Word: fleay
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...platypus is the most touchy, temperamental, unpredictable animal," says Australia's David Fleay, and he should know. Called "the platypus man," Fleay is the world's leading authority on one of the world's strangest animals, and the only man who has ever made the furry, duckbilled, egg-laying protomammals breed in captivity. Last week Fleay was grooming two juvenile platypuses for shipment to New York's Bronx Zoo, and he hoped that they would travel...
When he took three of them to New York by sea in 1947, says Fleay, "it was one of the most trying times I have ever been through." He had chronic dyspepsia for a year "due to those blasted platypuses...
Adult platypuses are set in their ways, so Fleay decided to catch young ones and condition them to human company before committing them to The Bronx. During the breeding season, female platypuses dig long tunnels into the banks of Australian streams, and lay their soft eggs in leaf-lined chambers at the ends. When the young platypuses hatch, they grow fast and fat by licking the milk that exudes from pores on their mother's belly. They begin to come out of their burrows in January and start life on their...
Double Splash. After getting a rare permit from the Australian government to catch platypuses, which are rigidly protected, Fleay made 22 sorties from his home in West Burleigh, Queensland. Tramping along the streams in a moving cloud of mosquitoes, he watched for the ripples stirred by swimming platypuses and listened for the characteristic double splash they make when they hit the water. In likely places he set funnel-mouthed box traps, caught a few adult platypuses and lots of eels and catfish...
...Healesville platypus was born after Curator David Fleay, as an experiment, gave Jill some nesting material. She promptly carried it into her burrow, soon afterward holed up for six days. When Fleay ventured to open the burrow last week, he found a fat baby, about nine weeks old, that uttered puppylike barks. Fleay is afraid to disturb the burrow further, but he thinks there may be another baby inside, because a platypus almost always lays two eggs...