I'm the 'mother' to 60 baby kangaroos. Here's what my day is like running a kangaroo sanctuary in the Australian outback.

• Chris "Brolga" Barns started fostering orphaned baby kangaroos in his home and backyard.
• In 2005, he set up the Baby Kangaroo Rescue Center charity while working as a local tour guide.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chris "Brolga" Barns, the owner of The Kangaroo Sanctuary and Baby Kangaroo Rescue Center in Alice Springs, Australia. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I always wanted to make a living working with animals. When I was growing up, my favorite show on TV was about a young boy and his kangaroo.

At 17, I left school and started working as a zookeeper at the Broome zoo in Western Australia.

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I worked as a zookeeper there for about 20 years. One day, someone brought in an orphaned joey — a baby kangaroo — to the zoo, and I was responsible for looking after it. I felt like the baby's mother.

When the zoo closed, I was in my 30s and living in the outback Northern Territory.

I realized there wasn't anywhere for kangaroos to go if they were orphaned or unable to return to the wild in central Australia

The nearest wildlife rescue center and hospital are over 1,500 km away.

I worked as a tour guide in Alice Springs when I first established the Baby Kangaroo Rescue Center in 2005. We started recusing baby kangaroos and nursing them in our home and backyard until they were strong enough to be released into the wild.

Many of our joeys' mothers are killed in road accidents.

A dead kangaroo on the side of the road is a common sight in Australia. But a kangaroo's pouch is full of muscles, and it tightens around the joeys like a seat belt, so often the joeys are still alive even if their mother has died.

We go out to check if those killed kangaroos were mothers and if their joeys are still alive.

We ran the rescue center out of our house for six years, but we needed a larger space specifically made to care for our animals.

We built the Kangaroo Sanctuary in Alice Springs near our home in 2011.

The sanctuary was just a massive plot of the outback with a fence around it to keep the dingoes out

We leased the land from the nearby airport. The joey care center to treat any young or sick joeys was originally just a tin shack in the sanctuary.

The equipment and food we need to run the charity are funded by donations. Once we had the sanctuary set up, we started hosting sunset tours around the land for tourists. The tours provide us with another source of income.

In 2015, we started building a more professional, air-conditioned treatment center for the joeys on the sanctuary. It has cost about $250,000 to build and operate so far. This is now where the youngest orphans are cared for by me, our volunteers, and visiting vets.

The sanctuary is home to almost 60 joeys

It can be hard to balance making an income and ensuring the animals aren't under pressure from tourism. There are day-to-day running costs, including food, veterinary care, solar panels, and maintenance.

Our primary income is from the guided educational sunset tours. The center is open to the public only during guided private or group tours.

Our kangaroos come first, so we can't have coachloads of people arriving. The small tours take place in the late afternoon after the kangaroos have woken up from their daytime sleep to ensure we disturb them as little as possible.

As soon as you start hiring staff, it can create financial pressure on the charity, so I run everything in the sanctuary with my wife, alongside our three amazing volunteers.

It's a full-time job

The sanctuary tours generate some income to live on, and we've also been featured in paid TV opportunities.

The BBC approached me in 2011 to see if I'd be interested in making a documentary about kangaroos orphaned by road accidents and my life with the kangaroos.

I thought it would be an excellent way to raise awareness. They first came out to film the show in 2012, and it was called "Kangaroo Dundee." We did a second and third series in 2014 and 2016. It's aired on BBC Two and Nat Geo Wild.

My wife also works with a local transportation company. We live pretty simply.

A typical day includes feedings every three hours for the orphaned baby kangaroos. There are also twice-daily checks and feeds for the adult permanent residents.

We try to rerelease all the kangaroos into the wild, but if they become too tame, they can stay at the sanctuary

The rest of the day is taken up by shopping for kangaroo food; cleaning up poo; washing pouches we make out of cloth to comfort the joeys; maintenance work, such as fencing and mowing; and then our evening guided tours.

One of our kangaroos became a YouTube sensation.

I rescued Roger after his mother was hit by a car. He was an Australian Red Kangaroo who grew to be six-foot-seven and went viral for his muscular physique. Some of the videos of Roger have millions of views on YouTube, and this helped bring attention and notoriety to our little sanctuary.