FEATURE - Cuddly koalas stir passions in Australia
Date: 03-May-02
Country: AUSTRALIA
Author: Paul Tait
"Anyone can have a computer," jokes Glenys Kouwenberg, who is known throughout Australia's sub-tropical holiday town of Port Macquarie as "the Koala Lady".
Down the road, Barbara and Geoff Barrett relax, watching television with their dog Tara. A badly burned female koala sits quietly by, perched on a pile of towels in a laundry basket.
The cuddly, gum-leaf chewing teddy bear-like koala is the quintessential Australian icon, immediately recognisable around the world and top of the must-see list for the thousands of tourists who flock to Australia each year.
The furry grey marsupials have been hugged by world leaders and featured in global advertising campaigns by Australian tourism authorities, national carrier Qantas and beer companies.
But at home the bushy-eared animals which spend up to 20 hours a day asleep in the forks of eucalyptus trees have a far more precarious existence.
Numbers in some areas have shrunk to the point that they are perched on the brink of local extinction. Elsewhere they are endangering themselves through over-population and inbreeding.
ENDANGERED OR OVER-POPULATED?
No one knows for sure how many koalas there are in Australia. Debate is passionate and full of contradictions.
The independent Australian Koala Foundation says there are fewer than 100,000 left of a species which once numbered in the millions but were hunted for their fur to the point of extinction by the 1920s.
Their habitat stretches along Australia's east coast from sub-tropical Queensland state through New South Wales and down into Victoria and across to South Australia.
Urban encroachment and the felling of eucalyptus forests mean populations in once-prime koala areas like Port Macquarie, about 300 km (186 miles) north of Sydney, are down to about 400.
The koala is listed in New South Wales state as a vulnerable species, yet a small wild colony has been found in suburban Sydney parkland after 30 years spent cleaning up the environment.
Koalas were almost wiped out in Victoria and South Australia but repopulation programmes have re-established colonies and similar vulnerable or endangered listings have been removed.
In May 2000, koalas were listed by Washington as threatened under U.S. endangered species laws. Australia disputed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listing but it remains.
Koala numbers exploded after they were introduced on Kangaroo Island in South Australia state, and there are anywhere between 18,000 and 30,000 competing for too little habitat space.
The overpopulation means that a debate over whether to cull koalas to protect them flares intermittently in South Australia.
Conventional wisdom is that a cull will never happen because it would be akin to legislating against Christmas and no politician would ever back such a career-killer.
"You and I both know that no one will ever shoot a koala," Australian Koala Foundation executive director Deborah Tabart told Reuters.
State officials have been left with costlier, slower and more complicated measures like mass sterilisation in a bid to thin koala numbers on Kangaroo Island.
KOALA HOSPITAL
Back at Port Macquarie, the volunteer-backed Koala Hospital is overflowing with koalas injured in bushfires which swept the area in January and others injured by cars or in dog attacks.
The January fires wiped out about 10 percent of the local population and left another 30 or so badly injured.
"The really sad part about the fire is that it was a viable breeding population," the hospital's chief supervisor, Cheyne Flanagan, told Reuters.
The worst cases, which need round-the-clock care, are sent out to the homes of volunteers like the Barretts and the Kouwenbergs.
"They're just such lovely little animals you just can't bear not to help them," said Barbara Barrett.
Barrett's koala, Perch Miracle, got its name because it was found clinging for its life on a burnt tree on Perch Hole Road six days after the fires.
