Meet Lucky the platypus I saved
<p><em><strong>Over60 community member, Margaret Skeel, 67, is a disability support worker and has just finished writing a book about internet dating. Another one of her hobbies is rescuing wildlife and this story in particular is her favourite memory of rescuing none other than the beautiful platypus.</strong></em></p>
<p>I knew there were platypuses living in my creek but it took years before I actually saw one. On a hot summer’s evening, I stepped into the creek and my foot touched something furry. I jumped and when I came back down, it was gone. Was it a platypus or a native water rat? I don’t know.</p>
<p>A few years later, a friend and I were sitting in the creek on a hot summer’s day. Suddenly a small platypus swam up to us. My friend reached down and gently lifted the little creature up out of the water. That is when I discovered young platypuses have blue eyes, just like kittens. His lack of fear indicated that he was only just emerged from the maternal burrow and still without the caution that would come with age and experience.</p>
<p>My friend passed him to me and he gripped my finger with one tiny paw and looked at me. That was when I realised that his “duckbill” had lips. It wasn’t hard like a true duck’s bill. They were soft lips and the bill was really an overshot upper jaw with the lower jaw set well back. I lowered him back into the water and he swam away, never to be seen by me again.</p>
<p>A few years later I got the strangest phone call of my life. A waitress at a local pub called to tell me there was a platypus walking down the street in front of the bar! This was at ten in the morning and miles from the nearest platypus habitat. I raced to town for the rescue. It was an old male with dangerous looking spurs on his hind legs. I handled him with caution and after a visit to the vet, where he was declared healthy and well, took him home. But where had he come from? My suspicion was that he was the victim of a wildlife trafficker but had escaped from a pen nearby and decided to walk home.</p>
<p>My intention was to release him into my river the next morning since I had no idea where he came from, but he had other ideas. Imprisoned in my bedroom en-suite for the night, he got busy trying to dig his way out. The noise was unbearable, sleep was impossible and by midnight, I had enough. I carted him down to the river and sploosh, away he went.</p>
<p>At seven in the morning, my suspicions were confirmed. A phone call from another local informed me of another platypus walking down the main street. I went to town and picked up a beautiful young female platypus, also in good health. I am sure now that someone was trying to smuggle them for profit. Unfortunately follow ups with the police and national parks and wildlife plus cruising the back streets looking for suspicious backyard cages led nowhere. </p>
<p>Luckily these two platypuses were smarter than their captors and got away. I released the female at the same spot in my river and hoped they both would find it to their liking.</p>
<p>I have saved my best platypus story for last. One morning I got a call from the local hotel. Could I come and rescue a platypus please? I was out the door like a shot. A platypus! When I arrived they handed me a life jacket and in the middle of it was a very sad looking little platypus. When I gingerly touched him, concerned about the poisonous spines on his hind legs, I felt hundreds of little lumps in his fur. Ticks! There had to be hundreds of ticks all over his body. I popped him in a carry cage, handed the life jacket back and asked where they had found him. On a rock in the full sun, lying there half dead was the answer.</p>
<p>I took him home, popped him in the sink, grabbed tweezers, tea tree oil and methylated spirits. I dosed the ticks in the oil and spirits to loosen their grips and began pulling them out one by one. As I pulled, I counted. I should have saved them too but I was more concerned with saving a life than the science of tick taxonomy so I washed them down the drain. One, two, three…. Ten, twenty, thirty… I kept pulling them out and flushing them but there was no end in sight.</p>
<p>One hundred, 101, 102,103… and he was still covered. He lay comatose in the sink so I kept cool water running over him and I held his little paw in my left hand. Two hundred, 201, 201, 203… I squeezed his paw and there was a faint squeeze back. He was still alive.</p>
<p>Somewhere after three hundred he didn’t squeeze back. I panicked and turned him over, pushed on his chest and blew air into his mouth. He moved, breathed. I went back to pulling ticks, this time on his tummy.</p>
<p>The final count was over 700 ticks. At least 70 of those were paralysis ticks, the kind where a single bite can kill a dog or make a human seriously sick. And yet my little platypus was still alive. It was late on a Sunday so I put him in his basket and put him by my bed. If he made it through the night, we would go to the vet in the morning.</p>
<p>I barely slept for the first few hours. I kept putting my hand in the carry cage and feeling him to see if he was alive. At 3am he had enough and he growled at me, a high pitched growl like an annoyed cat. That reassured me enough that I finally went to sleep, since he obviously wanted to be left alone.</p>
<p>The next day I took him to the vet, who gave him a shot to boost his adrenal glands but otherwise pronounced him fit and healthy. “He’s lucky to be alive!” the vet proclaimed, after I told him how many ticks had been on him. That’s a good name, I thought, as we weighed him. Lucky came in at 700 grams, which meant one tick for every gram of body weight. It was astounding. He wasn’t just lucky, he was tough as nails, that little guy.</p>
<p>He was a male but quite young, from the fact that his eyes were still blue. The deadly spurs on his back legs were still covered with horny sheaths. Apparently this wears off as he gets older and then he can use the spurs in territorial fights with other males. He certainly never threatened me with them.</p>
<p>I took Lucky home and made a platypus garden in my bedroom en-suite. There was a big plastic tub in the shower stall with a ramp so he could get inside to have a swim and a feed. I put a blanket on the floor for him to sleep in. I fed him meal worms but they had to be in the water for him to eat them. Because the lower jaw is set so far back on his head, he could not pick them up from the ground but could only munch them by tossing them up with his bill and then gobbling them as they floated back down. It worked. He ate 48 mealworms for dinner that night.</p>
<p>I spent the next three days sitting in there with him, watching him swim, play, feed, sleep, groom and explore. His main occupation was trying to find a way out. He wanted to go back to his river. So on New Year’s Eve my son and I drove him back. He was asleep in his blanket when I gently put him on the ground. He woke and sniffed the water for a moment and then went back to his blanket for another cat nap. That was fine with us, we were in no hurry either.</p>
<p>When he went back to the water, he played in the shallows for about twenty minutes and something magical happened. It was a full moon night and wherever he disturbed the water in his play, the ripples glittered like diamonds around him. Beyond, the still waters were dark. Only where Lucky was playing were there diamonds in the water.</p>
<p>At last he swam away. I never saw him again, but I hope he has a long life in his river and many children to make diamonds in the water as they play on full moon nights.</p>
<p><strong><em>If you're interested in learning more about Lucky, I have just written a book based on him, called <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Platypus-Dreaming-Adventures-Lucky-Friends-ebook/dp/B01FJWS8ZM/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1463288992&sr=8-2-fkmr0&keywords=bilby+skeel&linkCode=sl1&tag=wwwheliumco06-20&linkId=ed0fd2bc666287009c299ccb5f958418" target="_blank">"Platypus Dreaming: The Adventures of One Lucky Platypus and Her</a>.</span> It is based on this story and has pictures of the real Lucky in it. </em></strong></p>
<p><em><strong>If you have a story you’d like to share email melody@oversixty.com.au<br /></strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Related links:</strong></p>
<p><strong><em><a href="/lifestyle/family-pets/2015/12/life-lessons-from-grandparents/">Top 10 life lessons kids learn from grandparents</a></em></strong></p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><em><a href="/lifestyle/family-pets/2015/12/happiest-dogs-in-the-world/">The happiest dogs in the world</a></em></strong></span></p>
<p><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><em><a href="/lifestyle/family-pets/2015/11/clever-cop-saves-dog/">Clever cop saves dog with a moment of inspiration</a></em></strong></span></p>
