Koalas numbers in “terminal decline”

I'm not surprised people would think so. The export trade in koala skins didn't end until 1927. And only then because the Americans prohibited the import. Between 1888 and 1924 at least 8 million koala skins were exported. By the end of the 1920s there was hardly a koala to be found in NSW. That's why people don't remember seeing them in the 1930s and 1940s...

The Koala population hasn't recovered from that genocide. It's estimated by the Australian Koala Foundation that 99% of Australia's koalas died in that hunting frenzy. 

The tiny remnant populations of koalas are suffering from a myriad of threats. Yes, they are the victims of dog attacks and vehicle strike. Many have chlamydia, thought to be stress-related. But as well, their forests, their trees, their homes, and being cleared by humans - for development, for grazing, for timber.

It's not conservation organisations claiming the koalas are threatened with extinction, it's the NSW Government's Scientific Committee and the Federal Government's Scientific Committee and the chief scientist of the Australian Museum, Rebecca Johnson. But Mr Bryson knows better, he says 'koalas are not in decline', perhaps he doesn't 'believe in science' and maybe also thinks the planet is cooling.

The claim that if you 'fly over the forests to the west of Wauchope in a helicopter you will see plenty of them (koalas)' is laughable. Unlike Steve, we don't have a helicopter, but so far in all the drone footage that's been filmed there's not a koala to be seen. 

As for asking me to prove that our forests are in danger, Steve does that himself in his letter. When he was growing up there were '26-plus working timber mills'. In those days the trees were large, but trees grow slowly. Like the hunting of the koalas, the tree populations haven't recovered either. There are no oldgrowth trees with nesting hollows that have grown since Steve's childhood. Those trees take 150-200 years to come back. That's why it's not just the koalas that are threatened with extinction, it's also the Powerful, Sooty and Masked Owls, the Greater Glider and the Yellow-bellied Glider, the Glossy-black Cockatoo and the many others that depend on tree hollows in old trees to breed.

If readers want to see for themselves, go for a drive through the forests and have a look. Where once the canopy was dominated by giants that it took ten people to hug, now a child can get their arms around the average tree.

And it's not just our forests that are being damaged and the animals and plants that live there, it's also the capacity for forests to soak up and release water and to store carbon and to provide nectar. 

It's time that the forests that belong to the people of NSW, our public forests, were managed for the public good... and that means they need to be managed by an organisation other than the Forestry Corporation who are managing them to terminal decline.

Susie Russell

Elands