Short-Beaked Echidna Breeding Season — Tasmania Australia
The short-beaked echidna's breeding season from July through September produces one of Australia's most unusual wildlife spectacles — the echidna train, in which a receptive female is followed by a queue of up to 10 males nose-to-tail for days, each male attempting to mate. The train moves slowly through the landscape regardless of obstacles, the males shuffling doggedly behind the female, and the event is sufficiently common in good habitat that walking in the Tasmanian Midlands in August will regularly encounter a moving train. The echidna's monotreme physiology — sharing only with the platypus the distinction of being an egg-laying mammal — makes any encounter significant; the breeding train encounter is extraordinary.
About this spectacle
Walking through Tasmania's Midlands or Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park between July and September, you may suddenly find yourself beside one of nature's stranger processions: a line of short-beaked echidnas — up to ten males — shuffling nose-to-tail behind a single female. The train moves slowly and with apparent indifference to terrain, the males jostling for position over hours or even days. At close range you can hear the soft rustling of leaf litter and the occasional clicking of spines. The female moves at her own unhurried pace; the males queue with comic persistence. Morning light filters through eucalypt and heath, and the animals, absorbed in their ritual, often allow unusually close observation. As a monotreme — one of only two egg-laying mammal lineages on Earth — the echidna is a living relic, and the breeding train transforms that rarity into visible, moving spectacle. The experience is intimate, low-drama, and deeply strange.
When to go
Jul — Sep
Getting there
Nearest airport: LST. Nearest city: Launceston.
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