Claude the koala goes on $6k rampage at NSW nursery

A koala with a very big appetite ate his way through thousands of dollars worth of seedlings — until a nursery owner caught him green-handed.

When thousands of dollars worth of tree seedlings went missing in a NSW nursery, everyone was very confused.

Eastern Forest Nursery owner Humphrey Herington first thought possums were the culprits, the Saturday Telegraph reported.

The mystery continued for two months as new leaves intended for koala habitat restoration projects would disappear overnight.

But one morning, Mr Herington caught the real thief in the act. It was a male koala in the midst of a food coma, too full to get away.

The culprit was initially thought to be a possum. Picture: Eastern Forest Nursery/Saturday Telegraph

Named Claude due to his large claws, the koala’s undoing was being too full to climb back his tree, Mr Herington told the Saturday Telegraph.

“That’s when we realised it was a koala not a possum,” he 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.”

But it was only two days before Claude was back for more, getting his paws back into the seedlings. All up, he’d swallowed “thousands” of them, racking up a bill of $6,000.

Claude had eaten his way through $6,000 worth of seedlings. Picture: Eastern Forest Nursery/Saturday Telegraph

In an effort to stop the hungry fur ball, Mr Herington is working on building a fence on the northern rivers nursery, which has been growing koala food trees for more than two decades.

But in all the years the nursery has been growing seedlings, Mr Herington said it was the first time he’d seen a koala get inside it.

“To me this is not normal koala activity,” he told the Saturday Telegraph.

“However, they don’t have too many choices of where they can go to get new food. There must be a shortage of food around here”.

All seedlings are grown on-site and go to restoration initiatives led by community group Bangalow Koalas and the World Wide Fund (WWF) for Nature, Australia.

Last year, WWF funded Bangalow Koalas to plant more than 10,000 trees near the Eastern Forest Nursery in an effort to fight habitat loss.