Where Are the Most Kangaroos in Australia?

The highest concentrations of kangaroos in Australia are found across the semi-arid rangelands of western New South Wales and inland Queensland, where red kangaroos and grey kangaroos number in the tens of millions. But “where are the most kangaroos” depends on the species, the season, and whether you mean sprawling outback plains or the surprisingly dense populations that build up on the edges of cities and towns. The distribution is far less uniform than most people assume, shaped by rainfall gradients, predator barriers, and human land use in ways that keep shifting.

The Rangelands of New South Wales and Queensland

If you had to point to one region on a map, the pastoral zone of western New South Wales is consistently home to some of the densest kangaroo populations anywhere. Red kangaroos thrive here in semi-arid and arid country, with their range broadly bounded by rainfall lines: they occupy the zone between the 250 mm and 500 mm annual rainfall bands, stretching across the continent’s interior. Studies in western New South Wales have recorded red kangaroo densities exceeding 20 per square kilometre during good seasons.¹ Queensland’s commercial harvest zones, which span the state’s inland west and central regions, also support large populations of both red kangaroos and eastern grey kangaroos, monitored through aerial survey programs that have been running since the mid-1970s.²

Population structure across these regions is not a single undifferentiated mass. Modelling of kangaroo populations in eastern Australia has identified distinct subpopulations: two subpopulations of red kangaroos in New South Wales and four subpopulations of grey kangaroos, with the splits appearing to follow a rainfall gradient running from east to west. In Queensland, separate subpopulations align with each of the three main harvest management zones for both red kangaroos and eastern greys.³ These subpopulations rise and fall somewhat independently of each other, so a drought crushing numbers in the far west of New South Wales might barely affect a grey kangaroo population closer to the coast.

How Each Major Species Divides Up the Country

Australia has four large kangaroo species managed commercially, and each occupies different terrain. Understanding which species lives where explains a lot about why the density map looks the way it does.

Red kangaroos are the most widespread, dominating the arid and semi-arid interior from western Queensland through New South Wales and into South Australia and Western Australia. They are open-plains animals, using floodplain and sandplain habitats with roughly equal intensity and responding quickly to pasture growth after rain by moving onto freshly green sandplain.⁴ Their highest densities tend to cluster along drainage systems and floodplains in the rangelands.

Eastern grey kangaroos overlap with red kangaroos across much of inland New South Wales and Queensland but extend much further east and into wetter country. They are the species most Australians encounter near cities, along the coast, and in remnant bushland from North Queensland down to Victoria and into parts of Tasmania. Their flexibility in diet and habitat lets them thrive in everything from dry woodlands to moist coastal pastures.

Western grey kangaroos occupy the southern portion of the pastoral zone and extend across southern Australia from the Western Australian coast through South Australia and into western New South Wales and Victoria. Climatic factors are the main drivers: high densities of western greys show up where evaporation is low and rainfall is relatively high, making the southern rangelands their stronghold.⁵ Where red kangaroos and western greys overlap in western New South Wales, they partition habitat: western greys favor floodplain areas and use woodland more heavily, and they follow rain-driven pasture growth more slowly, lagging behind red kangaroos by up to three months.⁴

The fourth commercially harvested species, the common wallaroo, fills a different niche again, favoring rocky hill country and escarpments. In the tropical north, the antilopine wallaroo takes over as the dominant large macropod on savannas, where it forms some of the largest social groups of any kangaroo species.⁶

Rainfall Is the Master Switch

More than any other single factor, rainfall dictates where kangaroo numbers boom and where they crash. The relationship is direct and well documented: kangaroo populations track annual rainfall with a time lag of about six months. In the eastern rangelands, numbers peak following seasons where rainfall exceeds the average by about 100 mm; in the drier western rangelands, the threshold is lower, roughly 50 mm above average.⁷ This means the map of “where the most kangaroos are” can look very different from one year to the next. A run of wet years in the Channel Country of southwest Queensland can push red kangaroo numbers far above what the same landscape supports during drought.

What matters is not water itself but the food it produces. An experimental study of artificial water point closures in the rangelands found that shutting off stock watering points had no measurable effect on kangaroo populations, confirming that it is food availability rather than direct access to drinking water that controls density in Australia’s water-rich rangelands.⁸ Kangaroos get much of their water from green vegetation and can survive on remarkably little drinking water when feed is adequate.

