Maxine was actually incredibly hard to find here!
@lanikyea asked the below yesterday and I wanted to give a long answer:
"I so enjoy your Koala photos. There is within me the feeling of looking at living kindness, of ancient wisdom and beauty of the spirit; the same feeling I get seeing or being near dolphins, our prairie antelope, elephants and hearing whale songs.
Are Koalas gentle as they look? Are they intelligent-they sure look wise. do they recognize you and know you and your camera are not a threat?"
Response:
@lanikyea thank you for such great questions :)
Koalas are not agressive, but the males are certainly territorial and any wild koala will defend itself with those sharp claws and long front teeth. The idea of a human picking up a wild koala is horrific to them and they can cause serious injury in panic at the giant monster attacking them.
But for the most part they sleep and eat - pretty zen really.
There are many things said about their very low intelligence, and they certainly do not have what we measure as high intelligence. But what is intelligence? So often we anthropomorphise when we talk of intelligence.
Koalas are in the unusual position of being neither a predator nor prey. There are a few natural predators that could take a young koala, and now in the world of destruction of their habitat they are facing humans, dogs and cars and they appear quite dumb as they try to make sense of the changes to their world. But really they were just never hard-wired to deal with predators being after them, so they think very differently to most animals.
Yes they do recognise me. It's very interesting how individual they are however, as some retain a long flight distance (which means even after repeatedly seeing me they begin to move away either behind branches or up the tree even when I am a long way from them). Some, like Legion that I have been photographing a lot lately are very calm (males tend to be calmer in general) and these ones I think learn to really recognise me and feel I am not a threat on a deeper level.
I have always been around animals and I do take care how I behave around them - I know the ones I can do silly things near to get a bright-eyed photo, and the ones that need a very quite approach and pretending not to see them ;)
Having said all that, I do volunteer with our rescue and rehab organisation and so I work closely with sick and injured koalas in care. A sick or injured koala nearly always becomes a very quiet animal, and it is an amazing experience to do some of the very intimate treatments they may need such as tending to severely infected eyes. It's amazing to watch them become more and more a wild animal again as they approach full health, and it's important to keep them wild so they can be released again once they are rehabilitated.
Again thank you for asking, they are fascinating, there is no animal anything like them in the world and I am incredibly privileged to live in their backyard and observe them daily - not many people have this privilege and less and less will as their habitat is destroyed rapidly.
