The Port Macquarie Koala Hospital offers free tours at 3pm, so today I took them up on that generous offer.

The hospital was a little outside the town centre, and had a good bit of bush surrounding it:

The hospital itself:

The place had some pretty exciting decorations around it – this was a mural outside:

And there were three funky koala statues:

I think I like the leaf one best.  Eucalyptus leaves on a koala statue just seems very appropriate.

They also had this guy outside:

Pretty good advertisement, really – leaves you in no doubt where you are.

There was a case of preserved baby koalas – from ‘pinkie’ to ‘ready to leave the pouch’.  The photo is at a funny angle because this was the only way I could minimise reflection:

I also got a koala stamp on my hand:

It wasn’t mandatory or anything.  They brought it out for the kids, and asked if anyone else wanted one.  I put my hand up, because who doesn’t want a koala stamp, right?

Then it was time to meet the koalas!  I only got to see the permanent residents, because those koalas that are going to be released need minimal human contact.

This is where the koalas are kept:

This is the first koala I saw – Elparra David:

The names are in two parts – the first part is where the koala was found, and the second is the name of the person who found them.  The volunteers referred to him as a ‘repeat offender’, in that he’d been taken to the hospital, treated and released multiple times.  Now he’s a permanent resident because trauma and infection have made him almost completely blind, which means he can never be released into the wild.

They do say he’s adapted well to captivity, though – I guess he figures he’s onto a good thing.  And with a nice shelter from the weather and food brought to him every day, why not?  As far as he’s concerned, this is the high life.  I even took some video of him eating:

 

You can see that his eyes have something wrong with them in the video.  Now for another koala – a female called Ocean Summer:

She’s been at the hospital since she was joey, again for vision problems like David.  But her vision difficulties are from brain damage that occurred when she and her mother were hit by a car (her mother died).  She seemed to like climbing, though, and was pretty active, as evidenced by all the photos I took of her:

Well, she’s not very active in the last one, but koalas sleep for over 18 hours a day – what do you expect?  She also seemed to like licking the wood:

I’m not sure why she was doing that, but she seemed happy about it.

This Emerald Downs Mary, in the same enclosure:

Again, she had issues with her eyes and one actually had to be removed.  She wasn’t terribly active, and seemed to prefer sleeping and nibbling on the leaves.  I did get her after she had a little climb, though:

You can see the closed lid over the missing eye pretty clearly in that one.  Next up is NATF Zenani:

She was found in the aftermath of a bushfire, and several digits on her hands and feet were burned so badly the claws can’t grow properly.  This means that, while she can ascend on an angle, she can’t climb vertical tree trunks and so can’t be released.

This is her, back in the shelter:

As you can see, her little hands and feet don’t look quite right.  I took a close-up:

This is Barrington Xavier:

He’s another one with vision problems – it seems to be a common issue that stops release back into the wild.  While I was watching, he descended to the ground and walked in circles around his little ‘tree’:

Then he just sat down in front of it, like he’d done what he had to do, but it was just too much effort to climb back up:

This is Oxley Kaylee:

Yeah, she didn’t move from that position the whole time.  We’ve all been there.  If you look closely, you can see that her back leg ends in a stump – she was hit by a car, and it needed to be amputated.

They also had plaques commemorating some of the more interesting koalas, both from the hospital and the general area.  I took some photos for you all:

Hopefully Garage Girl passed some of her road safety awareness onto her offspring.  And finally:

To put this in perspective, most koalas live up to 18 years (Garage Girl making 20 is unusual), so Birthday Girl’s record doesn’t look like it’s going to be broken anytime soon.

Then it was back to Turtle Shell for some dinner, and to write all this up.