Naughty koala eats thousands of seedlings bound for wildlife park

His stomach must have been growling.

A hungry koala bear repeatedly slipped onto a farm in Australia to chow down on a total of $6,000 worth of seedlings being grown specifically for his species — and was only caught when he finally ate too much one night and became too stuffed to climb away.

“I noticed some of my seedlings were being chewed off and I thought it was probably a possum,”  Humphrey Herington of the Gundurimba nursery in New South Wales, told abc.net.au.

“Every night, there’d be a few more and a few more [missing].”

He soon caught the cuddly crook — nicknamed Claude for his sharp claws — in a food coma after one of his feasts earlier this summer, he said.

“One morning we came out to work and Claude was sitting on a bench next to all these plants, just wrapped around a pole,” Herington said. “It seems like he’d had a really big feed that night, so I think he was too full to go and climb up his tree.”

A worker on the farm snapped a photo of the prolific plant thief looking wildly guilty near a patch of seedlings bound for a “Landcare group,” which manages greenspace that helps koalas thrive, he said. The animals were listed as endangered in the country in February 2022.

“I wrapped a towel around him and carried it down into my neighbor’s paddock 200 or 300 meters from the nursery and let him go in a tree,” Herington said. “But a couple of days later he was back.”

The farmer has since built a koala-proof fence to permanently keep away the mischievous marsupial.

“It’s basically just a netting fence with star pickets and it’s got a wobbly top on it, so if he tries to climb up the fence he’s going to swing back out and hopefully that will keep him out,” Herington said.

It was the first time in two decades that a koala had eaten his crop, he said.