Western grey kangaroo

You will meet the western grey kangaroo before you meet any other large native mammal in the Adelaide Hills, and you will likely meet it at the least dramatic moment imaginable: dawn or dusk, a loose mob grazing out of the tree-line onto a paddock, a golf fairway or the mown verge of a reserve car park, entirely unbothered by the road running past them.

It is easy to mistake this for unremarkable — kangaroos grazing a hillside is about as ordinary an Adelaide sight as there is — and that is exactly the point worth pausing on, because almost nothing else this big and this native still turns up so casually.

Macropus fuliginosus, the western grey, is recorded across the southern Mount Lofty Ranges wherever the biological surveys have gone looking, from forest reserve to farmland fringe (Armstrong et al. 2003), grazing grass and low shrubs in mobs that thin out and regroup as the day’s heat and cover demand.

It is tempting to read the kangaroo’s ordinariness as resilience — the one big grazer tough enough to shrug off two centuries of clearing and introduced predators that erased so much smaller company around it.

The truer reading is duller and more interesting: size did the surviving, not toughness.

Fox and cat predation, the twin engines behind the loss of close to thirty of South Australia’s native mammals, worked almost entirely on a mid-sized band of animals light enough to be easy prey and slow enough to breed to keep up (Woinarski et al. 2015); a grazer built on the kangaroo’s scale sat outside that band from the start.

There is an older ground it has lost, all the same.

Before 1836 the whole Adelaide Plains carried open grassy woodland and tussock grassland — kangaroo grass among it — that a grazing marsupial this size was built to range across from the gulf to the range front (Kraehenbuehl 1996).

The plains version of that grazing life is gone with the grassland that fed it, fenced, ploughed and built over; what remains is the hills-and-reserve remnant, the fringe country the plough never quite reached, while the same clearing and fragmentation still working through the ranges’ woodland specialists barely touches this one generalist tenant of the edges (Szabo et al. 2011).

Read a grazing mob on a Hills reserve boundary at dusk, then, as two things at once: a wild native going about ordinary business, and a shrunken, edge-dwelling remnant of a grazing range that once ran the length of the whole gradient this book climbs.

Reading the country

Look for a mob at the tree-line edge of any Adelaide Hills reserve in the first or last hour of daylight — Belair, Cleland and Morialta are reliable — grazing the mown or grassy verge rather than deep forest, since open ground and cover-in-reach is what a kangaroo mob wants.

Fresh sign is easy: cropped, close-grazed grass in patches, and dark, fibrous, barrel-shaped pellet scat scattered along the same verge.

A raised head and a slow thump of a hind foot is the mob’s alarm signal — worth standing still for, since it is the same warning system that has served this animal since long before there was a fence or a fairway to graze beside.