Koala Capers

Back in March 2014, I reported via my good friend Digger the Koala about lots of animals, including koalas, to be found in Victoria, Australia. Here's the link ==>Victoria's Secrets, Part 1 Animals. On this present excursion to the state of South Australia, we were fortunate to be able to spend some more time with koalas and a more substantive Feature on them seems appropriate.

As previously noted, koalas are often referred to as bears, but they are not. They are a species of marsupials (Phascolarctus cinerius) to be found only in parts of the Australian continent. Marsupials are mammals that carry their young in a pouch. The young are born essentially as a fetus which emerges after a few weeks and crawls into the pouch where it is reared for several months receiving nutrients via nipples within the pouch. Kangaroos are, of course, the other well known marsupial animal. Koalas are at the end of an evolutionary chain, and have no close relatives. The wombat is said to be the koala's nearest evolutionary cousin. They are, by and large, solitary animals with no real social interactions, except between mothers and their joeys. Koalas are herbivores and prefer to eat eucalyptus leaves from a variety of eucalyptus tree species. However, such leaves provide little nutritional content and koalas have developed a very sedentary lifestyle to cope with this diet. They are said to sleep for 20 hours in a day. The first two shots below, taken at Mikka Farm near Port Lincoln on the Ayers Peninsula, shows a typical koala pose in a tree. This may be a male koala as he appears fairly large. He is awake, probably aware of our presence on the ground, but simply does not react. 


 


The second shot is a close crop to give a good view of the face, fur, and claws. I have enhanced local contrast in this shot to bring out some details. Those claws look quite vicious, but their main use is for climbing and descending trees. You can see three spikes from one of the claws on the back leg sticking up. The fur seems to be incredibly thick for an animal that spends all its time in a hot climate, but such fur is needed at night when temperatures drop dramatically, sometimes to near freezing. The face of a koala is very distinctive, and appears to evoke a strong bonding response in humans - people just love these guys! Yet, looking at the close-up, this fellow looks as if he might not be too cuddlesome.


 

Photography point: even though these guys are slow moving (if not stationary) I still use continuous shooting mode firing bursts of three or four. Thi is because however good your camera's focus system is, there can be tiny variations in focus as the system updates. Consequently a single shot may just have lost the pin sharp focus you would have liked. Continuous focus shooting reduces this problem.

There is a myth (and I used to subscribe to it) that koalas got high on a substance in eucalypt leaves, and this accounted for their lethargy. This is not so, and the sedentary life style is a result of the low nutritional content of the diet. They have to eat a lot of leaves and digest them for a long time.  However, when a koala wishes to move, there is nothing lethargic about it. Here are some shots of a female koala on Kangaroo Island as she decides to move from one tree to another. At first, she appears fast asleep, but after a few seconds she has woken up, and is looking about - a definite "bright eyed and bushy tail" look. Probably she realises that there are no more leaves hereabouts, and she then climbs down the tree backward using the sharp claws to stop from falling.


  

   

Once on the ground, she moves swiftly across about 50 meters of ground and starts climbing the new tree. She is soon at a comfortable fork in the branches where she looks around before settling down.

      

 

We were very  lucky to catch this sequence, as koalas may live in one tree for days on end, until the leaves are finished before swiftly relocating!

Hope you enjoyed these photos. Look out for some birds in a few days.

Cheers

David aka Okavanga