Pest controllers hop into action over Wellington wallaby mystery

Could there be more Australian marsupials hiding in the capital?

Pest control rangers raced through Wellington's town belt last night hunting wallabies after one ended up dead on a city street yesterday.

None of those rangers think the marsupials live in the native bush that surrounds the city, but the tiny kangaroos eat pasture, seedlings and native bush so they have to take the threat seriously.

Cyclists and runners spotted the dead wallaby in the gutter on Sunday morning.

"Fingers crossed it's somebody taking a dead animal to the tip," said Forest and Bird's Kevin Hackwell.

But when the Department of Conservation and Greater Wellington Regional Council rangers arrived to take the body away, it was gone.

"As they are pest animals we needed to recover the carcass to ID the species and figure out where it has come from," said a DOC spokesperson asking anyone with information to call its Kāpiti office.

Was the wallaby a hunter's spoils that fell off a ute, a clandestine pet, or did it hop out of the bush to meet an untimely demise on the road?

Also looking for answers is Carl Gifford who runs nearby Carlucciland. He said he and his partner had both spotted something odd in the bush recently.

"I couldn't work out what it was," he said.

"It was so quick it was like a giant rat, but it could've been a cat, but it could've been a wallaby too."

When Mr Gifford found out about the dead wallaby down the road, he was on his way again.

"As soon as I heard I thought, 'gosh, I must go up the hill and have a look.'"

"I've been scouting the hill all day and there's been nothing. But you never know there have been a lot of animals released out the back over the years (by hunters mostly): pigs and even deer."

Last night he and his son searched the surrounding hills for those mini-roos, spotting several rabbits but no wallabies.

Equipped with thermal imaging cameras, Regional Council rangers searched for the dead wallaby and any others that are alive. They'll go out again the next two nights to make sure the wallaby wasn't part of a colony.

"They're an absolute disaster in native forests, they go through everything. If you go into native forests you have a situation where you can bend down and it’'ll be [picked] clean at the height of a wallaby's head. All the way through it'll just be eaten out," Mr Hackwell said.

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