Reading coastal wildlife on foot

A grey kangaroo stands tall and upright, with a small head, long ears and a heavy tail that rests on the ground as a third support. A wallaby holds its body lower and more hunched, with a proportionally larger head, shorter ears and a tail that usually clears the ground. On a trail the difference is read at the silhouette first, then confirmed by size and by the way the animal moves away.

How can I tell a grey kangaroo from a wallaby on a trail?

Distance is the least reliable measure, because a young kangaroo and a large wallaby overlap. Work from proportions instead. The grey kangaroo, the eastern grey in particular, carries its weight forward over long hind legs and a long, thick tail; the head is small against the body and the muzzle is fine. A wallaby, whether swamp or red-necked, sits with the shoulders high and the back rounded, the head large against a compact body, the ears broad and rounded rather than long and pointed.

Watch the tail. A grazing kangaroo often lets the tail lie along the ground behind it, using it as a prop when it leans forward. A wallaby feeding on a track tends to keep the tail clear of the ground, curved or tucked. Watch the gait as well. Both bound, but a wallaby moving quietly through scrub pushes through rather than over, and its hop is shorter and more upright.

Habitat separates them further. Wallabies favour dense cover, bracken, gully edges and the margins of tracks where they can slip back into shade. Grey kangaroos prefer open grass, clearings and the edges of pasture, and they are the animals most often seen standing in the middle of a fire trail at dusk. If the animal is in the open, large and slow to move, it is probably a kangaroo. If it is at the edge of scrub, compact and quick to break cover, it is probably a wallaby. A fuller account of kangaroo wallaby differences is worth reading before a first walk, because the two are regularly confused at range.

How do I recognise wombat burrows, droppings and koala signs?

Wombat sign is mostly ground sign. A burrow appears as a rounded tunnel mouth, often wider than it is high, cut into a bank, a slope or the side of a drainage line. The entrance is usually clear of leaf litter, because the animal keeps it swept, and there is frequently a worn pad or a shallow trench leading in. Look for scratch marks on the lip of the tunnel and for loose soil pushed out to one side. Burrows cluster: one bank may hold several entrances within a few metres, some in use and some old.

Droppings are the simplest confirmation. Wombat scats are distinctive: short, blunt, roughly cubical, dark and firm, deposited in loose piles or scattered along a pad. They are unlike the round pellets of a kangaroo or the cylindrical scats of a koala. Freshness is easy to judge, since a recent deposit is dark and moist and an old one is dry and pale.

Koala sign is read on trees. Scratch marks on the trunk, two parallel scores from the climbing claws, run vertically up smooth bark. Look for a resting fork high in a eucalypt, where the animal sits wedged between two limbs, and for a ring of pale staining or a scatter of droppings at the base of a preferred tree. Koala scats are small, firm and cylindrical, often with a slight taper, and they collect in a patch under a regular resting tree rather than being spread along a track. A tree with both scratch marks and a scatter of scats beneath it is worth standing still beside for ten minutes.

Which calls and colours identify kookaburras, rosellas and black cockatoos?

The kookaburra is heard before it is seen. Its call is a loud, deliberate laugh, a run of short notes rising and falling, often answered by a second bird and repeated at dawn and again in the late afternoon. The bird itself is stocky and pale, brown above and whitish below, with a heavy straight bill and a dark band through the eye. It sits upright on a dead branch, watching the ground, and drops onto prey rather than chasing it through the air.

Rosellas are identified by colour pattern rather than by a single colour. The eastern rosella shows a red head and breast, white cheek patches, a yellow-green back and a blue shoulder and tail, and it feeds quietly on the ground or in low seed heads. The crimson rosella is deep red with blue cheeks, wings and tail, and it is more often heard in forest than seen in the open. Both give a sharp, rolling two or three note whistle, often in flight.

Black cockatoos are the largest and the most audible. The yellow-tailed black cockatoo is dark brown-black with a pale yellow cheek patch and a yellow band across the tail, and its call is a drawn-out, wailing cry, slow and carrying, quite unlike the chatter of the white cockatoos. The glossy black cockatoo of the coast is smaller and darker, with a red or orange tail band in the male, and it is tied to she-oak stands, where it feeds quietly on cones. Listen for the wail before looking up; black cockatoos usually call in flight and often in loose groups.

Reading a trail in the first hour

Read the ground in bands. Look ahead for shape and movement, then down for scats, pads and scratch marks, then up into the canopy for resting forks and bark scores. A single pass rarely gives everything; the same hundred metres walked twice, once at ground level and once with the eyes lifted, gives two different readings.

Keep distance. Coastal wildlife is habituated to people in some places and not in others, and the difference is not always obvious. A kangaroo that holds its ground is not an invitation to approach. Watch for the animal that stops feeding and watches back: that is the point to stand still, or to move away along the track rather than towards it.

What to carry and what to leave

A notebook and a pencil are more useful than a long lens for this kind of reading. Note the time, the light, the substrate and the sign, and the pattern of a place begins to appear over a season. Binoculars close the distance without disturbing anything. A torch is worth having for burrow mouths under dense cover, and a tide table is worth having on any coastal walk, since the intertidal edge is where a great deal of sign is left and then erased twice a day.

Leave the sign where it lies. Scats, scratch marks and burrow lips are the record of an animal's routine, and moving them removes the information for the next walker and for anyone surveying the area. Photograph instead, with something in the frame for scale: a boot, a hand, a coin. The photograph is the note that survives.

Where the reading leads

Field reading is a habit rather than a technique. The walker who can separate a wallaby from a kangaroo at forty metres, who knows a wombat burrow by its swept mouth and a koala tree by its scored bark, and who can name a black cockatoo from its wail before it comes into view, is reading the same landscape three times over: ground, tree and air. Each layer answers a different question, and together they describe how the coast is used through the day and through the year.

Walking a shore teaches the eye to read water, weed and wing, and the same habit carries inland to rivers. The River Moy in County Mayo holds salmon and trout, and its beats and the Ridge Pool are described in a neighbouring page on this site, salmon and trout on the Moy. The shift is one of pace rather than subject: on the coast the tide sets the schedule, while on a river the reading is of flow, pool and lie. Both reward the observer who arrives early, stands still, and lets the water show what it holds before reaching for a rod or a camera.

A dog on the coast path changes what is seen and what is missed. A Whippet will hold a line of scent along the dune edge; a Beagle will follow it into the marram and lose the walker entirely. Breed, exercise needs and recall are practical questions before any lead is clipped on, and the paperwork matters as much as the temperament: health tests, pedigree, and the cost of a dog across its whole life. The field-craft notes on choosing a breed and its documentation set out what those records actually mean for a Basenji, a German Pinscher, a Whippet or a Beagle.

Wildlife seen from the tideline is only half the record. The other half is knowing what should be there, in which season, and on which substrate, so that a blank stretch of sand reads as information rather than failure. Published guidance helps here: the NSW wildlife notes set out species, habitats and seasonal behaviour for one coastal region in plain, checkable detail. Read alongside a British shore, they sharpen the eye for what a given tide, substrate and month can reasonably offer, and they make a useful comparison for anyone keeping field notes on foot.