Squashed bugs on your windscreen and roadkill strewn along the highway used to be familiar sights during any road trip on mainland Australia.
But after driving from Sydney to Victoria’s south via the coast and back up through the Princess Highway over the summer holidays, my windscreen was clean and apart from a 70km stretch in NSW between Yass and Goulburn, there were few roos, wombats, or possums dead or alive to be seen.
You can’t always be guaranteed to see live animals — that’s always dependent on the weather and time of day. Roadkill was sad to witness, but it was seen as a rough guide to the abundance of wildlife in the area.
I’m not saying kangaroos have vanished from everywhere — after I posted about the lack of road kill to X, formerly Twitter, many people around Queensland reported seeing them in abundance, and the same can be said of parts of Western Australia.
But during my regular road trips out of Sydney over the last 15 years, I’ve noticed wildlife has disappeared from the major roads down to Melbourne.
Why did NSW kangaroo populations drop by 2.2 million?
A couple of days after I returned home to Sydney, the NSW government released its modelling on how many commercially targeted kangaroos and wallaroos live across the state. It found the number had dropped by over 2.2 million, attributing the decline from 11.88 million to 9.63 million “in part” to “environmental and climatic factors”.
“Flooding may have impacted populations indirectly – by impacting the availability of vegetation in some areas – and directly – some animals may have died,” it added.
While the official NSW response did not touch upon the impact of sprawling new housing developments, or culling and harvesting, some wildlife advocates believe these issues pose a problem.
