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Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around “as high as a kite”, BBC News quoted an Australian government official said.
NGS photo of wallabies by Bates Littlehales
“We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,” Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania, told a parliamentary hearing on security for poppy crops. “Then they crash,” she added. “We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high.”
The kangaroo-like marsupials are apparently raiding poppy fields grown for medicine. (Read the full BBC News story.)
Giddings’s spokesman later played down the comments as the Attorney-General “making a joke” with her colleagues, The Times Web site reported. However, “poppy growers have admitted the native wildlife are fond of jumping the fence and eating the opium-laden poppy heads,” the news site said.
