Feral wallabies are bouncing around Britain

You might not think of rainy, temperate Britain as a good habitat for a southern hemisphere marsupial native to Tasmania.

But Holly English and Andrew Caravaggi, authors of a new paper published in Ecology and Evolution, said that Britain’s climate is actually quite similar to their native range, and they survive on a diet of shrubs, weeds, and grass, which grow everywhere.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, animal-lovers imported wallabies for zoos and private ownership.

Some wallabies escaped, while others were released during World War II, as their owners had other more pressing matters to attend to, the researchers found.

But experts aren’t sure just how many wallabies are running around Britain.

So English and Caravaggi combed through media reports and public research depositories. They even created a website for people to record sightings.

The reports were generally positive, English said. People “quite like having this weird animal coming to visit the garden,” she told Inverse.

Between 2008 and 2018, the researchers confirmed 95 sightings, mostly in southern England.

Hot spots cropped up: The Chiltern Hills to the west of London and Cornwall in the south.

“They're clearly not that bothered by hopping through someone's garden or Highgate Cemetery in London, or across a motorway, you know,” Caravaggi told Inverse.

The researchers would love to research the population more closely to find out what long-term influence the wallabies will have on Britain’s ecosystems.