No matter how long you have been travelling or how many times you have been around the block, it seems there is always something new to see in this great southern land.
And I’m not just talking about a gorge you haven’t been to before, or a mountain, or a lake.
It seems that ‘stoned’ wallabies are becoming something of a tourist attraction in Tasmania as they wobble around the place after eating opium poppies!
Before she got the top job, Tassie’s Premier Lara Giddings told a parliamentary hearing on security for poppy crops that the marsupials were creating crop circles as they hop around “as high as a kite”.
The BBC reports that Australia supplies about 50% of the world’s legally-grown opium used to make morphine and other painkillers.
“The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,” Lara Giddings told the parliamentary hearing back in 2009.. “Then they crash … we see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high.”
Wow! Wildlife watching on the road will never be the same again after this!
Rick Rockliff, a spokesman for poppy producer Tasmanian Alkaloids, told the BBC that wallaby incursions were not very common, but other animals had also been spotted in the poppy fields acting unusually.
“There have been many stories about sheep that have eaten some of the poppies after harvesting and they all walk around in circles,” he said.
Say what?
Retired Tasmanian poppy farmer Lyndley Chopping also said he had seen strange behaviour from wallabies in his fields.
“They would just come and eat some poppies and they would go away,” he told ABC News.
“They’d come back again and they would do their circle work in the paddock.”
Some people believe the mysterious circles that appear in fields in a number of countries are created by aliens. Others put them down to a human hoax. I think this is the first time they have been put down to drug-addled wildlife!
