By Janine Duffy
Exhausted and filthy, I stood in the valley of a fenced-off, revegetated creek in Teesdale, Victoria with my small team. It was 25th September 2024 and we had just planted tree #35,092 for the 2024 season. We were all filthy because it had rained overnight and the fertile floodplain had become a grey slippery mire, making planting much harder than it should be, but very funny.
I checked my email and a familiar address caught my eye: Wildlife Research – Decision on Manuscript. I braced myself for disappointment, but the first line filled my cup. “It is a pleasure to accept your manuscript entitled ‘On the nose: validating a novel, non-invasive method to identify individual koalas using unique nose patterns’ in its current form..”
The full, open access paper is here, and I’d love if it you could read it: https://www.publish.csiro.au/WR/WR24131
But this is a personal story.
In a blink, I was back in the Brisbane Ranges, just west of Melbourne Victoria, in December 1999, looking at two male koalas in trees just a few metres apart. Big Bloke was in front of me, at the top of a small tree, close enough for my cheap compact binoculars to show some detail. At least I thought it was Big Bloke. I looked him over, fascinated by every part of him.
I had so many questions, and most of them had no answers, at least in the books I could find.
I was looking for a way to know that he was Big Bloke, and not some other bloke. I had been looking for a sure way to tell them apart all that year, and no luck.
For the hundredth time, I checked his ear shape, face shape, wrinkles around his eyes, pale fur on his upper lip, white spots on his back, legs and rump, and nose …. and saw his nose pattern.
I ran over to the other male, Eureka. He looked down at me, and in perfect light his completely different nose pattern shone. I had found it.
But that was just the beginning. Ahead of me was a long, winding and bumpy road, full of love and learning, meeting wonderful people and koalas, that would culminate in a scientific discovery. With my name on it.
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1999 to 2006: Development of the koala nose pattern method, and a lot of learning.
For seven years I documented the nose markings of the wild koalas we found in the Brisbane Ranges. At first I drew them in a little black address book, under their alphabetical names, and recorded the dates I saw them. Ingrid, Paty, Santa Barbara, Bear, Garry, Blaze, Wilma, Clarence, Poppy, Russell Crowe, Daisy, Matilda, Rocky still live in these handwritten pages, though they are long gone from the gum trees. I still treasure these tattered little black books.
Today, when I look back, I find my drawings amusing, far too simple and a bit naive. But it was a start.
I am not a scientist. I studied as an architect, so I can sketch and visualise and do a bit of maths, but my biology was Year 12 level only.
The koalas became my personal passion project. Fortunately for me, I was a Wildlife Guide and I was able to indulge my passion on my work days too. My partner Roger was very supportive, loved learning with me, and didn’t mind me disappearing for a week when things were quiet, so I could camp in the Bush just watching koalas.
I’ll never forget the time he brought me warm porridge during a deluge in 2005. My car wouldn’t start due to the cold, so he drove an hour in the early morning, getting through on roads that would be closed from floodwaters an hour later. After we got the car started the roads were closed to Melbourne, so we went to Geelong and enjoyed the best coffee I’ve ever tasted, with Auntie Gwenda at the Wathaurong Co-op.
I look back on those days, and realise that I knew next to nothing about koalas. But I was learning.
Some of my questions started to find answers.
Qu 1: Did the nose pattern change over life? Possibly not. I was able to watch koalas Ingrid & Poppy for 5 years; Tess, Blaze & Yobbo for 4 years; Bear, Ignatius & Wilma for 3 years and found that their nose patterns didn’t change at all.
Qu 2: Was the nose pattern unique to each koala? Probably. By 2003 I had recorded 26 nice clear obvious nose patterns and no two were the same. But there were others that I couldn’t see clearly enough to be confident that they were unique.
In 2003 I was gifted my first pair of good binoculars, by the wonderful Barry Griffiths of Quest Nature Tours, and I could finally see details in the nostrils. I could now separate those koalas with similar and subtle patterns. I saw that some noses could be distinguished by small, but consistent notches, projections and spots. My drawings became more detailed.
