Jack Ashby

You'd wave frantically, you'd shout because...

Platypuses close their eyes and ears underwater, so they can't hear anything.

But they're super sensitive on the surface.

So you have to kind of stand dead still.

And Toby, I'd realised, had gone way out of earshot from where I was sitting.

So I get up and I start following his footsteps.

And I can see him on the other side of this marsh.

And in his face, it is obvious to me that he has just seen a platypus.

And I am terrified.

Because the worst case scenario is that he sees it and I don't.

And you haven't, right?

I'm so selfish, but that was...

Yeah.

So he signals that it's safe to come, that it's diving.

And we kind of stand there.

So I think the tried and tested rules of seeing a platypus are like, I don't know if you have this game in Australia, but grandmother's footsteps or what's the time, Mr. Wolf.

of where monsters in the dark monsters in the dark is that it so you if you know you've got to creep closer to to your target but if they see you move you're out and that's how it goes with the platypus so you you wait for them to dive you give yourself 30 seconds

run towards it exactly 30 seconds when you freeze and you wait for it to come back up again and on that time we'd seen it it was just kind of overjoyed and we crept closer I think three times of this kind of

dive, run, freeze, surface, dive, run, freeze.

And the third time it dived and I ran up to my closest point and I gave myself my 30 seconds and then part of us did not reappear.