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What rat is that ?

January 25, 2012

Photo by Alan Robertson

This Laughing Kookaburra, photographed on a property at Reedy Creek, has captured a fair-sized meal, but what exactly is it ? Judging by the relative proportions of the bird and the prey’s tail, our guess is it’s a Bush Rat (Rattus fuscipes) – any other ideas out there ?

A kookaburra’s diet can include snakes, lizards, rodents, frogs and small birds, but they live mainly on insects and other invertebrates.

4 Comments leave one →
  1. Susan permalink
    January 25, 2012 12:54 pm

    What a mouth full!

  2. January 25, 2012 2:53 pm

    Wow, I didn’t realize how big these guys were

  3. Pam Miskin permalink
    January 29, 2012 4:08 pm

    I think it is more likely a Black Rat (Rattus rattus) judging by the very long tail – bush rats and swamp rats have quite short tails in comparison with their body length. Just my thoughts. 🙂

  4. February 7, 2012 1:44 pm

    I’m with Pam. The long tail, coat colour and pink feet point to a Black Rat. Either way, I wonder if the Kookaburra caught and killed it, or got lucky?

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