On Sunday the Rescue Unit received a call from a farmer local to the Gympie region that had cut a koala off his barbed wire fence on Saturday. The family had done an excellent job in finding the koala, considering the size and remote location of the rescue, and once removed from the barbed wire had applied antiseptic spray and the Koala had jumped up into the nearest tree.

On closer inspection the next day, the family realised that the Koala was infact not using the lower right leg, which had been caught in the fence. Their call for help ended up with the AZRU and we headed up right away. They had also noticed that the Koala was indeed a female, and she had a young joey in the pouch.

When the team arrived at the farm, we drove all the way through the top paddock to the Koalas location - on a 10 metre spotted gum tree - on the fence line. She hadn’t moved trees since her rescue the previous day. Due to the delicate motion of getting her down out of the tree with her injured leg, the rescue team worked slowly and consistently with the koala poles. The team needed to encourage her down to the ground very slowly and in her own time so that there would be no chance of a fall or further injury.

During her decent, the team noticed that she had no control over the injured leg, with it even getting caught in the forks of branches. The Joey in the pouch appeared to be quite unfazed by the rescue mission, giving us quick glances throughout. Once on the ground, the team secured her into a Koala cage with some fresh tip leaf and loads of padding and blankets to make the 1.5 hour trip back to the Zoo on the dirt road a little less uncomfortable.

Once back at the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital, ‘Sam Toucan’, as she is now known, had immediate treatment by Dr Claude. We’re hoping that she is able to recover from her leg injury, while looking after that precious cargo she has in her pouch!

Barbed wire fences cause significant damage to our native wildlife, on Sunday we attended three rescue calls for animals caught on these fences, ‘Sam Toucan’ is very lucky to be alive. Inexpensive measures can be taken to alert native wildlife to the existence of these fences, including, securing flagging tape, old CD’s, shredded shopping bags to the top and bottom strings of wire every 5 metres, or even reconsidering the need for barbed wire on your fences at all. Check out www.wildlifefriendlyfencing.com for more ideas on how to protect native wildlife on your property.

If you see any sick or injured native wildlife, please call Australia Zoo Rescue Unit on 5436 2000.

Tags: Australia Zoo, Australia Zoo Rescue Unit, Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital, Barbed Wire, koala, wildlife. rescue

This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Australia Zoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.