THE KOALA PARADOX

Koalas, a much-loved icon, are both endangered and abundant in Australia. We look at the big picture across an even bigger country

- Words by RICHARD MUSGROVE

I'T'S 2AM AND Grandpa Boofhead is feeling frisky, his bellows echoing through the moonlit eucalyptus trees around my house in the Adelaide Hills, South Australia.

It's early spring, the breeding season, and those calls will carry for kilometres.

Grandpa Boofhead - the name given to him by my children - is the southern koala type. All koalas are the same species (Phascolarctos cinereus) but he's twice the size of his northern cousins, sporting darker, shaggier fur.

We met Grandpa Boofhead in 2007, when we moved into his neck of the woods. We regularly see him, usually at night, ambling between trees. He bellows now from his favourite perch, metres away from our bedroom window, signalling his readiness to mate. Things can get a little rowdy when his girlfriends, Elvira and Bunny, add their voices to the chorus.

Our fondness for our wild neighbour is echoed far and wide. The koala is beloved not only in Australia but around the world, generating billions of dollars in tourism revenue. You'd think, then, that its future would be secure. But today, the koala is both endangered and overabundant. It's a paradox that makes conservation far from straightforward.

Humanity's relationship with this endearing marsupial has had a chequered history. Koalas were once widespread across the bush-clad length of eastern and southeastern Australia – from Queensland down to Victoria and west into South Australia – perfectly adapted to a life of munching eucalyptus leaves in coastal forests.

That is, until the 19th century, when fur traders arrived. Entrepreneurs spotted the potential offered by koalas' warm, waterproof pelts and the slaughter began. Eight million skins had been exported by the time public outcry stopped the trade in 1927.