I half-watched a telly programme on UK TV this morning (in between watching Steve Irwin at Howletts Zoo and The Saturday Kitchen during the commercial breaks in the Steve Irwin prog.)
The third programme seemed to be about wild roos in Canberra, but I only saw snippets of it. It said that roos are a real problem in Canberra because Canberra is very green and roos eat grass.
It also said that the bush comes right to the edges of the city, bringing roos with it.
The prgramme went on to claim that car-collisions with roos are real and frequent problems throughout the ACT including in what looked like non-too-huge roads (certainly not dual carriageways) around Canberra. Certainly, there were lots of pix of dead roos and of cars which had allegedly been damaged in collisioss with roos.
Is all this so or was this programme exaggerating, please?
The quick answer is yes, Roo's are a bit of a problem here in Canberra. During the twilight and sunrise hours they tend to stray down to the roads for the lusher grass in the drainage area's. It is unlikely that a day passes without seeing a dead Roo by the roadside if you drive around Canberra a lot. By the way, there is not really enough traffic in the ACT to justify large motorways and the like. We get by with the roads we have and the government is constantly improving existing roads and building new roads.
No exaggeration at all. We live about 1km from the bush of Mt Ainslie as the crow flies and we have a couple of kangaroos that come into our garden almost nightly because we have a water source that they drink from. Occasionally, but not often I have seen them hopping down the street I live in during the day and one day almost collected one that was hopping down the main road in Ainslie as it decided to cross to go towards the bush. I saw one recently as road kill near Capital Hill which is the real centre of town and I have seen more than one dead by the side of the road very close to Parliament House. The Governor General and the Royal Canberra Golf Club have loads of them! They are also in almost plague proportions on Mt Ainslie and one jumped onto the boot of my (hire) car in Watson a few years ago - made a very big dent!!! The thing about Canberra is that it is the bush capital and the bush comes into the suburbs like veins in a leaf and so the wildlife can easily get in via bush corridors but that doesnt stop them using the roads either.
They have certainly become worse in the past 10 years. Before that, you didnt get nearly as many urban road kills. Unfortunately the government isnt nearly as good at collecting urban road kills either and if you go to work along some of the main drags you can plot the decomposition time table of those which have been hit - first they blow up really big, then the birds get to them and they go down in size then you get the skin and bones by the side of the road - yummy!!!
You do know that people actually eat kangaroo dont you? My son lives in the bush and shoots his own, butchers it and they eat it - my DH has it several times a week but I still havent managed to get a taste for it.
The prgramme mentioned that roos are a real problem to the golf clubs and there was footage of one golf club with several roos busily devouring the putting greens, to judge ny how green and fine and "lawn-like" the grass was compared to the browner, coarser looking vegetation further out (pix of the centre of Canberra in the background.)
I was interested because my sister, brother in law and I once drove right up to the North of WA and back. I was disappointed because we saw hardly any roos from the highway and the ones we did see were a long way from the road.
My brother in law said that they are mainly nocturnal and we didn't do any long-distance drives at night because he said the risk of hitting a roo is much higher at night. The roo bars on their cars are not those ornamental things you see in the UK. Both on the ute and on Neil's car they are more like scaffolding poles bolted together. According to Neil, if a roo comes through the windscreen it will probably kill anyone in the front of the vehicle. He said that was why the bars were so high - to stop the roos coming over the top and onto the bonnest in the event of a collision, in addition to protecting the radiator, I gathered.
I've never seen roos apart from in zoos and miles from the cities in WA, so I had the impression that there aren't many roos. However, Canberra seems to have a large roo population to judge from the programme yesterday. (The narrator also remarked that the roos have worked out that domestic gardens are a good source of food and water, as Quoll has mentioned.)
I must say I did like the scenery round Canbera. The green bits really do look lush and verdant and I liked the fact that you can see for miles further out.
The little quokkas on Rottnest Island were really cute and very tame - though I was appalled to see tourists feeding them with sailted crips when there were signs everywhere saying not to feed them at all, and espcially not with anything salty because apparently there is not much water on Rottnest.
