A group of Australian women holidaying on Magnetic Island, off the coast of Queensland, had quite a surprise over the weekend. The article, in The Times, doesn’t mention whether the three women were looking for steamy holiday romances with the island’s natives, but even if they were they can’t have been expecting the uninvited visitor who decided to drop in.
They were unsurprisingly shocked when the hirsuite, drug-addled, intruder ambled into their holiday home, and procedeed, without a word, to crawl on to one of their beds, where he made himself comfortable and settled in for a nap.
So, who was this interloper? One of the natives for sure, but not, as you might have thought, some kind of “surfer dude” gone feral, looking to rediscover the joys of “flaking out” on a real bed? No, this was an entirely different kind of native, a young male Koala from the National Park on Magnetic Island.
Fortunately the women did the sensible thing & called the local ranger, who arranged for the creature to be removed to a part of the island more frequented by his own kind, than by tourists. So all’s well that ends well, no harm done to the koala, or to the tourists. That latter might sound like an odd statement, but koalas, for all that they have a reputation as being cute docile creatures, can actually exhibit quite a mean streak when riled, & have pretty wicked claws; Afterall, how else do you think they clamber around in those trees so easily?
Another little known fact about the beasties is that their docile appearance is, at least in part, due to their diet of Eucalyptus which, while toxic to most creatures, apparently just gives the koalas a mild euphoric effect, or, if you prefer, gets them high!
Still, despite those claws, and a potentially nasty temper, if disturbed while going cold turkey, it turns out that, statistically speaking, the koala was far less likely to seriously hurt the trio of tourists then the beds themselves. Despite being genuinely soft and comfortable, beds are apparently far more dangerous than koalas, or so it appears judging by the stats for bed related deaths.
Actually, like many marsupials, koalas are quite interesting creatures, the wiki article isn’t massively comprehensive, but isn’t a bad place to start if you’d like to know more about them.
Tags: Weird stuff
[...] on Jun.12, 2009, under Uncategorized It’s something that I touched on briefly in my post, Strange Bed Fellows, last week, but the stats on bed related deaths, which I found while researching that piece, were [...]