00:00one of the pleasures of walking in the bush is encountering an echidna i recently stumbled upon
00:09this one crossing a dirt track near maloney's beach in marmarang national park now echidnas
00:16have no teeth and instead use their long snout for foraging and digging and then their tongue
00:22which is up to 18 centimeters long to slurp out ants termites and other insects from under leaf
00:31matter and also from under and inside logs
00:37peekaboo i see you those ants aren't going to last long if you look closely an echidna's hind legs
00:57point backward allowing them to more easily push soil away when digging and sometimes they even
01:05stand on their two hind legs of course this one's just after even more ants but it's those quills
01:15that often cause some people to call them spiny anteaters it can't be easy to scratch yourself
01:24lucky they also have elongated claws for grooming between their sharp quills which are actually an
01:31enlarged and toughened form of hair oh and those those little white tags that the echidna's scratching
01:39they're probably ticks commonplace on echidnas so too are fleas if you do observe one in the bush
01:46and get a little too close as a defensive mechanism an echidna will roll up into a ball of radiating
01:53quills to protect themselves or sometimes even dig themselves to safety so next time you're out and
02:00about keep an eye out for echidnas but bear in mind when they are in the forest they are often hard to spot
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