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Claude the koala goes wild and eats six thousand dollars worth of plants on the NSW North Coast
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A starving koala has been captured ‘green thumbed’ after eating thousands of seedlings meant to be used to create new habitat for the koala.
The marsupial wreaked havoc on tree seedlings worth around $60,000 at the Eastern Forest nursery on the far north coast of New South Wales during a two-day rampage month.
Nursery owner Humphrey Herington initially believed the damage was caused by opossums until the morning he came across the greedy koala.
Mr. Herrington found Claude after a particularly long night of sowing and he had outgrown his tree.
He said Claude had “eaten thousands of seedlings” of “every type of koala food tree that we grow here”.
A starving koala, named Claude (pictured) because of his long claws, was found to have gorged on seedlings worth around $6,000 at the Eastern Forest Nursery on the north shore of Nova Scotia. South Wales.
Mr Herrington initially tried to move Claude, but the ‘leaf thief’ returned to his buffet a few days later.
“I put a towel around him and moved him a few hundred meters further to a big tree at my neighbour’s house,” he said in a statement from the World Fund (WWF) for Nature-Australia.
“He was quite nervous when I came to pick him up.
“Two days later, Claude was back and he was hanging out every night tending to the seedlings.”
Having been eaten “out of house and home” by Claude, Mr. Herrington intends to build a fence around the nursery to prevent any creatures from entering the seedlings.
“I’m sorry Claude but the party is over. You eat me out of the house and out of the house so I started working on a fence to keep you out,” he said.
“It’s back to normal for you.”
In all the years Mr. Herrington has grown seedlings in his nursery, he has never seen a koala behave the way Claude does.
Claude had worked his way through thousands of plants that were being grown to help create new habitats for many animals like him.
“To me, that’s not a normal activity of a koala,” he told the Saturday Telegraph.
“However, they don’t have much choice about where they can get new food.
“There must be a shortage of food around here.”
The nursery grows all the seedlings on site, all of which help restore habitats through projects run by Bangalow Koalas and the World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia.
“These plants are well watered and fertilized and are top quality food for a koala,” said Tanya Pritchard, senior koala recovery officer at WWF-Australia.
“Claude developed a taste for champagne and with his ‘what are you looking at’ attitude he decided there was no denying it.