Part Two Natural World

HE CALLS OUT

Up a dirt track, in the heart of the Australian outback

lives a rather unusual family.

Meet Brolga -

a six foot seven Aussie who is mum to a mob of kangaroos.

Some people think I'm a bit of a wacko living out here in the bush,

by myself, looking after kangaroos but I love it.

Brolga built his sanctuary for orphaned kangaroos

with his own blood and sweat.

Sacrificing everything to live an Australian fairy tale.

It's a childhood dream to have a kangaroo.

Now I've got my own mob.

Like being any parent,

life as a kangaroo mum requires round the clock commitment.

In this unruly family there are good days and bad days,

and Brolga never knows what the next day might have in store.

HE CLICKS HIS TONGUE

It's 6:00am - milk time for Brolga's current batch

of baby kangaroo orphans.

They live together in a tin shed,

not far from a town called Alice Springs.

Over the past weeks,

Brolga has been surrogate mum to three orphan red kangaroos...

..Amy,

William

and Daisy.

Just cos I'm a man some people call me a kangaroo dad.

I'm not, I'm a kangaroo mum -

a full-time kangaroo mum

and proud of it.

Having lost their natural mothers,

these babies have been handed a lifeline.

Brolga's dream is to get William, Daisy and Amy

over the trauma of losing their mum

so that, one day,

they can be released back to the wild where they belong.

Together they've been making excellent progress.

But today, a gust of wind spooked the joeys.

In the panic, baby Daisy got caught up in a fence and is badly hurt.

(It's all right. All right.)

HE CLICKS HIS TONGUE

I'm gutted now.

Daisy will have to be 100% fit, as all three of them will be,

to able to survive in the wild and be able to outrun their predators.

If she's not capable of being 100% fit,

she can't go back to the bush -

and that's what I work for, to get the animals back to the bush.

Daisy's sudden injury threatens all the orphaned joeys.

They stand a much better chance of surviving in the wild as a mob

with safety in numbers.

I raise them as a group so they can all go back to the bush together.

I don't want to send two back, not three.

Brolga has reached the limits of what he can do for Daisy,

she needs urgent, expert, help.

So, er, what...

what is the damage?

Look, I'll show you the X-rays

and that's probably the best way to understand

exactly what her injuries are and just where to go to from here.

All right. Is it positive?

Well, I'll talk you through it.

The ankle is such an important joint for a kangaroo.

They're bouncing off it, they're walking on it.

So her having two functional legs is actually really important.

But it looks like this whole joint is completely crumbled together.

-Yeah.

-In addition she has some other injuries.

So, look, she wouldn't be able to ever be released

-with the severity of her injuries.

-Really?

-Um, she's just got so many injuries...

-I know.

..it's, um, unfortunately, stacking against her.

Um, I think the best thing for Daisy would be that we put her to sleep.

-Yeah.

-So um, you know, so she's not going through pain in this joint.

Yeah. Yep.

-Thank you for doing everything you could.

-No worries.

It's been over a decade since Brolga last lost an orphan.

When the vet was talking to me I was thinking, "Well,

"if she can't go back to the bush, she can then stay at my sanctuary."

Then you hear those words of, "She's got to be put to sleep,

"nothing can be done, I'm sorry."

That's where all your plans that you had just come crashing...

Many things go through your mind,

thinking about the two other ones that have... You know,

the three of them bonded together so well that,

I could already see them in my mind

running off into the bush at sunset together.

I look at the baby kangaroos, the orphans that I look after,

with the same respect and love as if they were my own children.

So to get told that one of your children's got to be put to sleep...

..I don't know, it sort of...

HE SIGHS ..it sort of hits you.

Daisy has died, I accept that,

but Amy and William really need me at this time. I am their mum.

It's a job that I've taken on because I love it

and although Daisy has passed,

we will move on, the three of us, together.

It's midsummer. William and Amy are now nine months old

and still on six regular feeds of milk a day.

Despite the loss of Daisy, Brolga is pressing on.

When winter comes, he hopes he will have fully rehabilitated

his orphan joeys and made them fit to be returned to the wild.

But that momentous day is still a very long way off.

Everything Brolga knows about mothering kangaroos

has come from years of observing the females

that live around his shack in the sanctuary.

And to succeed in raising his orphan joeys,

Brolga has to imitate how natural kangaroos raise their young.

In place of a pouch, Brolga uses a pillow case.

