Wednesday 22 July 2020

The Sign Below,

is not what you would expect to see,


driving through France! if you drive through the forest of Rambouillet, just west of Paris, and happen to see an animal resembling a kangaroo, know that your eyes aren’t playing trick on you, the French forest has been home to up to 150 wallabies for over 40 years, and here is the problem, the wallabies only seem to have one major problem, they keep getting run over by motorist, which is bad enough, but made even worse when the motorist puts in his or her insurance claim! “We probably have about 30 to 40 collisions per year,” Bruno Munilla, from the forestry center in Rambouillet, said. “Not all are deadly but 15 to 20 animals do get killed.” yellow road signs with kangaroo silhouettes on them, similar to the ones in Australia, have been installed on roads passing through Rambouillet, and while many consider them a joke, they really inform motorists to the presence of marsupials in the forest, the chances of spotting wallabies around Rambouillet are highest early in the morning or after sunset, but even then, the animals are only rarely seen,

photograph pen_ash/Pixabay, the colony of red-necked Bennett’s wallabies, (Macropus rufogriseus) living in Rambouillet Forest can be traced back to a small group of animals that were brought into a zoological reserve in the nearby village of Emance, during the 1970s. A few of them escaped through holes in the fencing, and were never retrieved. They’ve been living in the wild for decades and researchers believe that the woods may now be home to around 150 wallabies. The forest provided them with shelter and sustenance, they had no natural predators to fear, and the climate was apparently very similar to that of their native Tasmania, note to insurance companies, there are wallabies in France!


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