‘I don’t have favourites – but Maude was definitely my favourite’: picture captures vet’s bond with orphaned baby wombat
This photo captures trainee vet Aldana Cantavenera bonding with an orphaned baby wombat - and there’s a happy ending...
How touching is this? Aldana Cantavenera, a trainee vet, had just finished bottle-feeding an orphaned baby wombat named Maude, and was giving her a cuddle before she went back in the incubator. “Maude’s eyes hadn’t yet opened, so she relied entirely on smell and touch,” she says. “After every feed I would go nose-to-nose with her like this, so she could smell me and feel my warmth.” The image, which has taken out a gong in the global BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition, beautifully captures the bond between the two. “I don’t have favourites – but Maude was definitely my favourite,” Cantavenera laughs.
The 26-year-old, who’s doing a Masters in Veterinary Medicine at the University of Melbourne, spent a week volunteering at Julie Malherbe’s Joey and Bat Sanctuary in Beveridge as part of her studies. The infant animals that Malherbe takes in require round-the-clock care; they’re looked after there until they’re old enough to “graduate” to other wildlife sanctuaries, with the eventual goal of release back into the wild. Maude was just four months old when she was brought in, clinging to life; she’d been found in the pouch of her dead mother by a roadside in Whittlesea. Wombats are under 3cm long when born – they continue developing for many months in the pouch, which is like a second womb – so Maude was very vulnerable at this stage. “Like a premature baby,” says Malherbe. Hence the need to be kept in an incubator, except for bottle-feeding with special formula every couple of hours. “I gravitated towards Maude during my week there,” says Cantavenera. “I felt so sorry for her, because she’d lost her mother. She needed someone to give her love. And it felt like we developed a bond, because of the way she responded to my touch.”
A proportion of the infant animals that wind up at the Joey and Bat Sanctuary don’t make it, of course – their injuries and other traumas are just too great. But Malherbe happily reports that Maude, who has since moved on to another wildlife sanctuary in Kallista, is now coming up to a year old and is happy and healthy. “She’s running around the place with four other young wombats,” Malherbe says. “She’s like a feisty toddler, with a mind of her own!”