Mother kangaroos are one of the best mothers anywhere in the world.

When I look at the kangaroo mum and her baby I take notes.

I'm really looking at it,

seeing how I can be like the kangaroo mum.

I've found I have a much better success rate

if I can give the babies a lot of love,

a lot of nurture when they're very young.

If William and Amy still lived in the wild

with their natural mothers,

now is the time in their life - at nine months of age -

when they'd be venturing out of the pouch

and taking their first steps towards independence.

When the babies come out for a hop,

at the start, it's a slow hop.

And then you can see the excitement in their face almost,

and they do a thing what I call hot-laps.

Hot-laps is when a baby kangaroo realises

that with every spring in his step

he can go faster and faster and faster.

There will come a time however where they realise, "Hey! Where's Mum?"

And they'll come racing back.

Today, Brolga is taking William and Amy out into his sanctuary

for their first early morning run.

What's important for the babies now,

they've got to learn to be like wild animals but they don't have

their natural mother to teach them the ways of the bush.

Taking Amy and William out for a run is good for me and good for them.

They're building up their muscles

and building up the strength in their legs.

The worst thing I can do as a kangaroo mum

is keep the babies in the pouch for far too long.

When I feel they're just getting too relaxed,

that's not what a wild kangaroo's about and I'll decide to run off.

Come on!

'What I'm trying to do is sort of instigate in them

'the follow when someone runs, because

'that's how the kangaroos in the wild survive from the predators.'

When a kangaroo runs, it stamps its feet - bang-bang, bang-bang! -

into the earth and that sends off like a sound wave through the bush.

'That's their warning call when there's danger.

'So when mum runs, you run.

'Sometimes the ones following the leader

'don't know why they're running but it's instinct.'

Come on, keep up. Come on.

Training Amy and William to react to danger is a serious business

because in a few months, when they leave Brolga's care,

the orphans will need to be able to run for their lives.

When you watch a kangaroo hop,

when you really watch...

..you see they touch the ground for just a split second -

then they're off, flying through the air.

Inside a kangaroo's legs are tendons that,

like springs in a pogo stick,

store energy that's released with every bounce.

Kangaroos can speed across the outback as fast as a racehorse,

each giant stride up to eight metres in length.

They can keep going like this for hour after hour

in search of the next water hole.

Amy and William are beginning to hone their wild kangaroo instincts,

building up their agility and strength,

which also means a lot of jogging for Brolga.

He's devoting everything to be the kangaroo mother

that Amy and William have lost.

But he can't raise them on his own.

Soon he's going to need the help of other kangaroos.

Fortunately for William and Amy,

over the years Brolga has developed an extraordinary relationship

with a mob of kangaroos,

who, like an extended family, live alongside him in his sanctuary.

Many of their mothers were killed on the desert highway.

I make every possible effort to get an orphan back to the bush,

where it should belong, so it can be wild.

These kangaroos out here couldn't go back to the bush however.

HE CALLS OUT

Until now, or very recently,

any kangaroo that was raised by a carer in this part of the outback

would have to be destroyed if it couldn't be released.

That's the law.

I just couldn't let that happen,

so that's why I built my own nature reserve.

Kangaroos that would otherwise have been destroyed,

because they're not fit enough to go back to the bush,

can now have a home at my kangaroo sanctuary.

Out here is an area where they can live out their lives

as a wild animal, yet, hidden in the distance way, way, way, away

is a fence to keep out the dingoes.

If I allowed dingoes to get in here, they'd slaughter the kangaroos.

I can't have that.

These kangaroos are my family,

they are my children.

Amy and William are now ten months old

and they're outgrowing Brolga's shack.

In a few weeks' time, he's going to take them out into the sanctuary,

where the mob will teach them what Brolga can't -

how to become a kangaroo.

Mixing with the mob will be a key stepping stone

on their journey back to the wild.

When William is introduced to the mob, he'll have to meet Roger.

Roger is the head of the mob, and as alpha male,

no-one in their right mind dares to mess with him.

One day, William will grow to be Roger's size -

over six foot tall and 80 kilos of pure Australian muscle.

When Brolga rescued Roger six years ago

he was a hairless little orphan, even smaller than William.

How that's changed!

And now, Brolga has to contend with him every day on his rounds.

I'm playing ring a ring o' rosie around this tree with Roger.

Make no doubt about it, Roger's mad as a cut snake.

