The Sugar Glider

I’ve seen pictures of a funny animal from australia. It looks like something between a squirrel and  a bunny. I’ve never heard of anything like it, and would like to know what it is.

In Australia it’s a very common animal known as The sugar glider because of it’s sweet tooth and it’s ability to glide through the air in long distances, up to fifty metres. The sugar glider has a membrane between the front paws and rear paws, which it uses to glide through the air from tree to tree. Its fur can differ from blue-grey to brown-grey and it has a dark stripe from its forehead and down the middle of its back. Their bodies is about 16 - 20 cm and their tails just as long. Some of them has white or black tipped tails.

It’s a very light animal or it wouldn’t be able to glide through the air because it was too heavy. The females only weight about 120g an the males 20g more. The glider is a marsupial, which means that the female has a pouch where it has its young ones. They often live in small family units with about eight gliders and has their nests in tree holes hidden by leaves.

It eats a kind of gum produced by Acacias and saps of certain Eucalyptus, but it wouldn’t object to fruit and other things as long as it’s sweet. It can eat insects and small birds too. The little animal lives in open places in rainforest in Australia.

Some people also have it as a pet in their homes. But if you want to have it as a pet you have to have enough space to a pretty big cage, because of its need for space to run and glide around. For a Sugar glider its most important that the cage is high and have things like branches and ropes so it can climb around. But it is not everywhere that its legally to  have which is one of the reasons that the sugar glider isn’t common as a pet.