Claude ?the leaf thief? has found the best all-you-can-eat buffet a koala could hope for ? and he hasn?t held back.For weeks now, this large male koala has been raiding Eastern Forest Nursery in South Gundurimba in the New South Wales Northern Rivers region.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 $6,000 by now,? Mr Herington said.?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,? said Tanya Pritchard, Senior Manager Koala Recovery, WWF-Australia.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.
Claude was caught when he gorged so many eucalypt plants in one night he ended up too full to move (Picture: Humphrey Herington)

A koala named Claude has been caught red-handed – or green-fingered – chewing his way through seedlings worth £3,000 at a nursery in Australia.

The sneaky marsupial broke into Eastern Forest Nursery, near Lismore in northern New South Wales, and helped himself to thousands of young eucalypt plants before staff stopped him.

He was found one morning sitting on a pole, drowsy with well-fed bliss among the stripped branches, bringing an end to months of cute criminality.

Nursery owner Humphrey Herington told BBC News: ‘He looked like he was full. He looked very pleased with himself.’

He added: ‘There were lots of plants missing that morning…

‘I guess that day he must have had a really big feed and was too tired to go back to his tree.’

Mr Herington swaddled Claude up in a towel and carried him over to trees around 300 metres from his nursery.

However, after just a couple of days the intrepid marsupial had ventured back in once again, and a team on the site is now busy building a koala-proof fence around its seedling tables.

The nursery is used to grow new plants which will later be used to try and boost the endangered koala population – so Claude might have been allowed to enjoy a lot more if he’d had a little more patience.

Claude ?the leaf thief? has found the best all-you-can-eat buffet a koala could hope for ? and he hasn?t held back. For weeks now, this large male koala has been raiding Eastern Forest Nursery in South Gundurimba in the New South Wales Northern Rivers region. 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 $6,000 by now,? Mr Herington said. ?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,? said Tanya Pritchard, Senior Manager Koala Recovery, WWF-Australia. 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.
Claude, so named for his large claws, eyes up some unprotected seedlings (Picture: Humphrey Herington)

But Humphrey, who admitted to being ‘a little impressed’ by the koala, also told the BBC the behaviour made him a little worried about local resources.

He said: ‘I’ve been here for 20-odd years and this hasn’t really happened before.

‘Is it that there is a shortage of food?’

Australia officially announced koalas were an endangered species in February last year, after an already-declining population was devastated by bushfires that spanned the summer of 2019 to 2020.

The Australian Koala Foundation believes there are fewer than 60,000 left in the wild.

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