Happy new year. 🙂

This is not a quoll but it is a dasyuromorph. It is a numbat, Western Australia’s faunal emblem and one of the few marsupials that’s properly diurnal. Numbats are roughly squirrel-sized and eat only termites. A numbat may consume up to 20,000 termites in a day.

And yes, they’re endangered.

Much like chuditches, numbats were once found all across Australia but some British fools decided it was important to introduce foxes and rabbits here. Also like chuditches, Perth Zoo has been involved in bringing numbats back from the brink. As part of their breeding program, Perth Zoo has  bred, survival-trained and released at least 150 numbats back into the wild.

And now some administrativa:

In 2013 i have set myself a goal of learning to animate by doing one bit of animation a day from Sunday to Friday. This will probably end up quite time-consuming to begin with since i’m not that good at it yet, so i won’t have time to spend all day stalking spotty things for photos at various zoos and wildlife parks then coming home to sift through photos for hours on end.

That said, with the attention this photoblog gets and the good work it’s doing, i reckon it’s still worth it to crank out a few photos a week – i’m thinking Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the usual times. A bumper crop of numbat photos seemed like the nicest possible way to deliver this news. 🙂