Owners of a plant nursery near Lismore have been dealing with a unique kind of theft.
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For weeks now, a large male koala named Claude has been raiding Eastern Forest Nursery in South Gundurimba, having developed a taste for the "all-you-can-eat buffet" on offer.
Nursery owner Humphrey Herington named the gum gourmand "Claude" because of his large claws.
"Claude has eaten thousands of seedlings. He's tucked into every type of koala food tree we grow here. Clearly Claude thinks this is a restaurant but if that was the case his bill would be about $6000 by now," Mr Herington said.
He said efforts to move the koala had been met with some resistance.
"I put a towel around him and moved him a few hundred metres down the road to a big tree at my neighbour's place. He was pretty stroppy when I picked him up. Two days later Claude was back and he's been hanging around getting into the seedlings every night," he said.
Eastern Forest Nursery supplies seedlings for koala habitat restoration projects by Bangalow Koalas and the World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia.
"These seedlings are well watered and fertilised and are top shelf food for a koala. Claude has developed champagne tastes and with his what-are-you-looking-at attitude has decided he is not to be denied," Senior Manager Koala Recovery, WWF-Australia, Tanya Pritchard said.
Mr Herington said as soon as seedlings are planted in the region koalas are eating them.
"This behaviour shows that we need to scale up our work which we're doing through Koala Friendly Carbon. We're planting thousands of trees and hopefully the koalas can wait for them to grow a bit before consuming them," Ms Pritchard said.
In the meantime, Mr Herington has some bad news for Claude.
"I'm sorry Claude but the party's over. You are eating me out of house and home so I've started work on a fence to keep you out. It's back to normal tucker for you," Mr Herington said.
For more info on WWF's Koalas Forever program go to: https://wwf.org.au/what-we-do/help-regenerate-australia/koalas-forever/
