When I was out walking late yesterday with Steve and my 5 year old son we had competition to see how many animals we could each spot.

It was starting to get dark and my son was quite proud of himself having spotted a grasshopper, a king fisher bird and a sting ray from the Weyba Creek footbridge. 

We figured that each of these were worth 10 points each.

I could only claim 10 points for a butterfly.

"50 points" said Steve, as he pointed towards a koala, sitting low in the fork of a tree about 10 metres into the reserve from the path we were on.

We then hurriedly walked the 2 minutes home to grab the camera, along with child number 2 and the spotlight, to take some photos. The following photo was the best of the bunch, however please excuse the lighting!

It was the first time in many months since we had seen a koala in our area.  We have heard them at night, but had not spotted one for a while. 

However... I am not so sure if one animal alone can really be worth 50 points, but we had lost the motivation to argue, and let Steve win.

But I was quite excited as I could now fill in the Biosphere Koala survey! The survey is located on the left hand side of the home page of this website, and has been designed to help keep track of this threatened species. 

Questions are asked about where and when the koala was sited, any injuries or problems and the general frequency of koala sitings in your area.

Answers will be pooled in collaboration with other environmental and animal welfare orgranisations who are tracking and monitoring koalas, to help assist our community to better understand koala movements in our region.

On the way home after our adventure, we couldn't help but then try and sneak another couple of points for this Koala (below) as well... but our son wouldn't allow it.