Superintendent Veterinarian of Northern Rivers Koala Hospital Dr Kate Thomas has this message about koalas.
In just four days, 10 koalas have been hit by cars within our service area.
Seven have lost their lives.
Two have been left orphaned.
One is fighting for their life in intensive care.
Ten koalas. In four days.
Among them are young males moving through unfamiliar territory, searching for new home ranges. Mothers with dependent young. Healthy breeding females whose survival matters enormously to the future of our local koala population.
And among those we lost was Dexter.
Dexter had already fought his way through one battle. After weeks of treatment for chlamydia, he recovered. Just three weeks ago, we had the privilege of watching him return to the wild.
This weekend, he was hit by a car and killed.
We are heartbroken. We are frustrated. And, quite frankly, we are exhausted from seeing this happen again and again.
Our rescuers are being called to roadsides to collect koalas that never stood a chance. Our veterinary team is treating shattered bones, head trauma and devastating internal injuries. We are taking joeys from mothers who could not be saved. And then we turn around and do it all again for the next one.
*This is what it looks like to fight for an endangered species while watching them disappear in front of you.*
And we desperately need help.
We need our community behind us. We need the government to back us. And we desperately need financial support to keep rescuers on the road, our hospital running, our intensive care patients alive and our orphaned joeys cared for. We need to be able to keep saying yes when the next call comes in.
This is bigger than the ten koalas we have seen in the past four days.
Koalas are endangered in NSW and Queensland. We are living at a point in history where their future in the wild is not guaranteed.
There may come a time when hearing a koala bellow from the trees behind your home is no longer ordinary. When spotting one in a gum tree is something our children know from photographs and stories rather than from their own backyard.
We cannot look back and say we knew what was happening, but allowed it to continue.
Ten koalas in four days should make all of us angry. It should make us uncomfortable. And it should make us act.
Because extinction doesn’t happen all at once. It happens one loss at a time, until one day we realise how quiet our forests have become.
Please don’t wait until they’re gone to realise how lucky we were to have them.
You can support us through a donation, by spreading the word, or by lending a hand through volunteering. Every bit of support helps our team keep showing up for these animals when they need us most.
We still have the extraordinary privilege of living alongside wild koalas.
Please help us make sure we are not the last generation that does.