08/07/2026
Did anyone know about this?
In 1916, dogs attacked a private zoo on Alewa Heights in Honolulu. Three Australian brush-tailed rock wallabies were in a cage. A joey was thrown from its mother's pouch in the attack and killed by the dogs. The adult male and female hit the cage hard enough to break through it and disappeared into the forested ridges above Kalihi Valley. Richard H. Trent, the zoo's owner, called for a public wallaby hunt across the island. Nobody caught them. Their descendants are still in the valley 110 years later.
The Hawaiian Gazette ran the story on August 22, 1916, and included a line that reads like prophecy: unless the animals are caught they may become permanent denizens of the mountain districts and, like their distant cousins the Australian rabbits, may propagate and produce eventually a breed of Hawaiian wallabies.
That is exactly what happened. Two wallabies that escaped a dog attack on a backyard zoo colonized the cliffs above Kalihi and built a breeding population in the rocky terrain above Honolulu, on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 5,000 miles from Australia.
The brush-tailed rock wallaby is a small marsupial, about knee-high, weighing 10 to 15 pounds, with a long bushy tail, small rounded ears, and powerful hind legs built for navigating vertical rock faces with the agility of a mountain goat. In Australia, it lives on cliff lines and rocky outcrops along the Great Dividing Range. The cliffs above Kalihi Valley, steep volcanic rock faces with ledges, caves, and crevices, turned out to be close enough to the original habitat that the wallabies treated them as home.
A 1984 study published in Biological Conservation counted 247 animals in the valley, roughly three-quarters of them female. Half of the breeding-age females were carrying or nursing joeys. The researchers noted that the Hawaiian wallabies had already diverged from their Australian counterparts, a population developing its own characteristics on an island it was never supposed to reach. By the early 1990s, a state survey put the estimate lower, around 75. Ron Walker, a retired state wildlife manager who studied them for years, told Hawaii News Now in 2009 that the number was probably fewer than 40, but added that he was confident they were still out there.
In 2002, a wallaby was captured in Foster Village, a suburban neighborhood in Honolulu. The Department of Land and Natural Resources released it back into Kalihi Valley. In 2020, a Nuuanu homeowner found an adult wallaby in their yard. The Hawaiian Humane Society picked it up. The Honolulu Zoo checked its health. DOFAW wildlife biologist Jason Misaki returned it to state forest land. His comment was dry: occasionally a single wallaby will wander into a neighborhood and that of course gets everyone's attention, as they tend to stay in their colony in the forest.
The colony is not actively monitored. DLNR does not manage it because the wallabies are not considered invasive. They eat mostly Christmas berry and other non-native plants. They do not damage native forest. They do not compete meaningfully with any native species because Hawaii has no native terrestrial mammals for them to compete with. The state classified them as protected game mammals under the same statute that covers wild cattle. Hunting, killing, or possessing a wallaby without authorization is illegal.
In Australia, the brush-tailed rock wallaby is listed as vulnerable at the federal level and endangered in several states. Populations have been declining for decades due to habitat clearing, predation by introduced foxes and cats, and competition with feral goats. The 2019-2020 bushfires in southeastern Australia destroyed an estimated 70 percent of the species' remaining habitat. Reintroduction programs in Victoria's Grampians National Park failed largely because of fox predation.
The Honolulu colony has no foxes, no feral cats in the cliff habitat, no feral goats competing for the same ledges, and no bushfires. Two wallabies that broke out of a cage in 1916 to escape a pack of dogs may have accidentally founded one of the most secure populations of their species anywhere on earth.
Source: Hawaiʻi DLNR / Hawaiian Gazette, August 22, 1916 / Lazell et al. (1984), Biological Conservation / Hawaii News Now / HAWAII Magazine / Images of Old Hawaiʻi.
