Mother Kangaroo with Her Joey Coloring Page: PDF Sheet

Kangaroos and the Joey in the Pouch

The Marsupial Pouch and the Newborn Joey

A newborn kangaroo is one of the tiniest babies in the mammal world. At birth a joey is only about the size of a jellybean, roughly an inch long, blind and hairless, yet it crawls unaided through its mother's fur and into her pouch using its front limbs. Once inside it latches onto a teat and stays put, growing safely for months before it ever looks out at the world the way the joey in this scene does.

The pouch is a warm muscular pocket that the mother can tighten to keep the joey from falling out while she hops. A joey usually first pokes its head out at around five months and does not leave the pouch for good until it is roughly eight to nine months old. Even after that a young kangaroo often dives back in headfirst at the first sign of danger, folding its long legs in behind it.

Powerful Legs Built for Hopping

Kangaroos are the only large animals that hop as their main way of moving. Their long hind feet and springy tendons act like coiled elastic, storing and releasing energy so a red kangaroo can cover twenty-five feet in a single bound and cruise at around twenty-five miles per hour, sprinting faster over short distances. The faster they go, the less extra energy each hop costs, which makes hopping surprisingly efficient across the wide, dry outback.

The thick tail is not just for balance. When a kangaroo moves slowly it plants its tail on the ground and uses it almost like a fifth leg, pushing off with it while swinging the hind legs forward. Because of the way their legs and tail are built, kangaroos cannot walk backward easily, which is part of why the animal appears on the Australian coat of arms as a symbol of a nation that only advances.

Red and Grey Kangaroo Species

There are four main kangaroo species: the red kangaroo, the eastern grey, the western grey, and the antilopine kangaroo. The red kangaroo is the largest, standing over six feet tall and weighing up to two hundred pounds, which makes it the biggest marsupial alive today. Males are often reddish while females tend toward a soft blue-grey, so a mother kangaroo like this one would often wear the cooler, dustier coloring.

Kangaroos live in loose social groups called mobs or troops, sometimes numbering dozens of animals grazing together at dusk and dawn. They are grazers that feed mostly on grasses and can go long stretches without drinking, getting much of their moisture from the plants they eat, an adaptation that suits the hot, unpredictable climate of inland Australia.

Kangaroos Across the Australian Outback

Kangaroos are found only in Australia and on a few nearby islands, and they have become the living emblem of the continent. Some estimates count tens of millions of them across the country, more kangaroos than people, ranging from open grassland and scrub to the edges of farms and towns. Female kangaroos can even pause a pregnancy through a process called embryonic diapause, holding a tiny embryo in reserve until the joey already in the pouch is ready to leave.

Aboriginal Australians have hunted and honored kangaroos for tens of thousands of years, and the animal appears in ancient rock art across the continent. That long history, together with the unmistakable sight of a mother bounding across red earth with a joey riding in her pouch, is why the kangaroo remains one of the most recognizable wild animals on Earth.