A howler of a mouthful for wild dog at Charleville

When Matt Marks caught a glimpse of something white running through nearby trees while he was checking traps on his home property Bullecourt, west of Charleville, at the start of winter, he never imagined the surprise in store for him.

He put his rifle to his shoulder to check out the vision through the scope, to discover he'd flushed out a cream-coloured wild dog with what he thought was a pup in its mouth.

After shooting it he drove up, expecting a two-for-one bonus of dispatching its young one, only to discover the bitch had a much bigger mouthful - a dead echidna that had been turned inside out.

"It took me a while to work out what it was," Matt said. "I've been shooting all my life and trapping professionally for four or five years and seen wild dogs carrying a few lizards and roos, but I've never seen anything like that.

"Some friends on Facebook said it's a common thing but I've never seen it before."

Matt said the echidna had been folded inside out like a discarded mango skin, with all the flesh eaten back to the skin.

It's an indication of how smart they can be, he said, adding that he's lately been seeing male pups stashed up one log while the female pups have been hidden away in a separate one.

"They've gotten used to people looking for them and this is what they're doing," he said.

"I've had the situation where I've been able to find the males but not the females."

Matt surmised that the echidna meat was very rich in protein, which would have been a perfect meal for a bitch getting into pup.

He said that now there was green feed around, he expected most bitches would pup twice over the next 12 months, with 9-10 pups each.

According to research published by Ben Allen and Luke K-P Leung, in PLOS One in September 2014 on Australian dingo diets, wild dogs are known to eat echidnas but they are not a common part of their diet.

Dr Allen commented that they would have to be pretty hungry and very patient to kill and then consume one.

Their paper, The (Non)Effects of Lethal Population Control on the Diet of Australian Dingoes found that control through baiting didn’t change what they ate.

The study was undertaken in response to concerns that management through baiting might be detrimental to biodiversity conservation.

According to the findings of 4298 dingo scats in three remote arid sites collected over a four year period, between 14 and 17 different prey species or food items were detected, mainly cattle, kangaroos, rabbits and a variety of small mammals, primarily dusky hopping-mice, house mice, stripe-faced dunnarts and long-haired rats.