If you are not Australian you probably think Kangaroos are everywhere down here, like a squirrels or pigeons, just hanging around the streets looking all kangaroo-ey.
But this isn't the case, at least not in the cities, you do need to go out of your way to see them. They will be on the outskirts in farming land, parks, sometimes golf courses, basically they don't like humans much, and they generally speaking eat grass and leaves so they don't need to interact with us much, they don't need to go through our bins for food, and they generally aren't a menace, unless you are a farmer who would prefer that your animals eat that grass not the wild kangaroos or you are a car that they bound in front of, but really that feels like a human problem not a Kangaroo problem.
I quite like kangaroos, there is something about them that amuses me, they always seem to be up to no good, there is a look on them when you spot them of 'what? I'm not even here." because they have always, always spotted you first.
The Kangaroos you get in our part of Australia are Eastern Greys, because well I live on the East coast and they are grey. They are grey because it camouflages them against the silver gum trees what we have around these parts.
In the Outback, or the Red Centre - which is probably the other view you have of Australia they are Red Kangaroos (it's not complicated is it) which are much bigger.
These photos are taken in Woodland Historic Park (just near Melbourne Airport), which has a 'Forest' part of the park, except as Australian's we would likely just call it bushland, and it's so evident how good they blend in.
Their first instinct is not to hop away, rather it's stare at you to see if you are going to do anything to them. If they consider you harmless they will go back to doing what they were doing, generally eating to scratching themselves. It's really only when you take your eyes of them that they hop away.
Anyway that was my day of chasing kangaroos. In what some might consider a deep irony or maybe deeply offensive, I'm now going to go eat some Kangaroo meat for dinner.
Eating Kangaroo is not that common in Australia, but also it's not that rare either. Kanga meat is being positioned as both Healthy (it has almost no fat being a wild animal that hops a lot) and environmentally friendly, as Kangaroos are not farmed (and aren't rare so populations do need to be controlled in certain areas) and there light bounding across the plains mean they don't damage the ground like a hoofed animal would.
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