Drought, conversely, hammers populations hard. Research on eastern grey kangaroos has shown a strong correlation between drought severity and body condition, with the tightest link appearing at a six-month lag.⁹ Animals in poor condition breed less, raise fewer joeys to independence, and die at higher rates. A prolonged drought can reduce regional populations by half or more, then wet years bring rapid recovery. This boom-and-bust cycle is the fundamental rhythm of kangaroo abundance across inland Australia.

The Dingo Fence Effect

One of the starkest boundaries on Australia’s kangaroo density map has nothing to do with climate. The dingo barrier fence, stretching over 5,000 kilometres across southeast Australia, was originally built to keep dingoes out of sheep country. It has inadvertently created one of the largest ecological experiments on the planet: a continental-scale predator exclusion zone.

On the side where dingoes are rare or absent, kangaroo numbers are consistently higher. Surveys comparing mammal communities on either side of the fence have found kangaroos and red foxes more abundant where dingoes are excluded.¹⁰ The effect is not purely about predation, since land use differs on either side as well: sheep grazing and commercial kangaroo harvesting are more common in the dingo-free zone. But the pattern is striking. Studies comparing red kangaroo populations across the fence found far fewer kangaroos collected on the dingoes-common property than on the dingoes-rare property, along with a marked female bias on the dingo-free side, suggesting that dingo predation selectively removes females and young animals where it is common.¹¹

The practical upshot is that the dingo fence roughly maps onto a density gradient. The pastoral country of western New South Wales and parts of South Australia inside the fence supports some of the highest kangaroo densities on the continent, partly because its top predator has been systematically removed.

Peri-Urban Hotspots on the City Fringe

Some of the most intense kangaroo concentrations in Australia are not in the outback at all. They are on the edges of cities, in peri-urban zones where housing developments, golf courses, and nature reserves sit side by side. Eastern grey kangaroos, in particular, thrive in these fragmented landscapes, reaching very high densities where remnant native vegetation and improved pasture provide abundant food while roads and fences prevent animals from dispersing.¹²

Canberra is the most famous example. Suburbs on the city’s northern and southern fringes adjoin nature reserves and rural land where eastern greys gather in mobs of hundreds. Parts of the New South Wales south coast, the outer suburbs of Melbourne, and corridors around Brisbane and the Gold Coast see similar dynamics. These peri-urban populations create a different kind of management problem from the rangelands: overgrazing of reserves, vehicle collisions, and stressed animals confined to shrinking habitat patches.

Health data from one coastal headland population showed densities as high as 5.4 kangaroos per hectare, with parasite loads rising in line with crowding. Animals at the highest-density site carried the heaviest burden of gut parasites and ticks, consistent with the stress and close contact that comes from being hemmed in by roads and development.¹³ Peri-urban kangaroo management has become one of the more politically fraught conservation issues in the country, with periodic culls generating public controversy even as ecologists warn that leaving overabundant, trapped populations unmanaged causes animal welfare problems.

How Kangaroo Numbers Are Actually Counted

The national population estimates you sometimes see in the media, figures like 40 or 50 million kangaroos across Australia, come overwhelmingly from aerial surveys. State governments have been running these since the 1970s, flying systematic transect lines over the rangelands and counting kangaroos from small aircraft. Queensland’s monitoring program, for instance, uses both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters alongside ground surveys on foot and from vehicles.²

These surveys are good at detecting broad trends but come with real limitations. Comparison trials mounting thermal cameras alongside human observers found that thermal imagery detected roughly 30 percent more kangaroos overall than human observers did, with the gap widest in wooded habitats where animals are harder to spot from the air. In open habitats, human observers actually counted more, possibly because sunlight interfered with the thermal signal and because kangaroos flushed by the aircraft were easier to see with the naked eye.¹⁴ The thermal cameras could not tell species apart, which is a significant drawback when management quotas are set species by species.

There is also a paradox that has puzzled researchers: aerial survey estimates sometimes seem to rise during drought, even though kangaroos should be dying. One plausible explanation is detection bias. When vegetation is sparse and brown, kangaroos stand out more against the bare ground and are easier to count from the air. This means drought-year estimates may overcount relative to wet-year estimates, making population swings look less dramatic than they truly are.¹⁵ Aerial surveys also cover only the commercially harvested rangelands, leaving out large tracts of tropical savanna, the eastern forests, and peri-urban areas where eastern greys can be abundant.

