S8 Ep820: Drought Realities and a Miraculous Kangaroo Rescue in Narromine Guest: Jeremy Zakis Summary: This segment details a dramatic wildlife rescue in Narromine, New South Wales, where a gray kangaroo became trapped up to its neck in a muddy, receding dam durin
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 3 May 2026
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Drought Realities and a Miraculous Kangaroo Rescue in Narromine
Guest: Jeremy Zakis Summary: This segment details a dramatic wildlife rescue in Narromine, New South Wales, where a gray kangaroo became trapped up to its neck in a muddy, receding dam during a severe 12-month drought,. A local farmer discovered the animal, which had likely entered the mud in a desperate search for water. Despite initial fears that the kangaroo would need to be euthanized, it rey farmers to abandon livestock in favor of irrigated crops like wheat and barley,mained calm during a rescue effort and is now recovering under wildlife care. The segment underscores the severity of the drought in Australia’s agricultural heartland, where cracked soil and lack of rain have forced man.
UNDATED WESTERN AUSTRALIA
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchelor, Jeremy Zakis. He's in New South Wales reporting on the continent of Australia |
| 0:06.5 | in the southern hemisphere with winter coming on. It is fall now, but winter's coming on. I've learned |
| 0:13.0 | from Jeremy that the birds do not migrate, that the temperatures do not get anywhere close to |
| 0:19.0 | what we struggled with in New England because we have |
| 0:22.5 | air coming over Siberia straight through straight down over the Great Lakes hitting us here in |
| 0:29.2 | New England gets very cold. I have in my mind every night when I think about what the winter |
| 0:35.6 | is that night when it was seven degrees below |
| 0:38.7 | Fahrenheit, zero Fahrenheit, and the fuel truck tried to get through my driveway, which is |
| 0:46.3 | not obvious when it's icy storm. The snow was blowing sideways, and me and the boys, that's the |
| 0:53.3 | Spaniels, we went out to help him. |
| 0:55.3 | Of course, he had to help us because we got stuck in the ice field. That was a night. |
| 1:02.0 | Now, Jeremy doesn't have a night like that, but everything's relative. So with the winter |
| 1:07.1 | coming on, we care about Jeremy and New South Wales. We also care about the |
| 1:12.8 | kangaroos. However, this is a continent. It's not consistent. There's a part of the continent |
| 1:19.4 | that's in drought, and that's a problem for kangaroos. What happened, Jeremy? Well, John, there |
| 1:25.6 | certainly is part of the continent in drought and is in the most |
| 1:28.6 | unexpected place. In Western New South Wales here, what we've seen is that when we've been |
| 1:34.1 | getting rain here in Sydney and rain all up and down the seaboard, there's kind of like a corridor |
| 1:39.0 | through Western New South Wales that just does not get the rain because of the way that the blue |
| 1:44.2 | mountains are geographically located. |
| 1:46.9 | Then the plains, they basically don't generate enough energy to create rain over this part |
| 1:50.9 | of the New South Wales. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.