In 2023, students at Wattle Grove Public School, near Holsworthy, were lucky enough to see a koala on their school grounds within a special plot of endangered Cooks River/Castlereagh Ironbark Forest.
As you can imagine little visitor raised a lot of excitement for koalas in their area. The school voted to name the koala ‘Koa’ and got in contact with Greater Sydney Landcare’s Southwest Sydney Koala Project to see what they could do help the local koala population.
Koala Monitoring at Wattle Grove Public School
In April and May 2024, Greater Sydney Landcareβs Sophie Blair delivered a two-part Wildlife Camera workshop for 12 stage 3 students interested in environmental projects. The students learned about citizen science, koalas and wildlife in the area, as well as how to monitor them with wildlife cameras.
The students were very excited and curious to see what would end up on the footage and couldn’t wait to come back to view it. They had very ambitious ideas such as seeing Eastern Grey Kangaroos, lots of koalas and even thought they might see a few foxes.
Sadly, due to the wet weather we had at the end of April and beginning of May, we didn’t get to see any wildlife activity on the cameras, but the students have hope to see Koa again.
Greater Sydney Landcare has kindly donated a wildlife camera kit for the school to continue their citizen science, and hopefully see more koalas on the grounds sometime soon.
About the Southwest Sydney Koala Project
Greater Sydney Landcare received funding from the NSW Government to help deliver the NSW Koala Strategy across the Campbelltown and Appin/Wilton areas.
The Southwest Sydney Koala Project includes conservation efforts such as encouraging connectivity with corridor plantings that include preferred koala food trees on private and public property. Numerous other conservation actions will be carried out in this partnership program between July 2022 and June 2026, including road kill mitigation, wildlife carer support, community engagement and awareness raising and education.
