woj.blog

Hooping around

I’ve just realized that not all of you guys speak or at least understand polish ! I have no idea how you can live without that but OK. No worries ( I’m learning Australian expressions ! ) whole blog will be in 3 languages so I hope everybody can find something interesting here.

When I thought about Australia there were few typical things which always were coming on my mind. If you think about the city – Sydney. Half of Europeans even think that it’s a capital. If you’re Rock’n’Roll freak Australia for you is one big High Way To Hell where Hell’s Bells are ringing, Rosie is fat and each Angus is a little crazy bastard who has his brother Malcolm always by his side. If you thing about the nature- then depends or you see all those little and big things which can bite U, eat U or sometimes even kill U, or koala bears, wombats and…

…Well and what about kangaroos ? It’s symbol of this country, isn’t It ? What If not the legendary road sign “kangaroo crossing” is the most typical of the typical things form this big island ?

I don’t know what you guys think about that but for me this strange animal was one of the most important point of my trip, I really wanted to see it by my own eyes in their natural environment.

And I didn’t think that it’s that easy ! I Poland know many of people who live in the city, for example,  almost have no idea how deer looks like. There are quite a lot of them but you need a little bit of luck to see them. 

Well those huge jumping rats are way more easy to spot. THERE ARE EVERYWHERE ! In my first hours in this country, going by train from Sydney to Dubbo I saw few of them. And later around Enza stations almost every day. They a part of the landscape.

As I told you here are a lot of them. Well in fact there are TO MANY. And Australians don’t like them at all.

In the past, before White Man came to this land ridding wooden horses which can fly over the seas and oceans water was limiting population of kangaroos ( and not only them ). As long as they don’t have a lot of natural enemies amount of those animals depended of food and water. Later after the colonization of this lands people created infrastructure to feed huge amounts of sheep and cows . To obtain that they built all those things that animals need to have something to drink.  Of course wild animals didn’t wait for the invitation and since then their population grew.

But where is the problem ? Well the main thing is that the kangaroos still didn’t get what the highways and the cars are. 

Can you imagine what happens if you drive 110 km/h and you hit kangaroo because it suddenly appears on the road ? Yes, now you know why locals don’t like them. This kind of accidents happens quite often, and it’s very dangerous not only for the kangaroo…

OK but how they look like ? First what came on my mind was – huge rat ! With their long tails, funny ears and cute noses they really look like a mouse just a bit bigger. Significantly bigger. They can be 2m tall and weight 90kg ! Their powerful back legs allow them to move by hooping very fast. They feel very comfortable running 25-30 km/h. On short distance they can reach 70km/s but if they slow down to 40 km/h they can keep jumping 2 km with this speed ! It makes kangaroos very hard to catch and if we add to this the size of this mammal it explains why they don’t have a lot of problems with predators as long as they don’t have fast 4x4 cars and rifles.

Usually we can meet them on the grasslands easy going, eating grass or just lying and sunbathing. They live in small groups or alone. They are quite shy and it’s difficult to come closer than 200-300m. It makes photography of those guys quite difficult and I’ll have to prepare me way better to get some nice pictures. This what U can see here in this post is absolutely maximum what I could get with 300mm lens with a lot of luck and hiding almost like a green berets guy during the war. I hope to show you more much better ones soon !