Cleland Park is a lovely reserve behind Mount Lofty near Adelaide in South Australia. There are many Australian animals, birds and other fauna here in a very natural setting. Come for a whole day and see the animals being fed. You can interact with many of them and have good coffee or other drinks and lunch while you are there.
We were feeding a couple of kangaroos and another 20 or so were either lying down or eating grass nearby when this koala jumped onto trash (bark and leaves) beneath a gum tree and started climbing it. The noise that it made startled the kangaroos, so the whole mob jumped to their feet and bounded quickly away before stopping once they realised that there was no real threat to them.
Koala (Phascolarctos cinereus)
This delightful little animal is often called a koala bear, but is not a bear, but a marsupial which carries its young in a pouch for up to six months. When the baby emerges from the pouch, the mother carries it on its back or under her belly until it is about one year old.
Koalas are indigenous to Eastern and Southern Australia and eat only certain varieties of eucalypt trees, moving from tree to tree as they need to eat about one kilogram (about 2.2 pounds) of leaves per day. Most of the day they spend asleep propped up in forks or hollows of trees, sleeping for around eighteen hours. Their feet have opposable claws which make it easier to climb trees and also to lock into place when they sleep to stop them from falling.
Koalas do not drink much water and get most of their liquid from leaves however; we have seen examples of koalas drinking in very hot weather or after escaping from bushfires. They have small pouches in their cheeks where they can store small amounts of food too.
In much of the Eastern Australia, their numbers have reduced as land has been cleared for agriculture, but in other places where they have been introduced (such as on Kangaroo Island in South Australia), they have become a pest animal and controls such as de-sexing has happened to reduce their numbers over time.
