Just like puma and panthers being spotted in Australia and Europe, kangaroos have also been seen not within their original habitat.
Kangaroos have been seen often in the United States since the Mid 1960s. A man had reported a kangaroo on his porch early one morning in Chicago on October 18, 1974. Patrolmen Byrne and Ciagi were astonished to find a 5-foot kangaroo in a dark alley around 3:30 am. Not knowing what else to do, Byrne tried to handcuff it. The animal was not going to go quietly as it started to scream, then Ciagi was kicked in the shins and the kangaroo escaped down the street.
That was not the only sighting in Illinois. A couple of weeks later on November 2, in Plano, Illinois, two separate groups of witnesses reported seeing a kangaroo almost at the exact same time. Within another couple of weeks, sightings have occurred in Lansing, Illinois, and Rensselaer and Carmel, Indiana. Then on November 15, back in Chicago, a kangaroo was seen in a vacant lot. The witness said it was 5-feet tall and “black all over, except for the stomach and face, which were brown.” The last known sighting took place on November 25 in Sheridan, Indiana, when a farmer, Donald Johnson, spotted a kangaroo on a deserted rural road. Johnson stated “It was running on all four feet down the middle of the road.” When it noticed Johnson, it leaped over a barb-wire fence and into the field.
In Wisconsin, 1978, a photograph was taken of a kangaroo. The pictures were admittedly not very good, but clear enough to make out the creature. The kangaroo was first spotted in Waukesha on April 5, 1978. On April 24, there were other sightings at Pewaukee Township, Brookfield Township, and around Waukesha. Near Menomeonee Falls, two men had taken two pictures of a kangaroo and was said that this creature could possibly have been an escapee from a private animal collections or zoo, living wild.
Out-of-place animals, such as kangaroos, are rarely captured and they seem to disappear as mysteriously as they appear. It seems only few citizens see them and it is usually from a distance. However, in May of 1979, a kangaroo seen in Nashua, New Hampshire was caught and found to be a wallaby (an Australian marsupial similar to a kangaroo, but smaller) that had escaped from a carnival that had recently left town.
Other sightings of kangaroos, outside of their habitat, were also seen in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Ontario, Canada; around Morange-Silverange in France, and on the northern border of Hungary.
by Sash Dubronitz
