Koalas around Cape Otway, south-west of Melbourne, are facing a struggle for survival that will persist unless a long-term solution can be agreed on

If you’re keen on spotting a wild koala, you can improve your chances by gazing at the eucalypts that host the largest of the marsupial species, in the Otways of Victoria.



The koalas around Cape Otway, a good three-hour drive south-west of Melbourne, off the famed Great Ocean Road, can weigh in at 14kg – roughly double the size of koalas found in Queensland.

But something is terribly amiss in this koala population. Many of the animals are starving, prompting the largest intervention yet by the state government, with a fortnight of health checks ending this week.

More controversially, this intervention also involves the sterilisation of all captured female koalas and the euthanisation of those deemed too frail to survive much longer in the wild.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cape Otway catch team secures another koala for health checks. Photograph: Victoria's Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning

Wildlife officers and scientists are back in the Otways, bundling koalas into bags, just a few months after it was revealed that nearly 700 of the animals were secretly culled in 2013 and 2014 due to overpopulation concerns.

The starvation issue is blamed on the koalas’ fetish for manna gum – to the exclusion of all other food. Trees are stripped bare, curbing their ability to recover and replenish their leaves, leaving the koala population hungry.

“There should be less than one koala per hectare, but we were finding 15 to 20 koalas on a tree in some places,” says Jim O’Brien, the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning official who is coordinating the latest intervention.

“Koalas have no natural predators now, so something had to give and it was the trees and the animals. People were finding koalas at the base of the trees,” he says.

Disease and hunting for the fur trade virtually wiped out koalas in Victoria before a successful breeding program saw them bounce back. In 1981, 75 koalas were introduced to Cape Otway. By 2013, this population had ballooned to nearly 8,000, causing mass starvation.

“The trees just started dying and there was a big crash in koala numbers – I was burying them everywhere because they were stinking, it smelled so bad,” says Frank Fotinas, who has run the Bimbi camping park in Cape Otway for the past decade. “There were dozens and dozens of them, just lying at the bottom of trees.”

The koalas which tourists pull over to gawk and point at by the side of the road are a direct benefit to Fotinas – his campsite’s slogan is “camping under the koalas”, after all. But he has no problem with them being euthanised.

“Something has to be done or the forest will die and there will be no koalas at all,” he says. “We’ve had to sit and watch the forest crumble around us, it’s hard to look at. Koalas are cute, they are good for business but there has to be a huge number reduction.

“People who sit on their couches and say it’s cruel should come out here to have a look before making their moral judgements. What’s cruel is watching koalas starve to death, to see them push their babies out of a tree because there’s no food there for them.”

Bimbi park is temporarily hosting the government officials and contractors who are catching and assessing the area’s koalas. Koalas are plucked from trees, put into sacks and brought to a tent which has the air of a battlefield triage.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Arthur Rylah Institute’s David Ramsay and Peter Menkhorst collar koalas with radio tracking and GPS devices. Photograph: Victoria's Department of Environment and Primary Industries

The marsupials are placed onto a table for a vet to examine. Shoulders and legs are felt for abnormalities and the koalas are weighed. The animals’ teeth are examined too – if they are too worn down to enable eating, the koala could well be euthanised, especially if it is old and in poor physical condition.

The oddest spectacle involves shaving the neck of a sedated, prostrate koala as if it were some sort of radical hair-styling intervention. A vet will do this in order to implant a sterilisation device into females to slow reproduction rates.

Young joeys, who peer out from behind their mothers’ backs, will be sent to wildlife sanctuaries if their parent is put down. All the koalas are groggy yet unwieldy, their stout frames and sharp claws unsuited to being placed in bags.

On a separate table, a new technique is being trialled. Fit, healthy koalas are being fitted with radio collars and moved to a new area, slightly further east. Thirty-six are being given new homes, with 24 placed back in Cape Otway but tracked to see how they fare by comparison.

“This over-browsing is a phenomenon that only happens in coastal manna gum communities,” says Peter Menckhorst, principal scientist at the Arthur Rylah Institute, which is running the translocation project. “The koalas love manna gum so much they will sit in a tree until they’ve eaten every last leaf, rather than move to another species of tree nearby.

“Manna gum is a minor component of the new place they’ll be going to. The koalas will have to go for different gum. We know they are quite capable of changing their diets.”

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The move will stress the koalas, Menckhorst admits, and isn’t feasible on a grand scale due to the lack of available homes for the furry tree-dwellers. Just a fraction of western Victoria’s native vegetation remains, due to land clearing for agriculture and housing.

But government officials insist the latest intervention will aid the situation and claim that the previous culls have helped the remaining koalas. Halfway through the two-week assessment, 28 koalas have been put down via lethal injection, out of 151 checked – an improvement on past ratios, although koalas are still being found at unsustainable densities of four to 17 animals per hectare.

“The big picture is we want to get back to having a nice healthy forest and a sustainable population of koalas,” O’Brien says. “This won’t be the last intervention we make, but translocation might be the answer.

“If we don’t intervene, they are going to die a painful death. I’m an animal lover but I believe in what we’re doing here. We’re doing something that makes a difference.”

Others aren’t convinced. The Australian Koala Foundation has written to Lisa Neville, Victoria’s environment minister, to demand better oversight of the operation and its scientific assumptions.

“They are doing this as a public relations exercise, they have no long-term plan for koalas in Victoria,” says Deborah Tabart, chief executive of Australian Koala Foundation. “Just you wait – those 36 translocated animals will have their own Facebook pages just so you can see they are living happily ever after.”

Tabart says the diet available to koalas at Cape Otway isn’t suitable and that the animals are being unfairly targeted.

“You get dead trees for a multitude of reasons and the koala is the last man standing,” she says. “They are perpetuating cruelty upon koalas beyond your imaginings. Sterilisation will harm the viability of the population too. I believe [the government] doesn’t know what it is doing.”

The population is going through a boom and bust cycle and I’m not sure it will stop. But we have to try something. Scientist Peter Menckhorst

Back at Bimbi park, we are witnessing the release of two healthy koalas back into the wild. One is put onto a chosen tree but scrambles to another, her incredible climbing skills helping her up a bough positioned at a seemingly impossible angle.

The second, fitted with a radio collar, is still drowsy from the sedation. She falls off the lower reaches of the trunk and has to be helped back onto the tree. What follows is a stressful episode as she climbs haphazardly up the tree, swaying as if drunk, nearly falling the backbreaking distance to the ground several times. Finally, it appears as if the heart-stopping high wire act is over and she is safe.

How her companions across Victoria, and Australia, fare remains to be seen. Koalas are listed as vulnerable in New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT and the species faces a serious long-term threat from climate change. The Cape Otway koalas face their own challenge, one that looks set to repeat itself unless a long-term solution is found.

“It will be very hard to manage this population in a sustainable way,” Menckhorst admits. “It’s going through a boom and bust cycle and I’m not sure it will stop. But we have to try something.”