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Adelaide men perform emergency C-section on dead wombat, save baby

Screengrab from Facebook video
Screengrab from Facebook video

Last Saturday, two fast-acting young men from Adelaide, South Australia, saved the life of an unborn wombat.

Dmrenzo Kotze, 21, and Chris Dimasi, 20, spotted a dead wombat on a dirt road. When they went to move the roadkill out of the way, they noticed tiny movements inside the marsupial.

“We could kind of see something moving inside,” Kotze told The Advertiser. “We thought we could see what we could do because (we thought) it could be a baby.”

The men ran home to get a knife. When they returned, Dimasi, who works at an abattoir, performed an emergency caesarean section, cutting the joey out of the mother’s pouch, while Kotze filmed the operation.

Kotze posted the video on Facebook.

Warning: Video shows wombat surgery

The tiny, 247-gram wombat was still alive.

The men took the tiny wombat — they named him Jeffery — to Kotze’s home to clean it up, then they contacted Jane and Phil Budich of Fauna Rescue SA.

Jane Budich renamed the baby wombat Whisper. She said the young wombat wouldn’t have survived more than a day inside the dead mother.

“They did a brilliant job. I can’t thank them enough for what they did and how they did it and how gently they did it," she said.

Whisper will sleep under a heat pad in the Budich’s home until he is big and strong enough to be moved to an enclosure.

“They (wombats) are normally 3kg when they’re born out of the pouch ... but he was pink with no hair and probably needs another 2.5kg in weight,” Jane Budich told The Advertiser.

“He’s on four-hourly (milk) bottles day and night.”

Little Whisper will eventually be re-released into the wild.

Last May, we shared the story of a Minnesota man who delivered a baby fawn, named Bambi, after its mother was struck and killed by a car.

Watch that incredible story below.