A pair of celebrity emus that vanished after being banned from an outback pub for bad behaviour have been rediscovered — and they have multiplied.
Yaraka is a small red-dirt town with a population of about 20, two-and-a-half hours south of Longreach in Queensland.
It has a church, a police station, a caravan park, a school and a pub that shot to international fame in 2020 due to its hardline stance against two strange visitors.
The Yaraka Hotel was forced to barricade the pub entrance in order to keep Kevin and Carol the emus out after they developed a taste for tap-room hospitality.
The emus had been targeting tourists and pinching food, drinks and car keys, and leaving behind a general trail of devastation.
But now they're back.
Why ban an emu?
A full-grown adult emu can weigh up to 60 kilograms, which equates to roughly the same poundage as 150 well-fed pigeons.
If you consider the kind of mess one pigeon can cause, it stands to reason that the droppings caused by one well-fed emu would be something akin to a bombardment.
Leanne Byrne says it was the back-end blitzkrieg that pushed Kevin and Carol beyond the realm of cheeky punters and into full-blown public nuisance territory.
Ms Byrne is known around town as the "Yaraka Mother of Dragons", a reference to the Daenerys Targaryen character from Game of Thrones who hatched three dragon eggs.
Kevin and Carol were inside two of nine eggs that were given to Ms Byrne after some blokes discovered an emu nest while pushing scrub.
She wrapped them in an electric blanket and they all hatched.
Sadly, only Kevin and Carol made it to adulthood, with truck and car collisions claiming most of their siblings' lives.
"They love cuddles," Ms Byrne says.
The Yaraka emus achieved notoriety for their confidence around humans, and now even feature on a range of tourist merchandise.
Unfortunately, their troublemaker tendencies came back to bite them with a ban from their beloved watering hole.
"I had to start buying them cartons of beers and getting takeaways for them," Ms Byrne jokes.
"They handled it. They used to try and get up the stairs and stuff, but they did put a chain across there to stop them.
"It doesn't stop all the people from coming to see them though."
And then, they disappeared.
Mystery of emu chicks' parentage
Ms Byrne leaves Yaraka to work for a few months most years, and Kevin and Carol would traditionally run off into the wilderness until her return.
After her last trip to Yamba in January, they didn't come back.
"But I have done some investigating, and I do know that they are still local," Ms Byrne says.
"And one of them has four baby chicks.
"And they're brother and sister, so we'll just leave that alone."
Tourists and locals would still love Kevin and Carol to come back to the township for a stickybeak, even though the pub ban is set in stone.
But Ms Byrne is encouraging them to stay up in the nearby hills until the chicks have grown, since Kevin and Carol's siblings fared so terribly with traffic.
"With all this rain, there's lots of waterholes and everything," she says.
"When I got the chicks it was quite drought-affected out here.
"I think they've got enough food and water and everything now.
"They're not my pets. They just tended to stay, and everyone looked after them type thing. They're still wild animals."
