SYDNEY: A koala survived a 16-km road trip in Australia, clinging to
the axle of a four-wheel drive vehicle, before the driver stopped and heard the
cries of the traumatised animal.
The female koala had crawled into the wheel arch while the car was
parked in the hills on the outskirts of Adelaide, the state capital of South
Australia.
The fire brigade was eventually called to take the wheel off in order
to help a wildlife rescue worker free the animal.
"I could smell her burnt fur," Jane Brister, from Fauna
Rescue, told Reuters in a phone interview on Saturday. "It would have been
hot in there."
"I searched that night and the next day, and the next, but I never
found it," she said.
After a couple of days of feeding in captivity, Brister released the
koala back into the wild.
The koala was listed as a "vulnerable" species under an
Australian conservation law in 2012.
There are fewer than 100,000 of the animals left in the wild, perhaps
even as few as 43,000, according to Australian Koala Foundation estimates. -
Reuters
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