We have had a friendly, little visitor here at Barambah in the last week, an echidna.
The visiting students have enjoyed observing him and he or she was not at all concerned by the attention.
Echidnas, are also commonly called spiny anteaters and are quite the contradiction. They are mammals, but they lay eggs, often classified as long- or short-beaked, but don't have beaks at all. They don't really look like true anteaters either, and they are not closely related to them. They are spiny, though; their bodies are covered with hollow, barbless quills.
He will be our featured animal in Wildlife Wanderings in the Term 2 newsletter, so if you want to learn more interesting facts about echidnas check the newsletter out.