A bunch of happy koalas have finally made their way back home, after the devastating bush fires that ravaged the country from the last summer into earlier this year.
A heartwarming footage released by the ACT Parks and Conservation Service on Thursday, shows the group of koalas returning to the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve in Canberra. After they were kept at safety at the Australian National University, Billy, Jed, Yellow, Gulu and Scully have returned were they belong, in the wild. However, the cute marsupials didn’t came back empty handed, though, as Yellow returned with a little baby in her pouch.
“We estimate she’s about three months old,” wildlife expert Dr. Sarah May told Nine News. “She’s going to poke her head out in a couple of months, they poke their heads out at around five, six months, and that’s when we’ll start to know whether it’s a boy or a girl.”
With the return of these koalas and the birth of the first koala baby since the wildfires, things seem to get back to normal in Australia. And there’s hope the wildlife and the environment will thrive once again, after the catastrophic bush fires. “Everything’s just coming back to normal,” Dr. May said. “We are getting back to a sense of normality.”
The Minister for the Environment and Heritage Mick Gentleman has released a statement in order to encourage locals to visit the returning marsupials. “We saw the habitat loss and the loss of animals as well, so it’s wonderful to be able to see these animals return here,” he said. “The koalas were returned in good health to Tidbinbilla in late February and have been housed behind the scenes in secluded enclosures while the team refurbished the public display enclosure in the Eucalypt Forest.”
For over 240 days since the summer of 2019 until early 2020, Australia was in a constant fight with the devastating blaze. Unfortunately, the effects on the country’s native wildlife have been dramatic. The ecologists at the University of Sydney said that over one billion animals have died due to the bushfires.
h/t: facebook
