Mountain Tails by Sharyn Munro

having been woken by all my banging.
    Last year I saw a koala in the adjoining national park, on the next ridge where those fires did not reach. This one looked healthy, and was gadding about in bright morning daylight instead of sleeping. The fur of its rump was almost yellow in colour. So I know they are still around in these mountains, and can only hope they breed up enough to reclaim my place as new territory, for the young ones must move away when about eighteen months old to make their own way in the world.
    In any given area koalas feed on only a few species of eucalypts; here one of their preferred trees might be the blue gums, of which there areplenty. To process the large amount of leaves eaten daily, I read that a koala has an extraordinarily long caecum, the pouch between the small and large intestines. At about 2 metres long, even compared to that of other herbivores like rabbits or horses, it’s huge.
    I had to look up the word ‘caecum’, and it really just means ‘blind’, in the sense of a blind alley, a dead end. So koalas have a long blind alley, whereas we just have a sort of bay window in our intestinal pathway. You’ll locate it better if I tell you that ours is what the appendix tags on to, another dead end which has evolved to be so small that its proper name is the ‘vermiform’ appendix—that means wormlike!
    We don’t eat as many raw greens as our ancestors did, when the appendix wasn’t just a vestigial organ, a small nonfunctioning remnant, a mere vestige of one that was once necessary. (I confess I checked ‘vestigial’ when I looked up ‘vermiform’; I love dictionaries!) Now its only purpose seems to be to become blocked, get inflamed, cause the pain of appendicitis, require removal and hence stress out young ladies who wear very skimpy bikinis. We must be evolving, as some people are born without one at all.
    In poorer countries, less subject to marketing, with less access to takeaways and processed food, and thus where people still eat more fresh plant material and fibre—although not gum leaves—appendectomies are rare and the appendix is still considered to have a purpose. So are we in the West evolving backwards?
    The koala could teach us a few things about surviving on a restricted diet, as not many animals have so narrow a menu. Baby koalas have to be specifically prepared for this otherwise indigestible gum tree product diet. For seven months the usually lone offspring stays cosily milk-fed, developing in the pouch. Then it enjoys the good life, with free transport on Mum’s back and free food of milk and leaves for the next five months, until weaned at twelve months.
    Apart from their super caecum, koalas need certain bacteria to digest so much cellulose, plant fibre. The mother introduces the necessarybacteria to the intestines of her young one by also feeding it a special soft green faecal substance she produces from her anus—pre-digested leaf pap. This unusual and effective process might spoil some tourists’ romanticised image of koalas, but after all, a koala’s normal droppings are just processed leaves, aren’t they?
    I think it’s an extraordinary example of super-adaptation. Living here, I often find myself shaking my head: evolution, God—I don’t know to whom the credit is due, but I know it’s truly amazing and we’re the dumbest of the lot if we think we know even half of how it works. And that’s despite centuries of killing and cutting up creatures to try to find out.
    Watch, and wonder, is a better way.
    But to do that with koalas, I need them back here. In the mating season, apart from the savage sounds they make, males rub against tree trunks, marking them with their scent from a gland on their chests, to warn off other males. So I ought to be able to spot such rubbings.
    I’ll be on the alert, looking and listening this year. Maybe I need to hang a sign