It was about 9.30 or 10 on a dark, late November night; Molly Laird was driving her pink Mini home along country lanes to her Warwickshire cottage. Suddenly, the headlights’ beam picked up an animal sitting in the road. “I thought it was a deer at first,” Molly tells me. “But when it moved, its tail wasn’t right, and it was hopping. It took me a while to realise, but I thought: that’s a kangaroo!”
Molly’s next thought was: “I’m going insane,” closely followed by, “No one’s going to believe me.” So she got out her phone and filmed it. Later, she posted the video on social media, where she was told it was likely to be not a kangaroo, but its smaller cousin, the red-necked wallaby.
I have come to meet Molly, who is 19, and her mum, Becky, where the encounter happened, just outside the village of Oxhill. Molly had woken her mum up on the night she spotted the wallaby. “I did actually ask her: are you on LSD?” says Becky, before quickly adding: “Not that she takes anything like that. I’ll shut up!”
Becky has spent time in Australia and recognises a native of those parts when she sees one; she knew the creature on her daughter’s phone video was no deer.
Also with us is Darren Parkin from nearby Stratford-upon-Avon. Adventurer, outdoors instructor, bushcraft enthusiast and tracker, Parkin has been interested in the UK’s wallaby population for years. “When you’ve been everywhere and done everything in the outdoors in the UK, if there’s something slightly different, that doesn’t fit that normality, it becomes fascinating,” he says.
Parkin has followed wallaby tracks in the Peak District (where there used to be a well-known population). Then, a couple of years ago, after several sightings near his home town, he spent a night in a hammock strung between trees in the Welcombe Hills with some borrowed thermal imaging equipment. Again, no joy; a potential wallaby turned out to be a rabbit. Parkin has never seen a wallaby in the wild. Maybe today he will.
This is classic wallaby country, he says, surveying the terrain. “Nice open spaces, but also copses, plenty of hedgerows to skirt around.” Molly shows us where she came across hers, and where it went. Parkin scours the hedges looking for fur, and the verges looking for footprints. He has brought along a sketch of a footprint to show us what to look out for. The line between the footprints is made by the tail, he explains. Nothing definitive so far, this cloven one is a deer, a big stag judging by its depth. And here is a badger’s. Tracker Parkin should have lived in the wild west. “Yeah, I don’t belong in this time,” he says.
Before coming tracking I consulted Anthony Caravaggi, an ecologist who has spent years studying non-native species and has a special interest in wallabies in the UK. He was first involved in a project on the Isle of Man, home to about 1,000 wallabies, descendants of escapees from a wildlife park in the 1960s. That’s how they get out there. “They’re really adept at escaping,” says Caravaggi. “Obviously, they can hop, but they also dig, they can manipulate things with their claws. They’re popular in wildlife parks, farm zoos, and more ubiquitous in private collections than you might think. People are even keeping them as an alternative to sheep to control vegetation.”
Once out, wallabies feel, perhaps surprisingly, at home. The scrubby habitat of the Isle of Man, for instance, is quite similar to Tasmania’s. And throughout the southern half of the UK, the temperate climate suits them, Caravaggi explains. “I think the main limiting factor historically – and what put paid to the Peak District population – was our harsh winters, but with climate change our winters are getting milder.”
Caravaggi carried out a study over 10 years, based on sightings (he created a website for submissions), then mapped their distribution across Britain. He won’t put a number on the UK’s wallaby population, because he is a scientist and he doesn’t have sufficient evidence, but he will say that there appears to be a continuous population across southern England, with a few hotspots. There have been regular sightings in the Chilterns, plus in Cornwall, where they appear to be breeding. “I base that on observations of joeys [baby wallabies] in the pouch.”
Caravaggi says that more work – that he plans to be involved in – is needed on wallabies’ impact. In New Zealand, where they are also non-native, they are considered a pest, as they browse saplings and have a big impact on forestry. There are no reports of them having a major impact on the landscape in Britain, but on the Isle of Man landowners have been upset by the damage they cause.
The effects of some other non-native species are well known: grey squirrels (originally from North America) have led to a massive decline in native red squirrel numbers, similarly minks’ effects on water voles, and ring-necked parakeets are likely to have an impact on nesting birds. “I wouldn’t imagine wallabies would have much impact in terms of the larger fauna,” says Caravaggi. “The only animals they’re going to compete with directly are, for example, muntjac deer [also non-native], or sheep if they got into the fields. But they might impact flora, and if you change the dynamics of plants, small-scale systems and habitats, that can change invertebrate populations, so there could be broader ecosystem consequences.”
