Surprising Koala Facts | A Day with a Mother and Joey

Today, we follow a koala mother and her joey, who live in a eucalyptus forest in Australia. They sleep up in the trees, and when they wake, they eat leaves. Let us watch their slow, unhurried day.

Morning light poured into the eucalyptus forest. Sitting in the fork of a tree beside her mother, the little joey slowly opened her eyes. A koala's food is almost entirely eucalyptus leaves. It rarely eats anything else. Even awake, a koala's day is a slow one.

A koala spends about twenty hours of the day asleep.

The pair made their way along the branches, over to the next one. The joey clung tightly to her mother's back. What keeps them holding on to trunks and branches is their sharp, curved claws. With those claws, they grip the tree firmly.

Look closely at the front paws that grip the branch, and you will see two thumb-like fingers facing each other. With those fingers, a koala can hold a branch tight.

Before she takes a leaf into her mouth, the mother smells it well with her big nose. By the smell, she can tell a good leaf from a bad one. There are some nine hundred kinds of eucalyptus trees, but koalas eat only about seventy of them.

Once she starts eating, she munches on and on for a good while. In one day, she eats about six hundred to eight hundred grams of leaves. Eucalyptus leaves hold little nourishment, and they contain things that do not agree with the body.

Inside a koala's belly there is a large cecum, where the leaves slowly ferment, and the nourishment is drawn out.

When her belly is full, sleepiness comes again. The fork of a tree was a comfortable place for a koala to sit. The mother curled up, as if to hold her joey close. The afternoon in the forest passed by quietly.

Before this joey was born, she grew inside her mother's belly for only about thirty-five days. Once she was born, the tiny baby climbed up to her mother's pouch, all by herself. At birth, she weighed only about half a gram.

And she was only about two centimeters long. Inside the pouch, the baby grew for about six months. Drinking her mother's milk, she grew bigger little by little.

That pouch opens toward the back. It faces the opposite way from the pouches of other marsupials. Now, peeking out of the pouch is the joey's daily habit. Little by little, she was learning the world outside.

In time, the joey began to come out of the pouch. Once out of the pouch, a young koala rides on her mother's back to travel. She digs in her claws and holds on tight, so she will not fall.

Do they not get thirsty? A koala rarely comes down to a waterhole. The water they need comes from the eucalyptus leaves they eat. That is why a koala can live while drinking almost no water at all.

On the fingertips of the mother's front paws, there are fingerprints, just as in people. And what is more, the pattern is different for every single koala. The joey watched her mother's fingers move, very closely.

As evening drew near, the pair decided to move to another tree. There is no way to cross from tree to tree along the branches. A koala climbs down the trunk, walks on the ground on all fours, and heads for the next tree.

As the sun sank low, the forest was dyed in the colors of the sunset. Up in the new tree, the pair sat side by side and began to eat leaves again.

A young koala drinks her mother's milk and stays by her side for about a year. During that time, she learns how to choose leaves, too. One day, the joey will begin to live on her own. Koalas are animals that basically live alone.

By the time the sky had turned deep indigo, the pair had settled again in the fork of a thick branch. The forest at night is quiet. Only the small sound of leaves being eaten can be heard, softly.

Stars began to appear. The joey rested her chin on her mother's back and closed her eyes. A long sleep, leaves chosen by smell, and a baby born so very small. The pair's gentle day quietly came to an end.

In the wide eucalyptus forest, another day of the pair's life passed by today. Tomorrow, too, up in the trees.

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