A kangaroo drank my urine

Warning: If you are about to tuck into your weeties or take a sip from your cuppa, you might want to bookmark this story and come back to it a bit later.

In response to this column's recent expose about kangaroos in Namadgi National Park desperately digging dirt away from posts that hold up signs in order to lick the mineral salts contained in the concrete (September 15) Andrew from Mawson reports a somewhat disconcerting recent camping experience in the Cotter Valley.

''Near Cotter Hut, we were inundated by kangaroos in the morning and they followed us around trees and across paddocks and wouldn't stop following us. They know that humans go to the toilet first thing when they wake up. When we finally urinated they were very brazen and came right up to us and stuck their noses into the stream of urine. When we finished they licked the ground to a depth of 20 millimetres,'' reports Andrew, who presumes it's the salt content in human urine that attracted this bizarre behaviour in the kangaroos.

Not surprisingly, Andrew reports that ''While this was very confronting to us men, the poor girls certainly didn't appreciate the kangaroos' presence when nature called.''

Mmm. I bet they didn't. When I first received Andrew's email, I was somewhat cynical, but a number of park rangers have since confirmed they are aware of eyewitness accounts of similar macropod behaviour from elsewhere in Australia. In fact, Andrew reckons I should hike into the Cotter Valley to validate it for myself. Now, while I'm not overly keen to do that (would you?), I would, however, be most interested to hear from anyone else who has experienced this pre-meditated behaviour by local kangaroos.