For the last ten minutes, I’ve been watching a wallaby give birth to a joey the size of a jelly bean, in a jellybean sort of color — bright pink.
OK, there’s the joey, pink and fur-less. Wow. Teeny. Not much bigger than my thumb fingernail. And now the joey has a big job for a newborn; it has to crawl up the mom’s stomach and into her pouch.
How fast does an inch-worm crawl? What’s the slowest animal on earth?
The joey ascended at about a millimeter per minute. I can’t say I was thoroughly engrossed but I sat there watching. It was so frustrating, I began to say to the mom, “Why don’t you just pick it up in your mouth and dump it into your pouch? Why are you just sitting there watching it?” Which is what I was doing.
No point in encouraging the joey. You can’t talk to a weird pink apparently blind jellybean which moves at one millimeter a minute.
Eventually, the jellybean got up to the rim of mom’s pouch. And then didn’t back in. Just squirmed slowly around the rim of the pouch.
I left. And here I am telling you about it. I do assume the joey made it before the mom got as bored as I did. Or maybe she just said, “What the hell?” got up and hopped off.
Well, it was memorable. And fascinating. New life.