A WOMBAT spotted stranded on a half-submerged tree stump in a lake near Yarrawonga in Victoria’s Central Murray region was given an impressive rescue last week by a former Hamilton resident and Monivae College student.

Dutch Thunder Wildlife Shelter owner/operator, Kylee Donkers, was called out to help the marsupial off its precarious perch in Lake Mulwala on the Victoria/NSW border and could only speculate as to how it ended up between 500 metres to a kilometre off shore.

“Wombats can swim, they’re not known for their swimming ability – all you’ve got to do is look at their bodies,” she said.

“I’m guessing she was probably chased into the water by a running off-lead dog or something like that.

“I think something happened to scare her into the water and she just kept on swimming.

“I dare say she just swam until she found something she could pull herself out of the water on.”

Ms Donkers said the last few months of flooding in the area had meant “stranded animals on logs and tree stumps and things like that have sort of become quite a common occurrence for us”.

After deciding a rescue off a jet ski wasn’t safe, she managed to get the help of a fishing operator and his boat to carefully approach the animal.

“It was a great rescue - it could have gone very, very wrong,” Ms Donkers said.

“But it all went well.”

Now recovered from hypothermia and some foot wounds, the newly-named ‘Miss Mulwala’ was ready on Wednesday for release back into the wild.

“She’s had a health check and she’s 100 per cent ready to go,” Ms Donkers said.

“We’re just working with a local landowner at the moment to get permission to release onto his property which we’ve done releases on before and it’s a nice huge property.

“Nowhere near a large lake, so she can’t get herself into trouble again.”

Ms Donkers grew up locally in the south-west but admitted apart from “aunties and uncles and cousins (who) all still live in Hamilton”, even her parents, who used to own Accurate Clothing before they moved to Geelong - but still get The Spectator sent to them regularly.

She met her husband James at school and after university moved up to Murray River country about 15 years ago where she volunteered at a local wildlife shelter, and the couple then applied to start her own.

“We’ve been a shelter for nearly 12 years now,” she said.

“We’ve gone from maybe having half a dozen animals in care to, I think, last count (there’s) over 70 animals in care.”

“Because we are so close to Lake Mulwala we get a lot of swans and cygnets; we get lots and lots of water birds, reptiles - we do absolutely everything.”

But for now, Ms Donkers was happy to see Miss Mulwala go back into the bush after her ordeal – with perhaps the bonus of a companion.

“We’ve actually got a second one that we’ll be releasing with her, which is a male,” she said.

“So the two of them hopefully will go out before the weekend.”