Bangalow Koalas reckons it’s on track to plant 500,000 trees for habitat restoration work this year – if only one certain furry marsupial would stop eating them.
A young koala has been caught munching on seedlings at the Eastern Forest Nursery, near Lismore. Again.
In 2023, the nursery made world headlines when it revealed a hungry koala named Claude was raiding the nursery for food.
VIDEO: click here for more about the visits.
Now, possibly, the ‘child of Claude’ may have been dining out as nursery manager Humphrey Herington explains.
“When we took the original pictures of Claude, it was definitely a surprise to get people ringing up from all around the world wanting to hear about his behaviour,” he says.
“The new koala we discovered in the nursery was quite a shock to my staff. We’d been working all day; at 3 o’clock one of the staff noticed this little koala sitting on the sprinkler. Everyone wanted to get a few pictures.”
Herington believes the extra work they put in to prevent the visitor from dining on thousands of seedlings may be working.
“Improvements to the fence seemed to work because for the last few months we haven’t had any more seedlings destroyed,” he says.
“Claude, thank you for giving us a lot of enjoyment watching you and your behaviour in the nursery,” he says.
“We’re glad that you’re so fat now you can’t get back in and eat our seedlings.
“Please don’t introduce anymore of your offspring to our plants but we’re all very grateful for the awareness that you’ve brought for the cause of your family.”
KOALA HABITAT RESTORATION
Bangalow Koalas began planting trees in 2019 to create a wildlife corridor across the Northern Rivers to provide food and enable the marsupials to move in safety.
President Linda Sparrow says that a targeted 500,000 trees planting this year is “a huge milestone” and “great for koalas”.
“If we can do this, any community group can. We would love to mentor more groups to do what we are doing to benefit wildlife and people,” she says.
Sparrow says 500,000 new trees is just the beginning for them.
“We want to get between 750,000 and one million trees in the ground by 2030,” she explains.
“I just visited one of our plantings with trees only a few years old and I came across all this wonderful koala poo. There are koalas already there.
“It’s the most exciting, rewarding thing because it shows what we’re doing is making a difference.”
WWF Australia has funded about 250,000 of the tree plantings for this year.
Tanya Pritchard, the senior manager for koala recovery with WWF-Australia, says the planting milestone follows on from news about a new national park for the marsupials.
“We’re proud to have helped Linda and her team reach this incredible milestone. WWF-Australia has an ambitious goal of doubling the number of east coast koalas by 2050,” she says.
“There have been so many trees removed over so many years. Claude’s antics helped raise awareness and encouraged people to get out there and plant more trees.”
The nursery is supplying many of the trees planted by Bangalow Koalas.
For more on a WWF “we all need trees” campaign, go to wwf.org.au/trees
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