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# A road sign that can see a kangaroo coming
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/kangaroo-road-sign/
- Published: 2026-09-05T19:56:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-05T21:35:23.000Z
- Description: On a stretch of the Monaro Highway south of Canberra, cameras that see heat and shape are watching the verges for kangaroos, and when one steps close the sign ahead lights up: animal on road, slow down.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Innovations, All stories

*Celebrating all of our amazing fathers this Father's Day, with love from all of us at Earth to Sea News.*

Kangaroos move at dawn and dusk, exactly when drivers see least, and the yellow diamond with the hopping silhouette has been on our roadsides so long that most of us drive past it without reading it. This spring, on a three hundred metre stretch of the Monaro Highway at Michelago between Canberra and Cooma, a different kind of sign is on trial. It is called PAWS, the Protective Animal Warning System, and it was built by Transport for NSW's own technology and biodiversity teams. Heat sensing and optical cameras on the roadside watch the verges, a computer vision model trained on hours of footage of real animals picks out a kangaroo, a wombat or a deer moving towards the road, and the electronic sign ahead lights up with the words Animal on road, slow down, in the seconds that matter. Elena Guarracino, president of the volunteer rescue group Wildcare Queanbeyan, says the trial site is one of the busiest kangaroo crossing points in the district, and that a sign which only speaks when there is something to say gets around the oldest problem with warnings: drivers stop noticing the ones that are always there.

To teach the system what a kangaroo looks like from every angle and in every weather, the team filmed the animals at Symbio Wildlife Park north of Wollongong and matched the footage against time of day and conditions, building an image library before a single camera went up on the highway. Roads Minister Jenny Aitchison puts it simply: a few seconds of notice gives a driver time to slow down and gives the animal time to get off the road. New South Wales has put half a million dollars into the trial, Transport for NSW will count the difference over the coming months, and if the numbers come back the way everyone hopes, PAWS will move to other hotspots and could one day talk to cars directly through Bluetooth. For Christian McDonald and the other Wildcare volunteers who hand raise the district's orphaned joeys, sometimes for two years before release, it is the kind of invention that could mean fewer small arrivals in the laundry basket this spring.

Sources and links

Our short take: the full story is by Lish Fejer and Penny Travers for ABC News (20 July 2026), with details from the NSW Government's announcement of 18 July 2026\. Photograph: Thennicke, CC BY-SA 4.0, eastern grey kangaroos at Majura, a few minutes up the road from the trial.

- [Transport for NSW: the PAWS trial](https://www.nsw.gov.au/ministerial-releases/new-ai-animal-detection-and-smart-signage-trial-working-to-limit-wildlife-vehicle-strikes)How the cameras, the model and the sign work together.