Mobile phones can be crucial during emergencies, but it was only because his own phone had temporarily stopped working that Martin Greenwood discovered what he described as the "luckiest kangaroo in the world".
Mr Greenwood is construction superintendent at a new golf course and club project outside Penneshaw on South Australia's Kangaroo Island, and was on-site on Tuesday afternoon when he needed to make a call.
"I was down in an area where I couldn't get reception so I drove up to the top of the hill," he said.
"I was sitting there talking away [and] I looked over into the distance and I saw sort of like an old mullock heap — just clay and rocks, and so forth, and I thought, 'no-one digs a hole here'.
"I thought, 'What could be there?'"
His curiosity piqued, he decided to take a closer look, and drove over.
"It was sort of overgrown with trees and I looked in and there was just this little joey there."
The kangaroo had fallen down what appeared to be an underground water storage tank resembling a small well that Mr Greenwood believed could date back to colonial times.
He has seen several others around the property, and said they would need to be fenced off because they acted as traps for unsuspecting animals.
Rescue of 'special little kangaroo'
Lined with concrete and about three metres deep, this particular tank left no possible way out.
A tree was concealing the pit, and down in the mud and muck were the bones of other creatures that had inadvertently stumbled in.
Fearing the joey in question was facing a similar fate, Mr Greenwood called the nearby Kangala Kangaroo and Wildlife Rescue, a fauna protection service established at Nepean Bay in the wake of the island's devastating 2020 bushfires.
Kangala's Jared and Lisa Karran made their way over and inspected the scene before embarking on a delicate retrieval operation.
"It just looked like a bush in the ground. You'd have no idea there was a well underneath," Mr Karran said.
"All I could hear was something move down in the water. It wasn't until I got the ladder out and climbed down that I could see what it was — that's when I realised it was a little female joey.
"It wouldn't surprise me if she'd been down there for three, four or five days."
What followed, he said, was a truly remarkable and tender instance of animal behaviour.
"This poor little girl, she was absolutely covered in all the filth from down there — she was cold and wet and as I turned my back to her she came and grabbed my leg.
"It's very unusual — normally they'll flee and I was expecting to have to chase her.
"You could just tell she wanted to be rescued."
Mr Karran carefully grabbed her by the tail, picked her up and lifted himself and the young roo out of the subterranean depths back into the world above.
"We did a lot of rescues during the bushfires here on Kangaroo Island … but even with all of those, I put this one at the top of my list," he said.
"She's a special little kangaroo."
'One in a million' find
Mr Karran estimated the kangaroo could be approaching 12 months old.
Weak in the legs, hungry, cold and distressed, she nevertheless seems to have avoided any major injuries, and was "now recovering very well" at Kangala.
"She'll stay here with the other kangaroos and live her life here in safety," Mr Karran said.
"Animals do amazing things when they're in distress but this was just one in a million — first of all, the chance of her ever being found down there, just in the middle of nowhere.
"It took Martin to be in the right place at the right time."
Mr Greenwood said his focus was now on ensuring the pits were fenced off – and that they did not become hazardous, inadvertent bunkers on the future golf course.
But he was also glad his chance loss of phone reception saved the joey's life.
"There was nothing to eat in there, so it would have died a horrible death," he said.
