A mother kangaroo and her joey hop across Main Street to graze on a scruff of grass growing near a gas pump.
It’s a cool spring evening in White Cliffs, a quirky opal-mining town in New South Wales. Locals live like hobbits here, in ventilated holes. Thousands of mine shafts pock the parched earth. But the two eastern gray kangaroos are the oddest sight around.
“I’ve never seen them in town like this,” says George Wilson, a professorial ecologist who’s been studying kangaroos for five decades. “I wonder if they’re someone’s pets.”