About the same time I acquired a digital camera, and though the quality was poor, I could start to show stability in nose patterns over years.
Qu 3: Why were the koalas disappearing? By 2005 I had noticed that koala numbers were reducing and they were missing from areas they frequented in the early 2000s. But the trees were still there, and to my eyes, unchanged. I had no answers.
In those days I had support from many people – Belinda, Mel, AB and Alison who found koalas and filled in hand-drawn maps, Caz & Bart, and Gwenda who supported and encouraged, and wonderful Marilyn from Beremboke Wildlife Shelter who encouraged me to spread the word about the noses.
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Making use of the koala nose marking method
Initially I was hoping to recognise individual koalas to learn about their life histories.
I watched Ngardang, first seen as a joey with her mother Babarrang in 2014, grow up, set up home immediately to the north of her mother, and have six joeys of her own. Over the same timeframe Babarrang had another 3 joeys, one of whom, Djadja, set up home to the east of Ngardang.
All through 2019, I could walk and find seven koalas from 3 generations of the same family, and know precisely how they were related.
I never took it for granted, knowing these life histories and family trees. It had been my dream when I was starting out in my mid-20s.
Beautiful female Pat was Smoky’s dependent joey in 2006 when I first met her. I watched as she set up home inside her mother’s range (she took the north end, Smoky took the south end – establishing a sensible mother/daughter relationship they gave each other a bit of space, until one needed the other!). Pat had three joeys, all males – Pitta in 2008, Clancy in 2010 and Banjo in 2012. Pat and Banjo were in the tree above Smoky when she died in 2012.
You can see Smoky in this video by National Geographic in 2007 (she’s the koala I look up at): https://youtu.be/5PpOdgsLl6g
On Smoky’s death, Pat inherited all her mother’s real estate, and stayed there until her death in 2022.
As you can tell, these koalas became treasured individuals to me. They became important to a whole lot of people from around the world, too. Film crews and news teams came to film Clancy, thrilled to learn the life story of a charismatic male koala. A book was written about him. His birthday: 3 May, became Wild Koala Day and is still celebrated all over the world.
To help him start out as a young male in a habitat already full of koalas, my business Echidna Walkabout (now part of Australian Geographic Travel) started a weed removal program in the You Yangs. To this day we’ve removed 4.3 million Boneseed weeds from around his home.
None of this could have happened without recognition of the individual koala. The nose pattern is the non-invasive ear tag or microchip.
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2006 to 2020: Applying the nose pattern method to a new population of koalas.
On 20th and 21st January 2006 we lost most of the Brisbane Ranges koalas to a bushfire. A chunk of my heart was sliced out that week. I am writing this 18 years after that fire, and the memories are still fresh and the grief hasn’t left me.
Bear, Ingrid and Jamie survived – I don’t know how. Garry and SantaBarbara survived the first wave, were taken into care, and subsequently died there. But all the others perished. 18 years later, though there are plenty of trees with leaves, there is no koala population there, only the occasional animal passing through.
Devastated, in late January 2006 Roger and I started looking for koalas in the You Yangs. We found a decent population there – initially 0.19 koalas per hectare (though it would fall to 0.08 in 2018 & 2019 and is still falling).
In the You Yangs, things were quite different. River Red Gum was the primary roost tree, and their magical silvery-cream branches provided photogenic hammocks for the koalas. Koalas came to tolerate me quite quickly, and even walked along the ground in front of me. My visits increased, I got others involved and their photographs and observations swelled and complemented my own.
I was feeling pretty confident with the nose patterns by this time. I tried to get the word out – I wrote blogs, presented at conferences, created a booklet. Scientists mentioned our work in The Conversation. But the scientific partnership I hoped for didn’t yet eventuate.
Technology, equipment and systems improved, and I was able to answer a few more questions.