He sort of goes into this mentality of "I just want to kill yer!"

He's trying to drive me out of the territory

cos he confuses me with another rival male.

Roger really lives up to his name.

Since he's taken the throne as king of the mob,

he's sired 15 joeys with his harem of 8 females.

His youngest son is called Nigel.

A couple of months ago, he was a tiny pinky -

just a couple of inches long.

While Roger is otherwise occupied,

it's safe for Brolga to get close to Nigel's mother, Ella,

and sneak another peek inside her pouch.

He's keen to see how Nigel is getting on.

The joey Nigel is really coming on now.

I can now see eyes opening for the first time.

And that baby is now looking back at me for the first time.

I can see a little bit of hair just starting to come on the baby's body.

The toenails and the hands are fully developed.

You can see the pads on the baby's feet,

like an athlete's running shoe.

Since he was born,

Nigel's mouth has been permanently fused with his mother's nipple,

constantly sucking on this lifeline of Ella's nutrient-rich milk.

As that baby has been attached to that nipple

for the last few months without letting go,

that nipple has stretched and stretched and stretched,

and today it'd be about the size of my little finger.

Well after joeys have left the pouch,

up to a year after their birth,

they continue to feed from their mother's teat.

That's a lot of milk,

and kangaroos produce it all from this arid and prickly environment.

William and Amy need constant feeding as well.

They are growing up fast and really putting on weight.

But Brolga can't make milk from the desert,

so it's off on a road trip to town for the young family.

William and Amy are still too young to be left at home alone

but they seem to love these outings,

transfixed by strange sights and smells.

# When I'm with you baby I go out of my head

# I just can't get enough

# I just can't get enough

# All the things you do to me and everything you said

# I just can't get enough

# I just can't get enough... #

-Very cute joeys you have in your trolley.

-Yeah, thanks.

-How old are they?

-They're about six, seven months.

Little William and Amy - these are my kids.

SHE GIGGLES

-I hope they behave for you.

-Yes!

-And that's yours.

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

-See you later.

See ya!

Like all marsupials, William and Amy are lactose intolerant.

Every day, orphans can drink up to eight bottles of formula milk.

And what goes in, quickly comes out.

Watching a kangaroo mum and the baby,

mum's always sticking her head in the pouch.

What she's doing is she's actually taking the baby to the toilet.

She actually licks the baby's genitals

and that stimulates the baby to go to the toilet.

Mum then collects that on her tongue and then she swallows it.

This is one of the jobs that's very important that I do.

Of course...

not like that.

As Brolga can't use his tongue like natural mums do,

he has to provide gentle encouragement

to stimulate them to go to the toilet.

This is not to everyone's taste, but someone's got to do it.

Good little Amy.

The orphans quickly get the hang of toilet training,

growing more confident by the day,

until they can eventually do it by themselves.

BROLGA CALLS

To his relief, Brolga can finally take a break

from tickling kangaroo genitals

and spend more time with the mob out in his sanctuary.

I've lived out bush a lot of my adult life now, often by myself,

although I don't feel by myself,

because I've got my family of kangaroos with me.

I do look forward to settling down one day,

meeting a nice girl...

..and potentially having a human family.

There has been times I've thought I'd met the right girl

and they can't commit to what I have to commit to.

Your partner's going to have to learn to give up a fair bit of sleep.

It's a lot of me getting up through the middle of the night,

feeding joeys.

There's no luxuries, power or toilet.

It's not everyone's cup of tea.

That doesn't bother me.

You can't have everything, it's a bit of a trade-off.

This is much more important, this is adventure,

and...adventure is what I want.

I want to be able to wake up in the morning

and look out the window and see the kangaroos hopping around

and look at the relationship a joey has with his mum.

And at the same time, a flock of a thousand budgies,

beautiful green parrots, fly over my head.

If I was living in the city, what would I see?

Cars, concrete, traffic.

I had that as a kid.

I wanted to escape that and I have.

So, who knows? I think I'd make a good mum.

I think I'd make a good dad, I should say.

HE CLICKS HIS TONGUE

William and Amy are growing fast, as is their confidence.

Brolga is focusing on the bittersweet task

of distancing himself from his babies.

Recently, he's started weaning them off milk.

Each day Brolga is giving them less and less,

like mum would in the wild.

And he's feeding them from a bowl, not a bottle,

so that he can start gently stepping back from their lives.

No more bottles, right?

Something new, look.

