By Jenel Hunt
They live in a little two-bedroom fibro house in Maryvale and are on the pension so don’t have a lot of money to spare. But for Tony and Leonie Adams, life isn’t about money; it’s about caring.
Both are wildlife carers and at times their small house is almost taken over by the animals they look after.
They didn’t exactly sign up for this life knowing what they were getting into. A murmur of what was to come began back when their son Anthony started keeping snakes. At 16, he was too young to get a reptile licence so his Mum took out the licence. When he left home, he left the snakes for Mum and Dad to look after until nature took its course, which took quite some years.
Then one day out of the blue, Leonie’s brother rang up with the sad news that he’d run into a kangaroo. Then he said, “I have something for you, would you look after it?”
So a joey came to live at Maryvale and it was Frank – they name all their ‘kids’ and started right from the very first baby – who really kicked off the caring adventure.
When Frank was old enough to be set on the path to wildhood (yes of course that’s a word!), they took him to a carer’s property at Stanthorpe so he could be released. But from that one incident two important factors emerged. One was that Leonie knew she never again wanted to do a drive-and-drop-off goodbye.
“It was one of the longest drives I’ve ever had to take,“ she said.
“It took me a few months to get over that.”
The other factor isn’t hard to guess – Leonie and Tony had been bitten by the bug so became carer members with the Granite Belt Wildlife Carers Inc.
That was years ago and they haven’t ever stopped caring, although keeping up the work has been touch-and-go once or twice.
“I tell ya, it’s nothing like I expected it to be,” Leonie said.
“You can raise up some of them and it’s all going well yet you’ll still lose them – that’s the worst part for me. Little wallabies are prone to taking epileptic fits. They can be fine and five minutes later they fall to the floor and they’re gone.
“Raising them is worrying, but when you lose them after having looked after them for a while, it’s heartbreaking.
“I lost one that I’d raised from a pinkie [so young they don’t have fur yet] and I nearly give the whole thing up,” she said.
“Then three days later I gets a phone call, ‘Can you take this little baby?’ … and there we went again.“
Leonie said she and Tony had different specialties, although they both looked after all the animals.
“Tony does possums and gliders and we both share the birds and I do a lot with the kangaroos and wallabies,” she said.
“But when they’re really little and getting six or seven feeds a day, the day starts at 6am and ends at midnight or 1am so it’s good that there are two of us.”
At the moment, they make up a total of 41 bottles a day.
“I have a little pinkie that weighs 500g and a little bettong that weighs about the same. There are eight eastern greys, a wallaroo who loves cuddling and nibbling on the wrong things – like cords and sometimes your hand or your hair – and a black-striped wallaby that came from Killarney. Yesterday we got a baby brushtail possum. We’ve also taken lizards and cockatoos and koalas.”
There’s not a great success rate with koalas so they are usually taken to experts at the RSPCA in Brisbane. If the RSPCA doesn’t have enough volunteer drivers on the day, it might be a case of meeting half way at Aratula for the handover.
“It’s the same with the wedge-tailed eagles. They go to Brisbane for assessment. The last wedgie we got came from Upper Freestyle. He couldn’t fly. A lovely man brought him to our place. We made a few phone calls and the RSPCA came up. The bird had a fracture in his wing and has now undergone surgery to put a pin in his wing. He’ll go into rehab for a few months and we’re hoping he’ll be right to go home very shortly.“
A lot of their babies start as pinkies and saying goodbye once they’re grown enough to fend for themselves can be quite an extended process. After the abrupt goodbye with Frank, Leonie and Tony decided to do their releases from their home at Maryvale.
Despite being on just a three-quarter-acre block, they have made it work and their neighbours have all been supportive.
“Once the kids are big enough to be outside we don’t lock them in. While they’re still babies it’s quite a different matter. I think we have the most childproof house in Maryvale!
“But once they go outside they’re free to come and go as they please. That’s why we release them from our place. It’s not as bad. And it’s in their own time.”
She said she had raised a group of six once. They would come ‘home’ of a day and then leave in the late afternoon.
“They did that for quite a few weeks until eventually they just didn’t come back. They’re still seen around the area, though. I get the occasional call or message to say ‘The kids are down at my place’ or that someone saw them somewhere else.
“With wallabies, once they get into the great outdoors they’ll go and you’ll never see them again, but the eastern greys tend to come back and forth a bit before they go for good.
“It helps me a lot [with saying goodbye] to know that they can come home if they get hurt.
“One of my big boys, Tyson, had been gone well over six months and just appeared back one day. My husband said, ‘Tyson needs his mum.’ Tyson was standing at the bottom of the stairs and he’d cut his arm. He just stood there while I cleaned his arm up and then stayed for a few days. When his arm was feeling better he’d go, but he came back each day for me to check it.
“That was a couple of years ago. He comes back sometimes just for a look. But I wouldn’t approach him any more because he’s wild now and he’s quite massive. Not 1kg like he was when I got him!”
Leonie said the drought had been a particularly hard time.
“We ended up with 31 at one stage because all the carers were full. There were babies coming in every day. I had to draw up a list of all their names and as we fed them we’d tick their names off the list. When the rains came, a few of them went up to Stanthorpe to other carers,” she said.
She said wildlife caring was a ‘live and learn’ experience, and she was grateful to have a go-to lady, Betty Balch at Stanthorpe, for advice.
The Granite Belt Wildlife Carers look after a huge area stretching to the New South Wales border and taking in all of the Granite Belt, Warwick, Texas, Allora, Clifton, Killarney and Maryvale. The group relies on grants and donations for much of the formula, which Leonie said cost about $420 per 20kg bag.
The babies come to them in a number of ways. They’re often orphaned from road accidents or sometimes a mother has been shot and a joey is found still alive in the pouch.
She admitted the house could get chaotic.
“I have five in the bedroom with me at the moment. Two sleep in hanging pouches, others are in snuggies and they love them. I have two in one portacot and one in a portacot by herself because she fights with the others.
“They do have little fights. The next thing, they’ll be kissing each other.”
They can be pretty entertaining as they’re growing up.
“Sometimes we could really do with a stop/go sign because they race up and down the little hallway and they’re a real tripping hazard.”
Other times the naughty kids jump up on the beds then settle in for a little rest. It’s true that they had a hard start to life. But now?
“They’re living the life,” said Leonie.
