Count week. Many people saw echidnas during the week before and the week after the Count week, but not during that week. I didn’t see any that week but recorded a number of sightings for other people.
Thirty echidnas were recorded as seen in the valley during this year’s Count, twenty-eight of whom were recorded in iNaturalist and two in another citizen science website. The sightings were fairly evenly spread between the eastern and western parts of the valley.
During the year between the 2023 and 2024 Counts, four echidnas were recorded as killed on the valley’s roads.
This year’s Count is the first to record sightings of echidnas in groups, and there were quite a few! There were two groups of two echidnas, and two groups of four echidnas seen.
It used to be thought that echidnas were solitary animals, and that they only came together during breeding season, when a female is followed by a “train” of males, sometimes for days, until the female chooses one of the males with whom to mate.
It was also believed that echidnas did not see their mothers at all after they left their burrow.
However a study in Victoria in 2007 established that an echidna maintains a relationship with their offspring for at least a couple of months after their puggle leaves the burrow, and they might maintain that relationship indefinitely.
It was observed that after the puggle has emerged from their burrow, the mother will seek out their puggle and will feed them more frequently than they did when the puggle was confined to the burrow, and the mother is tender and strongly maternal towards their puggle.
This photo of an echidna feeding her puggle in a garden in Kangaroo Valley accords with that 2007 study.
We are still learning about the wildlife that lives quietly alongside us, and all citizen science records are an enormous help with this.
Kate Watson
Kangaroo Valley Environment Group