HE CLICKS HIS TONGUE

When you meet big kangaroos, take it really carefully.

As Brolga gradually withdraws their milk,

the joeys will start adjusting to a diet of leaves, grasses and roots.

Brolga is also leaving Amy and William alone

in each other's company for longer,

to build their sense of independence.

Amy and William are growing up

and they're not little babies any more.

They're not wholly dependent on me.

They don't want to be holding mum's hand 24 hours a day.

They want to come out here, they want to explore the place.

They don't know what they can eat and what they can't eat,

so they're going up to different plants and trying.

You'll watch them follow a lizard or a beetle

and they're almost looking at it, "Can I eat that?"

I'm saying, "Well, not really,

"you're supposed to just be a herbivore."

Near Brolga's shack in the sanctuary,

we find Ella and her baby, Nigel,

who has now reached a critical point in his development.

His mouth has separated from his mother's nipple,

and like a jack-in-the-box,

he's able to take his first peep out the window of mum's pouch.

Soon, Nigel's gawping at everything,

including a train of processionary caterpillars going walkabout.

It's dusk and, by pure chance,

Brolga witnesses a heart-stopping moment -

something even he's never seen before.

Nigel has fallen out of his mum's pouch much earlier than normal.

Almost hairless, he's extremely vulnerable

to the sub-zero temperatures of desert nights.

If he stays out for too long he'll die.

And what's more, Ella is incapable of putting him back into her pouch.

This is an incredible moment now.

This is the first time he's actually used his legs.

Before that, it was something attached to him

and it was sort of slung up above his head.

All Nigel really wants to do is get back in mum's pouch,

the only security he's ever known.

Brolga's aware that Nigel is losing heat fast.

He needs to get back into his mum's pouch quickly.

Fortunately, and not a moment too soon,

instinct guides Nigel back into warmth and safety.

It's been a cold baptism for Nigel

but at least he's had his first taste of life among the mob.

When Brolga releases William and Amy to the outback

in a couple of months' time,

he hopes that they will also be welcomed to join a mob.

But for this to stand a chance,

the orphans must first learn the secrets

of how to live among kangaroos.

Tonight is the last night

that William and Amy will spend inside with me.

It's the last night they get to cuddle up to each other

in their little pillow cases.

There'll be no more getting up for midnight feeds

and getting up through the night.

The hardest part is letting go.

The more you pick them up and hold them, and cuddle them,

that's for you, that's not for them.

Now's that time to break that.

Hello.

Hello!

It's time for Amy and William to face their biggest challenge yet...

It's time to come out and meet the older ones.

..to meet the kangaroos that live out in Brolga's sanctuary.

The girls are going to look after you today.

They've never seen big kangaroos before, so you can see in them,

it's like, "What's this?

"Is that what we are?"

They know there's some connection there.

You can see the wild kangaroos also looking at them thinking,

"Where's your mother?"

William is immediately inquisitive.

They'll have to learn that there's a hierarchy in place,

and they're way down the bottom.

The mob is taking over from Brolga

and it's now the kangaroos' turn to get the orphans ready for release.

Amy and William need to soak up as much kangaroo culture as possible.

William is learning about life in the kangaroo male hierarchy,

which is held together by a daily routine

of mostly harmless play-fighting.

But sometimes these fights get serious

and a large buck like the alpha male, Roger,

could easily kill William if he doesn't learn his place in the mob.

William will have to try and find a mate some day.

And it isn't long before he gets a valuable lesson.

Being head of the mob like Roger

isn't necessarily the only route to love.

While Roger's taking it easy, a rival male called Monty

uses the opportunity to make his move.

This is very risky business because Monty's a lot smaller than Roger

and wouldn't stand a chance if he was challenged

to a bout of kick boxing.

But with Roger still resting in the shade,

blissfully unaware, Monty can't resist temptation.

He seems to be getting away with it,

until Roger clocks what's going on.

The game's up.

Monty will have to postpone

his attempt to find love for another day.

But just as Roger thinks he's dealt with his rivals,

another male steals a quick mating.

It's a valuable lesson for William.

He's unlikely to grow up to be the biggest of kangaroos,

but perhaps he can be one of the sneakiest instead.

Meanwhile, Amy's been spending a lot of time with the mother kangaroos,

learning her place in the mob as well.

In less than a year's time, she'll be old enough to mate

and raise her own joey.

