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Down Under With Australia's Wildlife

© Connie Troutman

This is the first in a series of articles on the many creatures inhabiting Australia. Presently over half the world's endangered mammals are Australian. There is very little hope for these under the present "socialist conservation model" practised in Australia where there is "plenty of funding for conservation groups but no funding for conservation". It is so easy to see the problem that Australian wildlife face. Each endangered species has a "recovery group" associated with it. The more endangered the species, the more funding the recovery group gets. How can a system work which rewards failure and punishes success?...Source:Earth Sanctuaries.

Earth Sanctuaries has reintroduced many species of rare and endangered wildlife back into the wild. Take a look and see what they do.

Kangaroos are Australia's best-known animals. When Australia's first European Explorers saw a strange animal as tall as a human leaping around like giant grasshoppers they couldn't believe their eyes! They asked Australia's original inhabitants -the Aborigines - "What are these animals?" They replied "kangaroo." Now to the Aborigines, this meant "I don't understand you." The Europeans thought they were referring to the big-footed hoppers, so they named them Kangaroos.

Kangaroos, and their close relatives, vary greatly in size, ranging in weight from 500 grams to 90 kilograms. There are at least 69 different types of kangaroo, called species. These species are found naturally in the wild only in Australia and New Guinea, although feral populations of some species have been introduced in New Zealand, Great Britain and Hawaii. Recently, scientists have separated these species into two families, the Macropodidae and the Potoroidae, which together form a super-family known as the Macropodoidea (or macropods). The family Macropodidae includes kangaroos, wallabies, wallaroos, pademelons, tree-kangaroos and the forest wallabies of New Guinea. The family Potoroidae is made up of potoroos, rat-kangaroos and bettongs which are only found in Australia.

Kangaroos of all sizes have one thing in common - powerful back legs with long feet. They are distinguished from other animals by the way they hop on these strong back legs. Only a few other small mammals, such as hopping mice, do this.

Hopping uses slightly less energy than four-footed running, but this advantage is lost at low speed. To move slowly, kangaroos balance on their front paws and tail, and then swing their hind legs forward in a pendulum motion.

One of the many odd things about kangaroos is that, on land, they can only move their hind feet together but when