What are full sized roos like? Are they friendy or do they hop away or what? My impression is that they are not aggressive creatures, but that could just be me thinking, "How cute" and wanting to believe they are like labradors temperamentally.
I'm intrigued now because I didn't know you could see roos so close to home.
The Steve Irwin programme was amazing, by the way. He was at Howletts Zoo in the UK dealing with a family of gorillas that were about to be taken back to Africa and released into a reserve. He was sitting in the straw in their enclosure and one of the females gave him an almighty hug! She hand fed him a stick of celery and then made him open his mouth to prove he had eaten it! She more or less treated him like a young gorilla but he clearly loved every moment!
Thanks again
Gill
Last edited by Gollywobbler; 06-01-2008 at 05:15 AM.
Absolutely true about the bull bars - if you do a lot of night driving you have to be very careful as they are absolutely stupid and just leap out without looking (LOL)
Canberra is a bit greener at the moment but it isnt very lush actually - just some beginning growth following the December rains. It has been very un-lush for some years now. It appears green because of all the eucalypts which stay green no matter what but it isnt real green it is sort of bluey green.
On our last trip to Melbourne down the Hume Hwy we almost collected a koala wandering nonchalantly across the dual carriage way - looked like a monkey wandering across on all fours - never seen one of them do that before!
Generally kangaroos and wallabies (we have a mixture) are quite shy - they will bounce off rather than coming up and attacking you. We only have grey kangaroos which are smaller than the big reds which are more prevalent in the outback and I believe they are more aggressive but will still hop off rather than wander up to say hi!
Until this last big drought it used to be a joke that people would expect to see kangaroos hopping down city streets - well, now they do (very occasionally) in Canberra! Ours are almost plague proportions and there are constant proposals to cull them then the animal rightists get on the wagon and put pressure so that they dont cull them perhaps as much as they should.
Yep - the roos on the telly were grey and did not look particularly big but that is deceptive because there was nothing nearby to measure their size against. Some might have been wallabies, too.
The roos I saw in WA were reddish and looked very big - probably 6ft high if standing up straight - but they were a long way away.
The only live koalas I've ever seen were near Sydney. It wasn't a zoo but the koalas were plainly protected in some way. There was one close by in the fork of a tree, eating leaves. It had long, sharp-looking talons, mean-looking eyes and the Ranger said they are covered in fleas. He also said that they don't allow tourists to hold them because if the animal doesn't injure you (it looked well capable of it) apparently they are very prone to appendicitis if handled. Anyway the thought of the fleas discouraged most of us!
The koalas seemed to be asleep, mainly. Only a couple of them were wake ad munching.
Cheers and thanks again
Gill
Last edited by Gollywobbler; 06-01-2008 at 05:20 AM.
Yep - I knew that roo meat is supposed to be very good for you - like ostrich & venison, apparently. Very high in good things and very low in bad things. (Do they eat emus in Oz?)
When I was a child we lived in Malaysia. My mother inherited a couple of dachshunds from a guy who was going back to Denmark. The dogs had been fed on nothing but roo meat which came - frozen - from Oz. They ate the meat raw and were particularly fond of the raw tripe - which was utterly disgusting to look at. Dark grey and what looked like fleshy "spikes" of meat everywhere.
I've seen the stuff Rick Stein raves about on the telly - white and the surface looks more like a honeycomb. Happily I've never been closer to it than watching Rick Stein with it on telly!
Some of the male eastern greys can be very aggressive at times, especially around food, some are 6 foot tall too, 15 years ago I used to drive from Wollongong to Queenbeyan [just outside Canberra] twice a week to pick up prisoners, it was an awful drive back with the kangaroos bouncing across the road, especially if it was raining, one night a truck in front of us hit 3 of them and they were spinning on the road like tops, the tail of one damaged our car.
Another menace at night are deer, they only come down from the hills in drought conditions, but are evidently in plague proportions in the Royal National Park between Wollongong & Sydney, I hit one coming home from work many years ago, I thought it was a cow feeding at the side of the road, until it jumped into the air and landed on the bonnet of my car, I was left with an expensive repair, but the poor deer died.