As the orphans have been learning the laws of the outback,

Brolga has been keeping an eye on the mob

and he's noticed something unusual.

Something that Amy will one day have to learn about.

I have a kangaroo out in the bush called Zoe.

I'm feeling a little bit confident

that she could be about to give birth.

There's no sign by just looking at them that they're pregnant.

There's no swollen belly, like you would see with other mammals.

It's the behaviour of the kangaroo that changes.

The female kangaroo starts cleaning her pouch.

Just one or two minutes every hour.

And then, over the next hour,

a little bit more until just before birth

she will be cleaning that pouch - almost obsessively cleaning it.

And she is preparing the nursery for the newborn.

This is what Zoe is starting to do now.

And she's starting to sit on her bottom

with her tail between her legs, which is the birthing position.

By nightfall, Zoe has become increasingly uncomfortable,

constantly shifting position

and obsessively licking the fur around her pouch.

Suddenly, blood.

We catch a glimpse of a tiny pink thing,

the size of a jelly bean,

crawling up her belly towards her pouch.

This is her baby.

If it falls off now, it will die.

But Zoe, a first-time mum,

doesn't even appear to know what's happening.

She licks at the blood on her tail,

removing all trace that she's given birth.

Finally, one last fleeting view

before the new born foetus disappears.

Zoe leaves her hole and there's no sign of the baby on her fur.

He's safe inside.

In just 90 seconds, this tiny baby has climbed up into her pouch,

guided here by a hard-wired sense to follow the scent of milk.

Now he'll grow fast.

His mouth will fuse to the teat

and the teat will swell to fill his throat.

Mother and baby are one once more.

Winter's come to the outback.

Out in the sanctuary,

Amy and William have grown warm, shaggy coats.

They're now 14 months of age, and the perfect size for release.

They've formed a close bond,

which means the pair will hopefully stick together

when Brolga returns them to the wild.

William should be allowed to join a mob of wild kangaroos

because he's too small to be classed as competition.

And Amy will definitely be accepted because she's a female

and soon to be of mating age.

Over the past few weeks, Brolga's been looking

for a suitable new site to release his orphans.

I've been looking for a good spot to release them.

I need a spot that's away from people,

and particularly away from hunting.

I've found a really good spot.

There's lots of wildlife out here.

It means there must be water.

I've seen a lot of kangaroo tracks.

You sort of feel it in your heart, this is the right spot.

To get to the point where we can put little rescued joeys

back into the bush, way out in the outback, is why I do this.

Beautiful country out here, really remote.

And I'm really looking forward to setting them free.

THUNDER RUMBLES

The first rain in months and what Brolga's been hoping for.

These precious drops will make the land green and fertile,

giving Amy and William the best possible start

for their new life in the outback.

It's now time for them to go back into the outback

and have a life that they were born to have, that's to be wild.

That will make all the hard work worthwhile.

This is the end of an astonishing journey for William and Amy.

The culmination of over eight months' tireless dedication

from their surrogate mother, Brolga.

They've come a long way from the tiny defenceless orphans

he nursed back to health.

Now they're ready to inherit the life they came so close to losing.

I often feel I might be sad,

but when I get out here into the outback...

..no barriers, no fences, no highway,

this is the wild, this is the life they should have had at the start.

Just freedom.

Brolga's mob is finally back where they belong.

This will be his last sight of his babies.

Now they are in charge of their destiny

and they've got the whole continent to explore.

I'd imagine, like for any mother, the hardest part is letting go.

I'm a bit emotionally torn.

I want to give them their independence.

It's for the best for them.

Yet, then there's my heart and the way I feel that, you know,

they won't be with me any more.

I see myself in a way as a kangaroo of the bush.

I take the human form in my body but my spirit is a kangaroo.

I don't care about money, I don't care about possessions.

What's important is the kangaroos at the sanctuary stay safe,

and the sanctuary will hopefully live a lot longer than I'll live,

it's got to be a legacy,

a place that stands up for the welfare of the kangaroo.

Brolga's back again with his old mate Ella,

only to discover that her pouch is hiding a new arrival.

This is Ella's latest baby and Brolga has decided to call him

Terry.

Just like Ella's pouch, Brolga's shack is never empty for long.

And sure enough, only a few days after setting Amy and William free,

Brolga has been handed another orphan joey to look after.

Little Elizabeth here, she's a bundle of joy.

You could say a kangaroo mum's work is never done...

and, er, here I go again.