International Wombat Day and the Species That Nearly Ran Out

A wombat produces cube-shaped droppings, between 80 and 100 a night, and stacks them on rocks and logs where other wombats will find them. The cubes are formed in the last stretch of intestine, where the gut wall alternates between stiff and soft regions that contract at different rates and press corners into the material as it passes.

That is the wombat fact everyone knows, and on 22 October it gets a thorough airing. The day it gets aired on has a murkier history than the droppings do.

Nobody Signed It

International Wombat Day is 22 October. The date is stable and widely observed, and the trail behind it goes cold quickly.

The usual account says a wombat enthusiast created it in 2005 and that a Facebook page a few years later spread it. No founding organization claims it. The frequently repeated explanation for choosing 22 October, that it falls near the time of Australian spring planting, appears in a great many places with no source attached to any of them. That makes it folklore.

This puts it in the same bracket as reptile awareness day, another date that settled by consensus with nobody to credit for it. It is worth saying plainly instead of inventing a tidy origin, because a made-up founding story is the kind of thing that gets copied and then cited.

Three Species, Very Different Situations

"Wombat" covers three living species, and their conservation positions have almost nothing in common.

The bare-nosed wombat, the one in most photographs, is the common one across southeastern Australia and Tasmania. The southern hairy-nosed wombat holds on in arid South Australia and southern Western Australia. Both face a problem the day rarely mentions.

Sarcoptic mange, caused by the same mite behind scabies in humans, is endemic in bare-nosed wombat populations and can kill an animal over a period of months. It is a slow death from skin thickening, cracking, secondary infection and eventual inability to feed. Treatment is possible and is being done at the population level in places, but it requires repeat dosing of individual animals in the wild, which is as difficult as it sounds.

The northern hairy-nosed wombat is a different story entirely, and it is the one the day should be about.

Down to About Thirty-Five

By the 1980s the northern hairy-nosed wombat was reduced to a single population in one Queensland paddock, at a count of roughly 35 animals. Not 35 in one reserve with more elsewhere. Thirty-five in total, for the species.

The recovery is one of the more concrete wins in Australian conservation. In 2002 the Queensland government built a 20 kilometer predator-proof fence around the entire habitat at Epping Forest National Park, after dingo predation was identified as a cause of losses. The count reached an estimated 230 by 2015, over 300 by 2021, and at least 400 by 2024. Two insurance populations now sit outside Epping Forest, at the Richard Underwood Nature Refuge and at Powrunna State Forest, where 22 animals were moved in 2024, so that a single fire or flood cannot take the species.

It is still Critically Endangered. Four hundred animals across three sites is not a secure species, and the whole recovery rests on fence maintenance and continued funding. But it went from 35 to 400 because specific people did specific things, which is a more useful story than most conservation days have to offer.

The Cubes Are Doing Fine

The droppings will get most of the attention, as they do every year, and there is no harm in that. The mechanism behind them was only properly worked out in 2021, and it is a genuinely odd piece of anatomy: the corners come from the intestine itself rather than from anything the animal does. How researchers established that involved dissection, tensile testing and a mathematical model of a contracting elastic ring.

But the animal is more than a novelty digestive tract. A wombat digs burrow systems tens of meters long that other species shelter in during fires. It has a rump reinforced with cartilage and thick skin, used to block a burrow entrance against whatever is following it in. The full picture is a slow, powerful, short-legged grazer that has been doing this since the Pleistocene, and one of whose three species came within about thirty-five animals of not doing it any more.

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Sources & Further Reading