Port Macquarie Koala Hospital helps save koalas and wildlife devastated by bushfires
Anwen the koala was injured in the devastating bushfires on the mid-north coast of NSW. The juvenile female is one of many wildlife animals suffering due to the blazes and the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital is treating them — but they need help.
NSW
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With pink bandages on her paws, singed ears and scorched fur, Anwen the koala doesn’t look particularly lucky.
But this juvenile female is a furry bundle of hope that koala populations may be able to eventually recover from the devastating mid-north coast bushfires that have destroyed large swathes of critical breeding habitat.
Between 250 and 350 koalas are believed to have died and it will take at least 30 years to restore the area’s breeding population to pre-fire numbers, said Cheyne Flanagan, clinical director of Port Macquarie Koala Hospital.
The hospital is caring for 12 koalas brought in from fire grounds, all of whom are under five years old, including Anwen.
”We found her about six days after the fire and like all the animals she was incredibly dehydrated,” Ms Flanagan said.
The hospital team, which includes 150 volunteer carers, spent a day syringing electrolyte fluids into Anwen’s mouth while she rested in her “five star hotel”: A laundry basket with a pillow, a fluffy towel and another laundry basket on top to make a cosy house.
The next day Anwen — named after local girl Anwen Pullen, 8, who has been baking brownies for volunteers at the hospital, along with her sister Elsie, six — went under a general anaesthetic to have her burns cleaned, dead flesh trimmed away and burns dressings and creams applied before being bandaged up.
“It’d be ideal to change the bandages every day but you can’t do it to them because they need a general anaesthetic every time,” Ms Flanagan said.
“They’re a wild animal.”
As Anwen slumbered in her laundry basket home, where she’ll stay until she’s completely healed and the experts can find a safe patch of bush to return her to, the hospital took delivery of the first of a new innovation to help the population recover: Custom-made automatic drinking stations.
These are elevated water tanks with waist-high and ground-level water dishes enclosed in mesh, allowing koalas, goannas, birds and frogs to rehydrate while staying safe from cats, foxes and other predators.
The hospital has launched a GoFundMe page to raise $25,000 to buy more stations. Searchers are still going into smouldering fire grounds to look for surviving koalas, and during the week found a miraculously unburnt patch of virgin bush in a fireground close to The Ruins Way near Port Macquarie.
“The really awful part is they found a section of unburnt country and there were mothers and joeys in the trees,” Ms Flanagan said.
“They thought it looked safe so they left them. On Thursday afternoon that’s what went up, so all that has to be researched.”
Donate at koalahospital.org.au/ or gofundme.com/f/help-thirsty-koalas-devastated-by-recent-fires