The Guardian Australia is reporting on a study published in Global Ecology and Conservation which highlights how overabundant kangaroos is seriously damaging conservation efforts in the Australian interior.
The article examines Professor Mike Letnic’s work on grassland conservation in central NSW where his team have established exclosures to monitor the impacts of wild rabbits “It was completely denuded. It was like a moonscape” Prof Letnic said “There’s this perception out there that kangaroos are a native animal and because of that they can do no harm”.
Graeme Finlayson is a rangelands ecologist at Bush Heritage Australia, which manages one of the reserves examined in the study – a 63,000-hectare former sheep station at Boolcoomatta in South Australia. “There’s areas that should have had native grasses, but it was just dirt,” he says. “Grasses are important for the native species that we’re trying to protect.”
One of those species is the critically endangered plains-wanderer, an elusive ground-dwelling bird only found in Australia. “They need the grass for food and shelter from predators,” Finlayson says. “It’s the same for other native creatures: when the grass is gone, so are they.”
As part of the study, researchers found densities of kangaroos in the conservation areas were as high as 145 animals per sq km. Numbers estimated for Boolcoomatta were lower – just above seven per sq km – but Finlayson says they can boom to 30 or more.
Bush Heritage Australia has worked to decommission the old watering holes on the property to keep kangaroo numbers down. It helps, but is not enough.
“We don’t have a one-size-fits-all solution, but we know [kangaroos] are a good source of food,” Finlayson says. “But some people don’t like that we eat them. There’s going to be a lot of decisions that need to be made that will be hard for people.”
Graeme Coulson, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne, has been researching kangaroo ecology since the 1980s.
Prof Coulson says there urgently needs to be a national approach to managing kangaroo numbers to protect conservation efforts. “From a conservation point of view, there is now this increasing awareness that kangaroos can have quite big impacts in these conservation reserves.”
Each year, states set a quota that can be harvested for the kangaroo meat and leather industry. But the industry doesn’t kill anywhere close to the quota. In 2019, for example, the government data shows a quota of 6.2m kangaroos was set but 1.57m were harvested.
Coulson says the rising numbers of kangaroos also creates an animal welfare issue. The numbers boom during wet periods, but when the landscape dries out, farmers also have to contend with high numbers of dying kangaroos, he says. It means the situation “is a mess” because while NSW has a kangaroo task force, there is no national equivalent.
“It’s a big issue, and it is not being answered by commercial harvesting.”
The extremist Animal Justice Party opposes any culling of kangaroos. Their radical manifesto should be of concern to anyone who is genuinely interested in conservation in Australia.
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