It walked to the middle of a blue metal gravel road and “face-planted”, laying on the hot surface.

The wombat had mange and was apparently trying to get some relief.

“They do funny things when they have mange,” Ms Ridley said.

“You see them lay on the blue metal when it’s hot. There’s something that tells them that that’s the thing they need to do, like it’s their instinct.

“Before the mange, you never used to see them do that.”

About a dozen wombats used to call the Big 4 Kelso Sands caravan park home, digging burrows near the park’s boundaries and wandering the grounds at night, delighting visitors.

But now volunteers can only find three permanent wombat residents.

The few remaining were presumably curled up in their burrows on Thursday morning due to the light rain, as Bea Mayne and new volunteer Gilbert Baxter trudged around the area topping up their mange medication.

Ms Mayne calls one group of burrows the “dirty dozen”, set among gorse piles on a nearby property. Another cluster at the caravan park is called “Fairyland” because of the effect of the secluded avenue of trees.

Active burrows are easy to spot – they are generally cleared of all debris.

Ms Mayne runs Wombat Rescue Tasmania – a role that she says is equivalent to a full-time job due to the ongoing spread of mange and the difficulty in finding other volunteers to lend a hand.

She uses a large whiteboard to track where the wombats are living near Kelso, how much mange medication they have received and the location of burrows.

“The mange is worse in the summer, and now that Tasmania is warming up, it’s getting worse for the wombats,” Ms Mayne said.

The mange is caused by scabie mites, an introduced species. Wombats spread it to one another when they share burrows, or while mating.

The wombats need to be administered medication weekly for 12 weeks before they are considered cured.

Untreated, the mange can become fatal within months as the wombats scratch themselves to death.

The rural roads in the Kelso area also pose a hazard, so Ms Mayne hangs up signs on trees to remind motorists to be wary.

“It’s actually the healthy ones that get hit by cars because they’re out during the night. The ones with mange are likely to be out and about during the day,” Ms Mayne said.

Originally from Queensland, Ms Mayne moved to Tasmania in the early ’90s to work as a wool classer.

After an injury, she sought out flat land and chose to live in Kelso.

It was there that she was told of the plight of the nearby wombats, and met a carpet maker who was constructing medication-administering devices out of old real estate posters and electoral corflutes – designed to be hung at the entrance to burrows.

Ms Mayne helped to devise an improved design, using ice cream container lids and milk bottle lids .

“Peter’s are easier to cut out because they’re more flimsy, but Bulla are stronger lids,” she said.

There are a pile of the lids in her shed, along with frames, medication and needleless syringes to form kits. They are mailed out to anyone who gets in touch about mangy wombats.

Because volunteer numbers are so low, it is up to the individual to make sure they keep the device stocked with medication.

“It’s important to have volunteers all over. If we get a call of mange at Burnie, we can’t go out there all the time to make sure the wombats are getting their medication,” Ms Mayne said.

“There’s only a few of us doing this.

“We also need volunteers to do things like change SD cards in cameras that we set up to monitor their movements. A lot come for a week or so, but then seem to fall away.”

They did have some success however, almost-entirely eradicating mange from a group of wombats at Musselroe.

Volunteers set about 160 frames over burrows in the area and there are now reports of 200 healthy wombats, and just three with mange.

But elsewhere in northern Tasmania, mange has effectively removed entire populations.

Gilbert Baxter – who hails from northern California, but now lives in Beaconsfield – decided to get involved after seeing the suffering wombats go through when they have mange.

“I know 10 years ago they were everywhere at Narawntapu, but now they are all gone,” he said.

“It had to be the mange.”

It was the same story at Greens Beach where locals used to spot eight in a paddock each day, but now there are none.

Wombat Rescue Tasmania is attempting to have the council set up virtual fencing on roads in the area to stop the wombats from venturing in front of vehicles.

But without more support, Ms Mayne said wombat numbers would diminish further.

“Once mange gets into the wildlife, it’s terribly hard to cure,” she said.

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To get involved, contact Wombat Rescue Tasmania on 0419 585 001.