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\u2019 beam picked up an animal sitting in the road. \u201cI thought it was a deer at first,\u201d Molly tells me. \u201cBut when it moved, its tail wasn\u2019t right, and it was hopping. It took me a while to realise, but I thought: that\u2019s a kangaroo!\u201d<\/p>\n
Molly\u2019s next thought was: \u201cI\u2019m going insane,\u201d closely followed by, \u201cNo one\u2019s going to believe me.\u201d 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cI did actually ask her: are you on LSD?\u201d says Becky, before quickly adding: \u201cNot that she takes anything like that. I\u2019ll shut up!\u201d<\/p>\n Sam (right) with wildlife tracker Darren Parkin and Molly Laird, who took a video of a wallaby she spotted while driving home. Photograph: Fabio De Paola\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Becky has spent time in Australia and recognises a native of those parts when she sees one; she knew the creature on her daughter\u2019s phone video was no deer.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s wallaby population for years. \u201cWhen you\u2019ve been everywhere and done everything in the outdoors in the UK, if there\u2019s something slightly different, that doesn\u2019t fit that normality, it becomes fascinating,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n She knew the creature on her daughter\u2019s phone video was no deer\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n This is classic wallaby country, he says, surveying the terrain. \u201cNice open spaces, but also copses, plenty of hedgerows to skirt around.\u201d 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\u2019s. Tracker Parkin should have lived in the wild west. \u201cYeah, I don\u2019t belong in this time,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s how they get out there. \u201cThey\u2019re really adept at escaping,\u201d says Caravaggi. \u201cObviously, they can hop, but they also dig, they can manipulate things with their claws. They\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Wildlife tracker Parkin shows Sam a diagram of a wallaby footprint. Photograph: Fabio De Paola\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Once out, wallabies feel, perhaps surprisingly, at home. The scrubby habitat of the Isle of Man, for instance, is quite similar to Tasmania\u2019s. And throughout the southern half of the UK, the temperate climate suits them, Caravaggi explains. \u201cI think the main limiting factor historically \u2013 and what put paid to the Peak District population<\/a> \u2013 was our harsh winters, but with climate change our winters are getting milder.\u201d<\/p>\n Caravaggi carried out a study over 10 years<\/a>, based on sightings (he created a website<\/a> for submissions), then mapped their distribution across Britain. He won\u2019t put a number on the UK\u2019s wallaby population, because he is a scientist and he doesn\u2019t 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. \u201cI base that on observations of joeys [baby wallabies] in the pouch.\u201d<\/p>\n Caravaggi says that more work \u2013 that he plans to be involved in \u2013 is needed on wallabies\u2019 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 effects on water voles, and ring-necked parakeets are likely to have an impact on nesting birds. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t imagine wallabies would have much impact in terms of the larger fauna,\u201d says Caravaggi. \u201cThe only animals they\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Tracker Parkin zooms in on the escaped wallaby. Photograph: Fabio De Paola\/The Guardian<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 dead, to cook, which she duly did. It tasted a bit like chicken, maybe more ratty \u2026) 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.<\/p>\n It might be harder to do that today. Caravaggi says modern wildlife management doesn\u2019t work like it did historically, when landowners could kill what they didn\u2019t like and any complaints could be brushed off. \u201cWith the advent of social media and global connections, the opinions of the public are more important than ever. They\u2019ve explored grey squirrel culls but the public are just not on board. We\u2019ve 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\u2019d need to consider the associated relationships people have with nature and the wallabies.\u201d<\/p>\n He wants to be clear that he is not advocating lethal control. \u201cGiven global dynamics and climate change it\u2019s not sufficient to say they\u2019re not native so they should be culled. Like all countries, we\u2019ve a ton of non-native species which have neutral impact. What\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Back in the bush, I mean the English countryside, there\u2019s 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\u2019re doing. Looking for a medium-sized marsupial; has he seen one? Oh, that\u2019ll be his son\u2019s, he says, it escaped 10 days or so ago. Ah.<\/p>\n The wallaby had escaped from a locked paddock in Oxhill. Photograph: Fabio De Paola\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Tom Heritage agrees to take us to see his son, Paul, on the family sheep farm up the track. Paul initially isn\u2019t 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 \u2013 rather than over \u2013 the fence, which is seven feet (2.1 metres) high. Can we meet the remaining females? No, we can\u2019t.<\/p>\n The early frostiness thaws a little. Paul says he keeps them because he finds them fascinating, particularly their breeding cycle. \u201cIt\u2019s very unusual, when they\u2019re born they\u2019re only this big,\u201d he says, demonstrating with a section of his finger. A joey \u201chas 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\u2019s a most unusual way of breeding, developed for where they come from. In drought they pause gestation.\u201d<\/p>\n Becky chips in: \u201cI bet some women wish they could do that.\u201d<\/p>\n A water source would be a good place to start. We follow a stream into a wood<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019t come and see the remaining two? Yes, he\u2019s sure. But we\u2019re welcome to carry on looking for the missing one, though he doesn\u2019t think we\u2019ll find it during the day. No, it doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t having it.<\/p>\n