Sean Dooley

So they follow that general pattern, but then they obviously respond to local conditions and will alter that.

So they're not fixed migrants like we think of normally with bird migration.

They are

Probably genuine nomads in that sense, although they have an ancestral pattern of movement that they will follow if it's a typical year.

Yeah, you do.

Now, I'm trying to think.

The only time I've seen it up there is actually up on the, kind of up over the range, like at Davies Creek, I think it was.

Davies or Emerald Creek, that was the first place I've seen them.

You definitely do get them in North Queensland, but it'd be really interesting to see whether you get them before they're down south or on the way back from down south.

Yeah, the really fascinating thing about the koal is that its migration patterns, well, not so much the patterns, but the extent of its migration is changing.

And whether that's due to urbanization and other alterations to our habitat,

or whether it's driven by climate factors is still up for debate, but really fascinating.

The koal that used to be known as one species that went from India to Australia, it's now been split into the Asian koal and the

Eastern or Pacific koala.

I can't remember what the official name is these days.

And the one that we get in Australia is the Eastern population, the Eastern species.

I think it's the Pacific koala, whatever it is.

They actually, almost 100% of the birds leave Australia in our winter.

And they spend the cooler months in places like New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and the Lesser Sundas in Indonesia.

They start coming back down to the northern Australia and then down the east coast.