Chasing the rare to inform all of us (Australia, southeastern and eastern coasts; spanning centuries to present-day): Imagine having “nowhere to go, nowhere to hide and no capacity to run” as a roaring fire heads your way “lighting up the horizon with a livid orange glow.” You live in a unique part of the world where bushfires are a way of life. In your world you’re rare. In the spiritual world, you’re a symbol of relaxation and peace. Yours are called “million dollar babies.” You’re simply “unlike anything else we know of.” Who are you?
If you hadn’t seen the cover and title of Danielle Clode’s newest book, would you guess you’re from a species around for some 37 million years yet only abundantly studied over the last twenty or so years?
Koalas are iconic symbols of Australia. Surprisingly, very little is known about them. Danielle Clode, an Australian zoologist/biologist, wants to change that. “It amazes me a creature this iconic and distinctive to Australia is so mysterious.” Her husband says, “Maybe there’s not much to know.” Her reply, Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future,” vividly shows “there is just a lot more to koala than meets the eye.”
In dedicating this unusual, beautifully told story, Clode confirms what the reader delightfully discovers: there’s something in this book everyone can enjoy and learn from. When Clode lays out a “perfect world” and fears of an “apocalyptic wasteland,” she’s not just speaking about koalas. “Quite literally,” she says, she’s standing up “to protect life as we know it.”
Koalas are a “singular creature: idiosyncratic and inimitable.”
Singular might be one way to describe the author too. How often does someone spend their childhood education sailing around a continent, then attending college and winning a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where she earned a doctorate in zoology? One might assume her curiosity to “tell the story of the koala” was instilled early on – seeing, experiencing a stunning and wild landscape of enormous, unique biodiversity. A word that encompasses all forms of life in a geographic region.
Clode, an award-winning, mostly nonfiction writer, did it the “hard way” to craft this captivating and quite accessible book combining creative and academic writing, which she teaches at Flinders University in Adelaide. The school states its commitment to the “Traditional Owners of Country” (numbering close to a million Aboriginal peoples), reflecting Clode’s respectful acknowledgements before and during – not after – Koala’s fascinating story unfolds.
Creating this book involved researching, visiting, interpreting, and integrating numerous fields of knowledge: “Botany, ecology, Indigenous knowledge, evolution, paleontology, anatomy, conservation biology, history, toxicology, psychology, veterinary and nutritional science, and animal behavior.”
Thanks to two American Presidents – Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover – koalas became popular and were saved back in the early 20th century. Teddy, the reason they’re called bears when they’re not. Hoover banned importing them for their soft and thick fur, leading Australia to bar exporting them so the killing stopped. Hoover provides an interesting example of the value of travel, appreciating koalas from his time gold mining in Western Australia.
This two-minute National Geographic video highlights some of the koala characteristics you’ll read about:
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/koalas-101
Two pages of compelling novelistic prose preface each of the book’s six parts – Into the Woods, From Fossils to Bones, Life in the Forest, A Life in Reflection, Everything Changes, and Future Tense. For instance, the opening sentence begins with: “A cool breeze ruffled the koala’s fur, causing her to stir in her sleep.” Sleep as in twenty hours a day, which has given them a bad rap that they’re dumb.
A few questions Clode explores argues why they’re smarter than we might think:
- Why do koalas only eat specific types of leaves from one species of tree: Eucalypts? A designation referring to “800 or 900” types of gum trees.
- Why do they choose only a handful of these species, such as river red gum, manna gum, swamp gum?
- How do they know which leaves they can eat? Especially when the leaves of these trees are toxic for other creatures? (Note: a eucalyptus plant is toxic to dogs and cats.) Key is how specialized their teeth and digestive system are to their survival.
Between sleeping and eating, koalas are “an almost entirely arboreal animal.” Why it’s highly unlikely to spot them in the wild. Perched high up in these trees, they find safety away from predators on the ground. When they do climb down its nightfall, when most people aren’t searching for them.
We learn that two-thirds of Australia’s mammals are marsupials, more than anywhere else in the world. Like the kangaroo, koalas have outside pouches for carrying and nurturing their babies called joeys – the difference between marsupials versus mammals. But their “remarkable” and complex digestive system puts them in a class of their own. So you’re not likely to see koalas in a zoo elsewhere in the world. Feeding them their select types of gum tree leaves, fresh, makes them the most expensive animal to care for and thrive outside their native forests. The San Diego Zoo is a leading exception. If you have time, you can watch them on the zoo’s live cam:
Many frown upon anthropomorphizing animals, but Clode’s discussion on how the joeys cling to their mothers and how their sense of touch is critical to survival is relatable and heartwarming. Koala fingerprints are unique like ours too. And like us, the tips of their fingers have a purpose: to make them more sensitive when they touch things. Are fingertips “as important to koala evolution as it has been to our own”? the author asks.
Wanting to understand “what’s it like to sit at the top of a tree – to see the world from a koala’s perspective –” Clode makes us wish we too could climb trees. She posits they’re able to spend so much time on their “rump” because they don’t have tails and the skin on their behinds is “extremely tough” with “particularly thick” fur. A “comfortable cushion.”
In dedicating her book to all people who care deeply about the environment and wildlife, climate change a thread and threat throughout, Clode shows herself to be a wonderfully observant nature writer, a dogged researcher (includes twenty pages of detailed resources), historian of evolution, and a passionate activist. It helps that we see koalas as “cute and cuddly,” though their claws act like razors.
Startling is an estimate that only 60,000 koalas remain, which led last year to their joining the growing list of Endangered Species. Ten years ago, koalas were classified as “vulnerable.” Despite Australia’s vastness, koalas are concentrated in only two regions in the country. Perhaps the continent’s size and species diversity is why they have the poorest record of preventing the extinction of mammalian species? Among the reasons Clode attributes to their dwindling population include agriculture and the timber industries; highly contagious “retroviruses” likened to HIV; and climate change, horrifically seen in increasingly catastrophic bushfires.
Danielle Clode lives in bushfire country. She wants us to care. About the fate of koalas, and what their story is telling us. About their need to “climb to freedom” – and ours.
Lorraine