Smaller Macropods and Where They Fit

Kangaroos grab the headlines, but Australia’s macropod family includes dozens of smaller species, wallabies, pademelons, bettongs, and potoroos, whose distributions fill in the map differently. In southeastern Queensland, a mosaic of grassland and open forest supports eastern grey kangaroos alongside whiptail wallabies, red-necked wallabies, and rufous bettongs at moderate densities. Rarer species like the black-striped wallaby, red-necked pademelon, and long-nosed potoroo are restricted to dense cover, appearing only where tree density and ground-level vegetation are thick.¹⁶

In the tropical north, the antilopine wallaroo is the dominant large macropod on savanna woodlands, living in groups that rank among the largest of any macropod species. By contrast, northern wallaroos and agile wallabies in the same landscape are essentially solitary.⁶ The social structure matters for visibility: a traveller through the Top End might see large mobs of antilopine wallaroos grazing in the open and assume they are the most common macropod, while the wallaroos and wallabies hiding in rocky outcrops and scrub go unseen.

Roads, Roadkill, and Kangaroo Movement Corridors

One indirect signal of where kangaroo numbers are high is roadkill data. Kangaroo-vehicle collisions are among the most common wildlife strikes in Australia, and the distribution of collisions tells you something about where animals are concentrated and where they are moving. Research on outback highways has shown that roadside vegetation plays a key role: grassy verges and shrubby edges attract kangaroos to graze near the road, increasing the chance of a collision.¹⁷ This helps explain why certain stretches of highway are notorious for kangaroo strikes while nearby sections with different roadside vegetation are relatively clear.

In peri-urban areas, roads serve a double role. They kill individual kangaroos directly and, at a population level, they act as barriers that fragment habitat and trap mobs in isolated patches. This fragmentation contributes to the localized overabundance described earlier: kangaroos confined to a patch of grassland bounded by busy roads breed and eat their way through the available vegetation, then have nowhere to go.¹² Wildlife corridors that allow movement between patches are increasingly recognized as important for keeping these populations from becoming ecologically trapped.

What Climate Change Could Mean for Future Hotspots

The map of kangaroo abundance is likely to shift substantially over the coming decades. Climate modelling of seven iconic macropod species projects a drastic decrease in suitable habitat, ranging from about 83 to 100 percent reduction under future climate scenarios. Only small pockets of climate refugia are predicted for each species, and the amount of suitable habitat falling within protected areas drops by at least an order of magnitude compared to current conditions.¹⁸

For the big three commercially harvested species, this could mean a contraction of the rangelands toward cooler and wetter refuges in the south and east, potentially pushing kangaroo populations into greater overlap with agriculture and urban areas. Eastern grey kangaroos, already successful in peri-urban environments, might cope better than red kangaroos, which depend on the boom-and-bust cycle of inland rainfall that climate change is expected to make more erratic. Western greys, tied to the relatively mild southern climate, face the challenge of their preferred conditions shifting poleward, eventually running out of continent.

These projections are broad-brush, and kangaroos have proven remarkably resilient to environmental variability in the past. But the combination of more severe droughts, land clearing for agriculture, and expanding urban footprints could progressively squeeze the vast rangelands populations that currently account for the bulk of Australia’s kangaroos into smaller, more fragmented areas. Where the most kangaroos are in 2060 could look quite different from today.

Livestock, Harvesting, and Landscape Transformation

European colonisation transformed Australia’s rangelands in ways that both helped and hurt kangaroo populations. The introduction of livestock grazing after 1788 brought pastoral land management practices that cleared woodland, installed stock watering points, and created vast pastures, all of which favoured large grazing kangaroos over smaller woodland-dependent species.¹⁹ The provision of artificial water across previously dry landscapes extended the range of red kangaroos into areas they might not have occupied at such densities before European settlement.

At the same time, kangaroos have been managed as competitors to livestock and as crop pests since the earliest days of pastoralism. Australia’s commercial kangaroo harvest, one of the largest wildlife harvests in the world, operates under state-by-state quota systems informed by aerial survey data. Queensland introduced quotas in 1975 and has maintained monitoring systems covering population trends, harvest size and distribution, and reports of agricultural damage ever since.² The harvest is concentrated in exactly the regions with the highest kangaroo densities: the rangelands of Queensland, New South Wales, and South Australia. Whether it meaningfully suppresses populations below what the landscape would otherwise support is debated, but the combination of dingo exclusion, water provision, and pasture improvement has almost certainly boosted the total number of large kangaroos well above pre-colonial levels in the pastoral zone.