“I said ‘that looks really strange, that couldn’t be possible. Oh, there’s a baby wombat on the mum wombat’,” she explained.
A bushwalker’s photo of a mother wombat with its baby clinging to her back has delighted and stunned wildlife experts, who say wombats — with their “little legs for digging” — are simply not designed to ride “jockey-style”.
The image, snapped by Anja Boot at Cradle Mountain earlier this month, shows the pair frolicking on a plain surrounded by clumps of button grass.
“I’ve been bushwalking for many years but haven’t seen a treat like this in a long time,” Ms Boot wrote as the caption to the photo on her Facebook page.
“A baby wombat riding on mama’s back, as she cruised around Cradle Mountain.”
“Cuteness overload.”
Ms Boot’s daughter Ruby Flynn, 11, and Ruby’s friend Lilly McMahon, 8, were walking the boardwalk near Waldheim, in an area renowned for its abundant wombat population, last week when they spotted the unusual sight.
Ruby said she was not sure what they had spotted at first.