It would be incredibly easy to be flippant about numbat custard. A cuter thought has never been had.

But in reality, the fact that a custard recipe for numbats exists at all tells us something is very wrong.

The staff at the Perth Zoo are quick to trot out phrases that help them explain the situation to visitors.

"There are less numbats than there are pandas," they tell me.

"There are fewer numbats than there are orangutans."

If you counted all the mature numbats on the entire planet, even including these breeding numbats at Perth Zoo, you might not reach 1,000.

This animal, as small as a newborn kitten, is vulnerable to cat, fox and dog predation as well as habitat destruction and disturbance.

They are tiny, whimsical, and straight out of a fairy tale, with heavy eye makeup, stripy backs and a tail which bristles like a bottle brush when the animal is aroused.

The tail is just about as long as the body, and the mouth is equipped with the most teeth of any Australian land mammal (52 rounded pegs) and an alarmingly long and skinny tongue.

That tongue appears out of the creature's delicate lips like a muscle-bound earthworm. It is sticky, and incredibly important, because the numbat is an anteater.

That might bring to mind the loping giant anteaters of Latin America, who seem like they would be wonderful to see, until they loom above you with hideously strong claws.

The numbat is nothing of the sort. It is bright, twitchy and has delicate, dainty, paws.

Numbats are tiny and whimsical, with delicate, dainty, paws. ( ABC News: Pamela Medlen )

Those tiny paws and claws will be used to pull back the barest of top layers of earth in the search for food—specifically, to search for about 20,000 termites every day.

It does not attack the termite mounds, which dry hard as concrete, but rather it uses its nose to locate 'galleries, small termite off-shoots and highways that are just under the ground.

The numbat subsists almost entirely on the termites, rarely drinking water, existing in delicate balance with its arid environment.

But in captivity at Perth Zoo, where a breeding program is in full swing attempting to bolster the wild population, it's hard to serve a high-quality daily dose of 20,000 live termites to every numbat they have, every day of the year.

So, the zoo staff have perfected a maintenance diet, a custard with special additives and a garnishing of termites from the fridge.

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Vicki Power from the zoo's native species breeding program prepares the custard. ( ABC RN: Ann Jones )

But, the zoo's Vicki Powers explains, this is just a sustaining diet, one that will keep the numbats in the breeding program ticking along.

For the best chance at breeding success the numbats need their quota of termites, and the zoo does adjust their diet around breeding time to maximise success.

But as much as making custard for numbats could never really be a burden, the keepers are all wishing that soon, they won't have to make it ever again.

As adorable as thinking of a numbat eating its favourite dessert is, it's a symptom of their perilous decline.