Qu 1: Did the nose pattern change over life? In most cases, No. I was fortunate to know Pat her whole 17 year life. Her nose pattern in her 18th year was recognisable to a casual observer armed only with a photo of her as a joey.
Similarly, male Winberry, first found as a young adult in 2009, was completely recognisable from a photo of him in 2022. These were two of 36 koalas that I was fortunate to know for over 6 years.
Qu 2: Was the nose pattern unique to each koala? Yes. After documenting 156 koala noses I am confident that even the most similar can be reliably separated every time, provided you can see them properly.
Qu 3: Why were the koalas disappearing? Unfortunately the trend of declining population was repeated in the You Yangs. But there were the beginnings of an answer, and it was climate change – in 2008 this media release came out from the Australian Academy of Science, (and was followed by several papers) showing that eucalyptus foliage was declining in nutritional value: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080508131118.htm#
And drought and heatwaves weren’t helping either.
During this time I had help from so many people its impossible to name you all. But in particular, our Guides Martin, Scott, Kirby, Brett, Michael, Amy, Hayley and Bill, and researcher Bart, and supporters Mark H and Paul R.
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Black Summer hell, and a scientific partner.
2019-2020 was hell, and I’m not thinking about Covid. I watched in horror as koala habitat was incinerated from Queensland to Victoria. Every living creature in the east of my state was pretty much obliterated. By us. With our planet-destroying desire for fossil fuels.
I felt grief, and a deep shame. Covid came, and an era of watching koalas in the You Yangs was interrupted.
Then in 2022, Pat died. I have never felt so low, and for such a long time.
But there were bright spots.
Koala Clancy Foundation, the organisation I founded in 2015, planted 40,000 trees. Some of those are pretty big trees now, and providing home for birds, insects, possums and koalas. I can smile knowing those bleak years weren’t wasted. We couldn’t have done any of this without Maria, Caz and Eliza, and the Board and staff of Koala Clancy Foundation.
Another bright spot came in late 2019, when I heard from Dr Valentina Mella at University of Sydney. I had followed her work on koalas drinking from water troughs mounted in trees. Now she contacted me about some observations I had made of koalas drinking rain as it ran down the trunk of the tree.
We now know this is called stemflow. We now know it can be an important water source for animals, particularly arboreal animals like koalas. But we didn’t know then.
Val had been sent a video of a koala drinking rain. Then she found a blog of mine about it: https://koalaclancy.wordpress.com/2018/05/02/do-koalas-drink/
My team had been observing this behaviour since 2007, and we had video, photos and tree details. Together with my colleague Caitlin Orr, we worked with Val to produce this paper in 2020: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/eth.13032
At 15 years of age, Pat the koala became a cover girl! My picture of her drinking stemflow graced the cover of Ethology for August 2020, and every major news agency around the world featured the story, many using her photo.
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Finally, a scientific paper about koala nose patterns.
Val and I stayed in touch, and worked together on another projects, and I mentioned that I could recognise koalas from their noses. I remember the look of shock on her face. She stopped what she was doing, and said “What? You can recognise them? How have we missed this!” Since then, she has encouraged, supported, edited, found students to help, and pushed this paper forward.
After all this time, I was a bit reluctant, and uncertain that I had the skills to write a scientific paper. I read peer-reviewed papers all the time these days, and I know how much time, knowledge, statistics, analysis and referencing goes into them. But she was having none of it.
“You have to write it,” she said. “It’s your discovery, and you have to be the primary author.”
So I did.
https://www.publish.csiro.au/WR/WR24131
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Acknowledgments
My eternal gratitude to Dr Valentina Mella, and Tori Stragliotto, my co-authors. It was a team effort. Also thanks to the students who volunteered their time to match nose patterns: Emer Cahill, Josh Hall-Johnston, Jack Downey and Maria Costantino.
Most of all, to my partner Roger Smith. He supported all my crazy ideas, helped me work them through into practical improvements, read my writings, comforted my grief, shared my joy, and made our home and work a place for wildlife lovers.
