Koala Count 2025

Wow! We had about 30 children and close to 100 adults join us for our Koala Count this year which was a fantastic turnout. The weather turned up as well so we were blessed with cool conditions, glorious clear blue skies and not a breath of wind, a perfect autumn morning.

The day began at 4am when Sean Fitzgibbon and his team from UQ set up their equipment on the sports oval to conduct the drone count using a thermal imaging camera. The thermal imaging requires cool conditions hence the early start. One of our walking group members was present and reported that it was a special experience to watch the koala team from UQ flying their heat sensitive drone over the area and a good opportunity to catch up with members of the Qld Koala Society. Sean reported that 26 koalas were spotted by the drone.

We had set up our HQ at the rotunda near the children's playground and our spotter volunteers began arriving just before 8am. At 8.15 Sean and Gary gave an introduction and participants chose their groups. We had divided the main walking tracks into six non-overlapping routes, some tracks were more challenging than others so participants chose accordingly. Each group was allocated a leader, an experienced spotter and note taker and we had 10 to 15 people in each group.

Afterwards we feasted on morning tea and awarded 'prizes' and certificates to all the children. In all we counted 24 koalas on the visual count which also enabled us to assess the health of the koalas we spotted.

Our thanks to bakers extraordinaire Heather, Joan, Laurel, Belinda and Phyllis and various anonymous others for all the home baked goodies we feasted on on our return to base.

Thanks to our partners at Brisbane City Council, Susan & Martha, and Dr Sean and his crew from the University of Queensland. We will donate the profits raised from the registration fee to two local koala organizations: the Queensland Koala Society and John Knights the koala rescuer.

OUR RESULTS:

Sean reported that his UQ team spotted 26 koalas via the drones in the morning. In our manual count our teams spotted a total of 24 koalas. It was surprising that our total numbers were so close because they were conducted in completely different ways and but it was concerning that the numbers were way down on our totals back in 2024. This could be due to any number of factors but it will be interesting to see why numbers we find during our next count in October.