Paul Sheehy remembers the day a staff member at his Wee Jasper holiday park in southern NSW found a wombat that had been hit by a car.<\/p>\n
“We weren’t aware, or we had no knowledge about, how to rescue the joey [in its pouch],” he said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Paul Sheehy says he never expected to be caring for wombats in his day-to-day duties. (ABC Riverina: Jess Scully)<\/p>\n
The team made a call to Queanbeyan-based animal rescue group Wildcare.<\/p>\n
“From there we basically forged a relationship looking after the local wombats in our part of the world,” Mr Sheehy said.<\/p>\n
“They’re a part of us \u2014 part of Australia, part of Wee Jasper, the cute little buggers.”<\/p>\n
Mr Sheehy has now developed a passion for eradicating a disease that has affected native animals for centuries.<\/p>\n
“We were asked [if we] were interested [in working] alongside these guys to help eradicate the mange,” he said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Paul Sheehy administers a direct pole-and-scoop treatment to a wombat later named Crankypants. (ABC Riverina: Jess Scully)<\/p>\n
Now, staff at the park keep on the lookout for wombats suffering from sarcoptic mange, a sometimes fatal skin disease caused by mites that burrow under the skin.<\/p>\n
Sarcoptic mange was introduced to the Australian landscape during European settlement and infests more than 150 mammalian species, including humans, koalas and wombats.<\/p>\n
Elena Guarracino runs a wombat mange eradication program at Wildcare, and has been helping train locals to treat the disease<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Elena Guarracino is training more people to treat mange in wombats. (ABC Riverina: Jess Scully)<\/p>\n
When the program started, there were two people covering most of the southern highlands, from Young to Bredbo.<\/p>\n
“You cannot run a mange program with two people,” she said.<\/p>\n
“Having the mange team that we’ve got means wombats can now be treated, not euthanased, [and] we can stop the spread in a particular area.”<\/p>\n
In four months, about 140 people have been trained to treat mange in wombats by Ms Guarracino and Wildcare.<\/p>\n
Sneaky treatment<\/p>\n
Ms Guarracino said the wombats’ nature to burrow during the day and forage at dawn and dusk made it difficult to give them the four doses needed to treat mange.<\/p>\n
She said mange was treated by either a direct application of topical medication using an extended pole and a scoop of the treatment, or a burrow flap with a receptacle for the treatment to fall onto the wombats when they enter or leave.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Blue dye is added to the medication so park staff can track wombats that have been treated. (ABC Riverina: Jess Scully)<\/p>\n
“It’s not rocket science, but you have to be quite sneaky \u2014 it’s like you’re almost hunting them,” Ms Guarracino said.<\/p>\n
Once a wombat is spotted and treated, it is then recorded in an app so it can be monitored.<\/p>\n
“We’re wanting people to \u2026 come on board, come and help, and it’s working,” Ms Guarracino said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A wombat nicknamed Crankypants runs away growling after receiving treatment from a pole-and-scoop direct treatment. (ABC Riverina: Jess Scully)<\/p>\n
WomSAT founder and University of Western Sydney Associate Professor Julie Old said wombats were the “underdogs” of the native animal world.<\/p>\n
She wanted more citizen scientists to follow the lead of the Wee Jasper park crew and help treat animals for sarcoptic mange.<\/p>\n
“It is a death sentence \u2026 if it’s not treated, they will die,” she said.<\/p>\n
“The more people we have involved that are trained and know what they’re doing and how to go about doing it, it will benefit the wombats.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Julie Old says wombats’ burrows help protect other native animals from predators. (ABC News: Greg Heap)<\/p>\n
Both WomSAT and Wildcare have resources for the public to use to learn how to help wombats with mange.<\/p>\n
Dr Old said helping wombats had flow-on effects to the surrounding environment.<\/p>\n
“They build big burrows so that means they are turning the soil over, which helps plants grow” she said.<\/p>\n
“It helps other animals out by providing shelter for other animals as well.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Paul Sheehy remembers the day a staff member at his Wee Jasper holiday park in southern NSW found…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55487,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[64,63,137,45942,45940,45946,45944,45943,45941,45945],"class_list":{"0":"post-55486","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-mange-treatment","12":"tag-wee-jasper-holiday-park","13":"tag-wildcare","14":"tag-wombat-diseases","15":"tag-wombat-health","16":"tag-wombat-mange","17":"tag-womsat"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55486\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}