Fun Facts

Here are some quick, fun facts about a few of our Weird, Wacky, and Wonderful Australian Animals. We hope you find them interesting.

• A wombat can run at 40 kph, but only for a short distance.
• Cockatoos can mimic the human voice, some clever cockatoos can mimic up to 800 words.
• Wombats teeth have no roots and grow through it’s lifetime.
• A wombat may spend two-thirds of its life underground.
• Black cockatoos enter their nesting cavities back first.
• When a wombat is born it is the size of a pea, and weighs only 1 gram.
• Cockatoos have a relatively long life span, sometimes living beyond 50 years.
• Most cockatoos are left-handed, they will usually hold whatever food it’s eating in its left foot.
• An emu is a bird, yet it can’t fly, likewise a penguin is a bird, and it can swim.
• A bored cockatoo will methodically strip every leaf from a branch held in one foot, seemingly just for something to do.
• Aboriginal people used to hunt and eat wombats, but they taste disgusting, apparently.
• Wombats fall asleep on their sides, but end up rolling over onto their back, with their four feet sticking up in the air.
• Wombats recognise each other by their smell, and also the smell of their droppings.
• A male emu incubates the eggs, he also turns them over once a day.
• When emus drink, they usually take 70 mouthfuls of water, and lift up their heads between each mouthful.
• When wombats fight each other, they generally try to bite each other on the bum.
• Female wombats are bigger than male wombats, and almost always grumpier, especially if she has a baby.
• Wombats generally renovate old burrows, some of these burrows may have been dug 50, 100 or even 1,000 years ago.

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