The Prince and I

I first encounterd the Prince in my orchard. As home was bordered on two sides by a forested national park, wildlife was common. I therefore wasn’t surprised to see a wallaby underneath one of my most prized fruit trees, but I was bothered that he was holding a ripe apple in his paw, and taking obviously enjoyable bites from it. The last thing needed in an orchard is a wallaby, so I decided to scare it off, and from a distance of about 15 metres, picked up a fallen apple from another tree, and threw it towards (not at) the wallaby.

The response of the wallaby, with eyes locked onto mine, was to drop his partly eaten apple and reach down to pick up the apple I had thrown as it rolled along the ground towards him. He then lifted the apple to his mouth and took take a large bite, all the time looking defiantly at me. So began a long and mercurial relationship.

The problem

I’ll call him the Prince now, although the name came later. The Prince particularly liked fruit, as well as the leaves of the fruit trees. To select his snacks he would grasp a tree branch in one paw, pull it down towards him and grab the fruit or leaves in the other. I don’t mind sharing a little fruit, but the Prince broke the branch on most occasions, so that years of careful pruning were transformed into disfigured and misshapen trees within days.

The Prince was also partial to the crops in the vegetable garden, although the fence was high enough to keep him out. Forgetting to close the gate meant that he would be quick to slip inside to enjoy the harvest. Over time, as his familiarity with the family grew, he would ignore attempts to remove him from the vegetable patch and continue feasting on the best of the seasons crops, particularly enjoying tomatoes and zucchini. Ultimately, I found the only way to persuade the Prince to leave the vegetable garden was by spraying him with a watering hose.

Developing trust

Slowly, a scheme was hatched to humanely deal with the Prince. A friend who is a professional in the environmental and wildlife field offered to be available on request to use a hypodermic knockout on the Prince (importantly, for his safety, a different drug to ones used on other marsupials) as we now had arrangements with a person in a nearby district who wanted to take a wallaby for re-release into the wild.

So, the plan was simple. I would befriend the Prince by feeding him fruit, and over time, once he was tame, I would telephone my environmentalist friend who would travel the 10 kilometres to use the hypodermic gun. I would then drive the sleeping Prince to the recipient for release in his new environment.

A great plan? It didn’t work. Over a year or so, the Prince and I became quite close. If he was down the paddock, I would call him, and he’d respond by hopping up to collect his piece of fruit. But, whenever he was around, my wildlife friend was not available to shoot the hypodermic gun, and when he was available, the Prince was nowhere to be seen.

The Prince became much more relaxed around the house, often sleeping on the verandah, or in a shed. In fact, he became so at home, that one day when Mrs Nomadic and I went for a short walk and failed to close the door to our kitchen/dining room, we returned to find the Prince rifling through the fruit and vegetables in the pantry about 6 metres from the door.

Over time, my relationship with Prince evolved, but not always positively. He liked me to feed him on a more level basis height-wise, so I regularly fed him from my old shed chair, as pictured below. I am feeding him with metal kitchen tongs, as the Prince never acquired good table manners, and always tended to grab or snatch at the offering with his razor sharp claws.

The Prince and I in our Sunday best

The naming

It is well known that urine is a good fertiliser for lemon trees. Like many country people, I apply this knowledge. On one particularly dark night, it was very cloudy, with no star or moon light, and as always, no light from a neighbouring house. During the evening I strolled outside with the purpose, to put it delicately, of applying the lemon tree fertiliser theory into practice.

In the darkness by that tree, I was suddenly in the grip of the Prince, who could not be seen in the darkness. He was only innocently seeking something to eat, but it was an unnerving experience with those sharp claws so close to a very delicate part of my body.

After that experience, and with more than a biblical nod, we decided to name him The Prince of Darkness.

The romantic Prince 

The Prince had until this time never shown any interest in his own kind. But one day to our horror, we found him showing a young female wallaby his paradise, his Garden of Eden. We could imagine generations of wallabies – baby princes and princesses –  further decimating our fruit trees.

A falling out

One afternoon, it became apparent that home was too small for the two of us. As I strolled onto the lawn at the the front of the house, the Prince jumped towards me at some speed, and lashed at my face with his paws, drawing blood. A few moments later, the Prince bound towards me again at high speed, and I knew that this was a serious confrontation.

Alpha male kangaroos (the Prince’s first cousins) fight with rivals for supremacy and access to  females, grasping them with their claws, standing as upright as possible by balancing on their tails, lifting the rival off balance, then attempt to injure or disembowel the rival by kicking, made dangerous by their large sharp toes.

As the Prince reared up, slashing his claws at my face and trying to grasp me, I remembered a move from the couple of lessons I had in Taekwando many years before. The kick I landed in the middle of the Prince’s chest to knock him over defused the situation for a while, although I don’t think that our relationship ever returned to its earlier heights.

A fatal illness?

The prince was clearly very sick. He was lying on the floor of the open garage looking feverish, unable to get up, and I quickly saw that he had an infected big toe. It was very swollen. In spite of our differences, because I have  a weakness for wildlife, I decided provide him with a little comfort in his remaining time, with water and apples.

Within two weeks, instead of dying, he was back breaking fruit tree branches, having obviously enjoyed being nursed back to health.

What happened in the end? After a while, the Prince just didn’t turn up any more.