How did that ‘roo get stuck in that grate? Regardless, what a nice act to extricate it! But I’d hope we’d all give it a try.
https://twitter.com/Koksalakn/status/836328778464899072
h/t: Barry
Kangaroo rescue
March 4, 2017 • 3:15 pm
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Well handled.
I guess the grates covering the storm drain – far to wide. Lots of things could get stuck or fall through, never to be seen again.
I’m pretty sure those were cattle (sheep?) guards. I’ve seen them in Texas.
You run a fence to the edge of the road on both sides. Cattle guards on the road. Livestock won’t cross them (because they are too wide, as you noted) and you can dispense with a gate. Works for people, works for livestock, apparently doesn’t work so well for roos.
Note to self: read a few more comments first. Other commenters were already on it.
It is a cattle grate. This one looks like it is incorporated in a culvert over a seasonal creek or a storm run-off gully. This is pretty common in parts of Australia. It’s a cheapish way to cover a culvert, reduces the numbers of cattle wandering on the road, getting squished by road-trains, and also from trashing cars and their contents. Even so, collisions between cattle and cars kill far more people than all our more famous dangerous animals combined.
Usually pretty roo friendly too. They normally just hop over them. It’s a mystery to me how this one got so thoroughly stuck. If it had managed to fall through it could have just hopped off down the culvert, and escaped.
Near Voi in Kenya there is an elephant grid across the access road to Tsavo East National Park: a bit bigger that the one shown here.
In some hill farming regions of England there are sheep grids. Unfortunately, in one place, the sheep learned to cross it by rolling over it. When I only had horizontal wire fencing around my garden, sheep got through it by a similar technique.
What ratabago and Newish Gnu said. We call them cattle stops in NZ and they’re everywhere. It’s a way of keeping a road open because cattle/sheep/deer/goats (whatever you’re farming can’t get across them, but people can walk or drive across them. They’re either a type of bridge across a drain or stream/creek/river etc or sometimes just a big hole in a gap in the fence.
The gaps between the metal bars are too big for animals to walk across like a human would. The bars are slightly or completely rounded so animals can’t stand on the bars individually.
Kangaroos learn not to try, but that’s a young one and may never have been taught.
The bars are usually either steel water pipes or old railway rails – usually the latter, because they’re (a) relatively cheap and (b) strong enough as beams to not bend when a truck goes over them. The rails are also a little more comfortable to walk over for a human than round water pipes are.
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Yeah. Most are old rails. It’s rare to find one where the metal bars are completely round. They’re not very practical. Farm d*gs can negotiate old rails easily enough, but not the round ones and have to be carried across. And, as you say, the round ones hurt your feet and it’s easy to slip if you’re not careful when you’re a kid.
I don’t know about Texan ones, but in the UK, for cattle grids on public roads, there should be a gate on the metalled road beside it, so that horses and carts, horseback persons, and farmers deliberately moving a herd of dumb herbivores can get their beasts along the road.
Even in sheepish areas, the maps call them “cattle grids”.
The roo probably dropped his mobile phone through the grate and was trying to retrieve it.
That looks like a cattle guard rather than a storm drain cover. But the ones around here are only a few inches deep, not deep enough for an entire ‘roo.
In distant places like New Zealand and Australia the grate in the picture is called a ‘cattle stop’. They are built onto drives and lesser country roads to obviate the need for gates. The gaps between the railings are designed to stop cattle hooves traversing. For this to be effective a cattle hoof has to be able to slip through: the cattle quickly learn of the dangers. Hopefully Kanga will have learned his/her lesson,too.
The question is how did he get in head first?
There are cattle guards like that all over the western U.S. Many are designed in such a way that they’re pit-fall traps for small animals: slick concrete walls all around and 1-2 ft. deep — no way out at the ends. Horned lizards (“horny toads”) are particularly vulnerable.
In the UK, hedgehogs often fall into the cattle grids (as they call them), so the British Hedgehog Preservation Society has instructions on how to build escape ramps for them: http://www.britishhedgehogs.org.uk/leaflets/Ramps.pdf
(There isn’t a USHPS, is there?)
There are no U.S. hedgehogs, except a few imported pets. So, no USHPS either.
In the western US we sometimes just paint the road with white markings to look like it’s a cattle stop.
I was just going to mention the painted ones, Stephen. Apparently the cattle ( at least) can’t tell the difference. Lots of them in Utah.
Sounds like the basis for a Larson cartoon. 😎
And the roo would later resurface as the Christmas Kangaroo in a SNL skit.