Eastern Hare-Wallaby

Dancing hare down under

Early settlers found a wide range of kangaroo-like marsupials on the plains of southeastern Australia—both huge animals that could incapacitate hunters with a single kick and animals smaller than hares. Alongside the now extinct toolache wallaby, hare-wallabies (Lagorchestes) were among the most popular game animals in this region at the time.

Four species of hare-wallaby once existed; although they looked quite similar externally, they differed in their social behavior. The Lake Mackay hare-wallaby (L. asomatus) is known only from Aboriginal reports and from a skull found in 1932; the spectacled hare-wallaby (L. conspicillatus) still occurs in northern Australia today; the rufous hare-wallaby (L. hirsutus) is extinct on the mainland and now survives only on two smaller islands off the coast of Western Australia; and the eastern hare-wallaby has been missing since 1890.

With a body length of around 50 centimeters, an eastern hare-wallaby could grow to be only about the size of a European hare. And it was not only its size that recalled our native hares: its hairy muzzle, long ears, and the gray-brown color and texture of its fur did as well. It is therefore hardly surprising that the British ornithologist and animal painter John Gould gave the genus the name Lagorchestes in 1841, which comes from Greek and means “dancing hare”.

Even so, the Turatt, as the eastern hare-wallaby was called in the language of the Aboriginal people of the Murray-Darling Basin, also differed from hares: it had an approximately 33-centimeter-long, muscular tail. In addition, like almost all kangaroos, it had hind legs that were significantly longer and stronger than its forelegs.

Eastern hare-wallaby – fact sheet

alternative names	Eastern hare wallaby, Common Hare-wallaby, Brown hare-wallaby, Brown hare wallaby, Hare kangaroo, Hare wallaby, Hare-like kangaroo, Turatt
scientific names	Lagorchestes leporides, Lagorchestes leporoides, Macropus leporoides, Macropus leporides, Largoehestes leporides
original distribution range	Australia
date of extinction	1890
causes of extinction	habitat loss, absence of Aboriginal fire-clearing practices, introduced animals
IUCN status	ausgestorben

Eastern hare-wallaby lived in southeastern Australia

The small marsupial from the kangaroo family (Macropodidae) once inhabited open grasslands in southeastern Australia. Its range included parts of the states of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia. Subfossil finds led the British-Australian biologist Andrew Burbidge and his team, in Conservation Status and Biogeography of Australia’s terrestrial Mammals (2009), to extend the eastern hare-wallaby’s range to southern Queensland.

Archaeological finds in Mannalargenna Cave also suggest that the eastern hare-wallaby occurred in prehistoric times on Prime Seal Island, an island in Bass Strait between Australia and Tasmania. Cultural researcher Stephen Brown reached this conclusion in 1993 in his study Mannalargenna Cave: A Pleistocene Site in Bass Strait.

From historical times, the species is known only from two individuals collected at Mount Hope in the Northern Plains grassland in northern Victoria. The eastern hare-wallaby is underrepresented in today’s museum collections. Incidentally, according to Zootierliste, the species was once kept in the zoos of Berlin and Frankfurt am Main.

Little is known about it, but its meat tasted delicious

Almost nothing is known about the behavior of the eastern hare-wallaby. Much of what is known comes from the 19th-century naturalists John Gould, Gerard Krefft, and Richard Lydekker. From Lydekker’s A Hand-Book to the Marsupialia and Monotremata (1894), for instance, we know that the eastern hare-wallaby was an exclusively nocturnal and solitary animal . According to Gould in The Mammals of Australia in 1863, it spent the day in a kind of “nest” sheltered by bushes.

Gould also mentioned the eastern hare-wallaby’s speed over short distances and its ability to jump. In A Gap in Nature (2011), Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten reproduce a report by Gould. According to it, an eastern hare-wallaby was chased by dogs for half a kilometer and then suddenly changed direction. It then came within six meters of Gould and leapt about 180 centimeters high over his head with ease. In 1866, in On the Vertebrated Animals of the Lower Murray and Darling, Krefft even claimed that estern hare-wallabies could jump 240 centimeters high.

Krefft also reported that easternhare-wallabies were easy to tame and could then be fed biscuits, bread, or cooked rice. His animal descriptions usually included, in his own way, an account of the culinary qualities of various mammals. These are sometimes the only remarks about what animal species that are extinct today tasted like. In the case of the eastern hare-wallaby, Krefft noted: “The flesh is delicious; in fact, it is among the best meat I have ever eaten”.

The sudden disappearance of the eastern hare-wallaby

The number of eastern hare-wallabies declined rapidly in the second half of the 19th century—why, no one knows. As late as the 1840s, Gould stated that the marsupials were fairly common on all the plains of South Australia—especially those between the Murray River and the mountains. Eastern Hare-wallabies were also said to be common on the Liverpool Plains and near the Naomi and Gwydir Rivers in New South Wales. According to Krefft, eastern hare-wallabies were common in the region between the Murray and Darling Rivers between 1856 and 1857. After the 1850s, the sudden population decline finally began, and its causes have still not been conclusively clarified.

The IUCN names as one possible reason the change in habitat caused by grazing by sheep and cattle and the associated destruction of grassland. As another reason, the World Conservation Union cites the displacement of Aboriginal Australians from large parts of Australia by European settlers, which meant that the traditional winter fire-clearings of the Aboriginal people no longer took place in the habitat of the eastern hare-wallabies.

Among Aboriginal people, controlled burning in the bush followed specific rules, such as the course of vegetation and the needs of the Indigenous people. Through traditional fires, they promoted, among other things, the growth of existing useful plants and new plants that served as food for animals living there. One consequence of the absence of fire-clearing may therefore have been that there were no longer small-scale areas with young and old vegetation, which in turn may have meant that eastern hare-wallabies could no longer find sufficient food. In addition, the absence of winter fire-clearings increasingly led to devastating fires in the summer months. This also proved fatal for the pig-footed bandicoot, which became extinct in the early 20th century.

Did invasive species cause the extinction of the eastern hare-wallaby?

In The Doomsday Book of Animals, David Day assumed in 1981 that the red fox (Vulpes vulpes), introduced to Australia by settlers, became one of the most dangerous enemies of the eastern hare-wallabies. The foxes were originally introduced from Europe to maintain the traditional fox hunting of the British colonial rulers and to control the also introduced rabbits. Ultimately, however, fox populations grew enormously and they mainly ate native rather than invasive animal species.

Because red foxes did not reach the country until 1871, some scientists doubt that they were already widespread enough to have caused the disappearance of the eastern hare-wallaby. In Ausgestorbene Tiere (2021), Bernhard Kegel also points to feral cats, which may have decimated the populations.

In Australia’s Vanishing Mammals (1990), Flannery suspects that, in addition to overstocking with sheep up to the 1890s, the increased introduction of hares during the 1880s and severe dry periods combined to cause the extinction of the eastern hare-wallaby.

According to Flannery and Schouten, the last eastern hare-wallaby, a female, was collected in New South Wales in 1889. A final sighting is also said to have occurred in New South Wales in 1890. After that, there were no more sightings, but researchers were not aware that the species was extinct until well into the 1930s.

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