Claude was caught when he gorged so many eucalypt plants in one night he ended up too full to move (Picture: Humphrey Herington)
A koala named Claude has been caught red-handed – or green-fingered – chewing his way through seedlings worth £3,000 at a nursery in Australia.
The sneaky marsupial broke into Eastern Forest Nursery, near Lismore in northern New South Wales, and helped himself to thousands of young eucalypt plants before staff stopped him.
He was found one morning sitting on a pole, drowsy with well-fed bliss among the stripped branches, bringing an end to months of cute criminality.
Nursery owner Humphrey Herington told BBC News: ‘He looked like he was full. He looked very pleased with himself.’
He added: ‘There were lots of plants missing that morning…
‘I guess that day he must have had a really big feed and was too tired to go back to his tree.’
Mr Herington swaddled Claude up in a towel and carried him over to trees around 300 metres from his nursery.
However, after just a couple of days the intrepid marsupial had ventured back in once again, and a team on the site is now busy building a koala-proof fence around its seedling tables.
The nursery is used to grow new plants which will later be used to try and boost the endangered koala population – so Claude might have been allowed to enjoy a lot more if he’d had a little more patience.
Claude, so named for his large claws, eyes up some unprotected seedlings (Picture: Humphrey Herington)
But Humphrey, who admitted to being ‘a little impressed’ by the koala, also told the BBC the behaviour made him a little worried about local resources.
He said: ‘I’ve been here for 20-odd years and this hasn’t really happened before.
‘Is it that there is a shortage of food?’
Australia officially announced koalas were an endangered species in February last year, after an already-declining population was devastated by bushfires that spanned the summer of 2019 to 2020.
The Australian Koala Foundation believes there are fewer than 60,000 left in the wild.
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Around £3,000 of damage was caused by Claude’s gluttonous spree.