Wallabies are native to Australia but a surprising number of the nimble marsupials have been spotted some 10,000 miles away in England.
Researchers hoping to study the creatures analysed reports across the country, uncovering nearly 100 confirmed sightings in about a decade.
Most of the sightings were in southern England and happened in the month of August.
Wild wallaby colonies were first established in Great Britain in the early 1990s.
Wild wallaby colonies were first established in Great Britain in the early 1990s
They are canny escape artists and frequently break out of zoos, petting farms and other attractions.
Also known as Bennett’s wallaby or by its Latin name, macropus rufogriseus, the red-neck wallaby calls eastern Australia home, including Tasmania.
About the size of a dog, they have a gray coat with a reddish tinge across the shoulders.
Like their cousin the kangaroo, wallabies travel by hopping and carry their young in a pouch.
Colonies of wallabies were first established in England in 1900, predominantly in the Peak District, Derbyshire, and East Sussex.
During the Second World War, many wallabies were intentionally released into the wild, as zookeepers knew they would no longer be able to care for them.
Wallaby sightings were found to be most prevalent in August, although experts are not certain why. It’s possible that it is just when more humans are outside to notice them
‘There hasn’t been a great deal of attention given to wallabies in the UK, despite fairly regular sightings reported in local media,’ said Anthony Caravaggi, a professor of conservation biology at the University of South Wales.
Mr Caravaggi says most people who encounter a wallaby assume it’s escaped from a zoo or they simply refuse to believe they’re actually looking at a wallaby.
Working with Holly English, a PhD candidate in ecology at University College Dublin, he pored over public records, media reports and social media postings to get an accurate count of red-neck wallabies sightings across the UK.
They identified 99 confirmed sightings between 2008 and 2019, according to their report in the journal Ecology and Evolution, mostly in the south of England. Chiltern Hills, northwest of London, was home to 11 of the sightings.