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This is Karen, she’s about five years old, and she was hand-raised at the park.
When I first met her, she was a tiny little joey. She’d just lost her mother to cancer, so we had to hand-raise her.
A Koala is a type of marsupial.
It’s closest relative is actually the wombat.
It is not a bear. It does not have the koala-fications.
So, when a koala joey is born, it’s usually about this big. And it’s born incomplete, so it doesn’t have any legs or arms, it doesn’t have any fur, it doesn’t have any eyes or ears, and it will crawl up into the mom’s pouch
and that’s where it will stay for several months, growing and developing.
If a joey needs to be hand-raiased, we can get a special koala-formula milk that we make up.
Depending on how old they are, they’ll need bottles every few hours. Lots of warmth, lots of sleep, and then introducing the eucalyptus leaves.
Yeah, it comes down to the food… the lack of what’s in their food that’s the main problem for the koalas.
There’s just such a little amount of energy in their leaves that they can’t stay awake for all that long.
Because they need their eighteen to twenty hours of sleep every day… if they don’t get all of that sleep, they can actually suffer from stress.
Most of the other koalas would sleep, and be content letting people touch.
Karen wanted to get down and chase people. She wanted to crawl up your leg. She wanted you to hold her constantly.
But it was taming this wild koala who just wanted to be held.
She’s very obliging, and she loves the cuddles, and she often seeks out the cuddles. If we walks through the enclosure, and she’s sitting in the trees, she’ll let us know that she wants a cuddle.
She’s the coolest koala in the world. I really miss Karen.
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