What the Heck Are Wallabies Doing in Ireland?
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-heck-are-wallabies-doing-ireland-180953304/?utm_source=feedburner&no-ist
Normally spotted in Australia, the marsupial species is thriving on a remote island off the Irish coast...At first glance, the sighting of a wallaby emerging from a cool fog off the Irish Sea doesn’t seem real. The steep, rocky cliffs and the wet Irish weather are far from the usual depictions of the Australian brush, about 9,000 miles away. The conditions on Lambay, however, have proven to be almost perfect for the wallabies. The cliffs around the perimeter—and the rocky ground nearby—are a fair substitute for wallabies’ natural environment in Australia, where they favor rugged terrain. The 600-acre island sits three miles off the eastern coast of Ireland, offering isolation that seems to suit the shy wallabies. They are much less aggressive than their well-known counterpart, the kangaroo, and Lambay is a private island with few visitors to disrupt or threaten them.
The one condition on the island that might give someone pause is the temperature. On Lambay, the warmest days of the year are often in the 60-degree range, while the coldest days can dip into the low 40s. By contrast, Australia's island state of Tasmania, where wallabies usually abound, enjoys heat in the 80s and above in summer. Only the coolest parts of the state near the coast and in the highlands see temperatures as low as the 30s and 40s. “They don’t really do well with cold,” says wallaby expert Kevin Drees, director of animal care and conservation at the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines, Iowa. To help them handle the Irish winter, the Lambay wallabies grow dense coats of fur.
The island first became home to a bunch of wallabies during the 1950s and 1960s when the Barings, a well-known banking family that has owned the island since 1904, decided to raise them. There are rumors that Cecil Baring, the original purchaser of the island, introduced a number of species including tortoises and lizards, but none of them survived. His son Rupert had dreams of opening a zoo on Lambay, but his plans never came to fruition.
Peter Wilson was director of the Dublin Zoo in the mid-1980s when its wallaby population expanded rapidly. Their enclosure was too small to house all of them, and Wilson had a difficult time finding the excess wallabies a new home. A wildlife park near Cork in southern Ireland took a few, but no other zoo would take the rest. Wilson said he was sure Australia would not want them back either. Not wanting to euthanize the animals if he could find them a home, Wilson turned to the Baring family, whose private island was an ideal choice with its extant population of the species. Bringing new wallabies to the island would even help the older mob survive by adding new genes to the pool...
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