Kangaroo Plague? Part 2 | Thermal Drone Survey – Mt Pleasant & Springton South Australia

This series is about challenging the narrative of kangaroos existing in “plague proportions”, a description that seems to appear almost every time kangaroos are mentioned in online discussions. In this case, I’m looking specifically at the Adelaide Hills region and surrounding country. During online discussions about kangaroo numbers, a local farmer challenged me to head out towards Mount Pleasant and Springton and have a look for myself, suggesting I’d see a very different picture out that way. Fair enough. So that’s exactly what I did. At approximately 9pm, I took the thermal drone across several areas around Mount Pleasant and Springton, including open paddocks, grazing country, vegetated areas and the local golf course, along the Adelaide Hills / Barossa Valley fringe. This is continuous, unedited footage. Kangaroos are present, and when they’re encountered the thermal camera makes them readily visible. The point isn’t to claim there are no kangaroos. It’s to document what is actually on the landscape and compare those observations with the language routinely used to describe their abundance. This isn’t a formal population survey, and individual flights can’t establish the population of an entire region. They’re simply documented observations across different locations and different types of habitat. There are kangaroos out there. The question is whether what we’re actually seeing supports the constant narrative of “plague proportions”. I was challenged to go out there and look. So I did. Watch the full, unedited footage and make up your own mind. 📍Mount Pleasant / Springton, South Australia 🕙 Approx. 9pm 🚁 DJI Enterprise thermal drone 🎥 Continuous, unedited footage #mountpleasant #springton #kangaroo #dji #thermal #southaustralia #barossavalley #adelaidehills