Caravaggi mentions the coypu, a large semi-aquatic rodent from South America that was brought to the UK in the 20s for the fur trade. Some escaped and established colonies in East Anglia. (I grew up in Suffolk and I remember my mum once being presented with one by a neighbour – dead, to cook, which she duly did. It tasted a bit like chicken, maybe more ratty …) Anyway, coypus did a lot of damage, burrowing into the sides of waterways, causing erosion and destroying flood mitigation infrastructures. An eradication campaign, launched in the 1980s, successfully eliminated them.
It might be harder to do that today. Caravaggi says modern wildlife management doesn’t work like it did historically, when landowners could kill what they didn’t like and any complaints could be brushed off. “With the advent of social media and global connections, the opinions of the public are more important than ever. They’ve explored grey squirrel culls but the public are just not on board. We’ve seen outcries over badger culls. Wallabies are charismatic and in our landscape very strange animals, so even if there was evidence of negative impact, we’d need to consider the associated relationships people have with nature and the wallabies.”
He wants to be clear that he is not advocating lethal control. “Given global dynamics and climate change it’s not sufficient to say they’re not native so they should be culled. Like all countries, we’ve a ton of non-native species which have neutral impact. What’s needed for the wallabies is to accumulate evidence and consider their ecological role, economic role, all these things, then you can make informed decisions about how best to manage the populations.”
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Back in the bush, I mean the English countryside, there’s a twist in the tale of the Oxhill one. While Parkin is still scouring the ground for tracks, a farmer pulls up in a pickup truck with a jack russell emerging from the window. Is this going to be one of those get-off-my-land moments? No, he just wants to know what we’re doing. Looking for a medium-sized marsupial; has he seen one? Oh, that’ll be his son’s, he says, it escaped 10 days or so ago. Ah.
Tom Heritage agrees to take us to see his son, Paul, on the family sheep farm up the track. Paul initially isn’t thrilled to see us. He seems suspicious, but I can see that five strangers turning up armed with cameras and a notebook could be disconcerting. Yes, he has wallabies, three of them, keeps them in a fenced paddock. One of them, the male, got out, he thinks under – rather than over – the fence, which is seven feet (2.1 metres) high. Can we meet the remaining females? No, we can’t.
The early frostiness thaws a little. Paul says he keeps them because he finds them fascinating, particularly their breeding cycle. “It’s very unusual, when they’re born they’re only this big,” he says, demonstrating with a section of his finger. A joey “has virtually no back legs, which is weird, but its arms are very developed, so it can pull itself into the pouch where it latches on and stays for six months. It’s a most unusual way of breeding, developed for where they come from. In drought they pause gestation.”
Becky chips in: “I bet some women wish they could do that.”
It’s clear that Paul Heritage is passionate about his wallabies. He says he never would have had them if he thought they could damage the environment. Is he sure we can’t come and see the remaining two? Yes, he’s sure. But we’re welcome to carry on looking for the missing one, though he doesn’t think we’ll find it during the day. No, it doesn’t have a name. He was last seen on the other side of the village. They tried to corral him into a trap but he wasn’t having it.
Molly’s wallaby isn’t as wild as we suspected. But, as Parkin says, “it underscores the point that so many people in the countryside have strange creatures on their property and they escape.” About four years ago, another Warwickshire escapee, a distinctive white wallaby named Colin became well known around Kenilworth, not far from here, until, sadly, he was hit by a lorry. After some initial disappointment that our wallaby hasn’t been hopping around the West Midlands for years, we realise it’s actually the perfect illustration.
All that remains is to try to see the bloody thing. Molly and her mum have to go home, so Parkin and I and photographer Fabio head to the other side of the village, where Paul’s escapee was last seen. Parkin snaps into tracker mode, says that a water source would be a good place to start, so we follow a little stream into a wood. This is a “desire path”, he says, an animal trail where the grass has been beaten down. He crouches down to look for signs. Fabio snaps away. I’ve found some binoculars, so I’m staring into the undergrowth, thinking it would be funny if the wallaby hopped into view.
Guess what? He does! Parkin hisses, nods, and there he is, 30 metres ahead, sitting under a tree, eating fallen crab apples: a quintessentially Australian creature in a quintessentially English setting. It is both utterly incongruous and – precisely because of that – magical. Parkin, who has wanted to see a wallaby in the wild all his life, remember, is over the moon. “Sorry, I’m not a sweary man, but fucking hell,” he whispers. We creep a bit further, too close, the wallaby looks up again, finishes his mouthful, then bounds lazily off.
An update: Molly’s wallaby, who indeed turned out to be Paul Heritage’s wallaby, was recaptured. A team of five went down to where we saw him, with a net, into which they corralled him, bundled him into the back of the pickup and returned him to his pen. He didn’t get to join Britain’s burgeoning wild wallaby population. This time.
