5-Acre Grove Is a 5-Star Restaurant for Zoo’s Koala
It’s not surprising that a gardening project in Encino leaves people stumped.
Who would expect, after all, to find a koala food farm located between a quiet residential neighborhood and the Ventura Freeway?
But that’s where a eucalyptus tree plantation has been under cultivation for 22 years.
Some of the eucalyptus species grown by the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department tower nearly 100 feet into the air.
Hundreds of others are trimmed to form 6-foot stumps that are arranged in rows resembling an Illinois cornfield at harvest time.
The five-acre farm is carefully tended for a very exclusive customer: a single 2-year-old male koala named Baz who lives at the Los Angeles Zoo.
Half a dozen of the fuzzy, bearlike marsupials inhabited the zoo in 1982 when the eucalyptus farm was created. Over the years all but one have died of old age or been moved to other zoos for breeding.
These days, zoo operators are waiting with their fingers crossed in hopes of receiving a female koala when Baz becomes sexually mature in about two years and is ready for breeding.
And although Baz eats only about three pounds of eucalyptus leaves, snippets of bark and bits of seedpod “fruit” each day, workers must maintain the 1,000-tree Encino plantation.
That means cutting trees back so the succulent growth that koalas like won’t be too high to reach after the Australian government relaxes the export of the animals and more koalas arrive in Los Angeles.
Such cutting inevitably prompts protests from those who live near the tree plantation and from passersby who do not understand that they are looking at koala food.
“We had let the trees go awhile and they got 30 to 40 feet tall. Koalas like the fresh, tender growth you find at the top. That means you have to continually cut back,” said Michael Dee, animal collection curator for the zoo.
Koalas are so picky, in fact, that they will not eat leaves from the same tree several days in a row. Second-day cuttings taste different to koalas because of the defense that the tree mounts in reaction to being cut, Dee said. An interval of 10 days to a month is required before branches can be harvested again from the same tree.
That kind of finickiness causes problems everywhere koala food is grown.
In Australia, an estimated 80% of all eucalyptus trees have disappeared, the victim of land development and, in some cases, dieback.
A major campaign to re-vegetate habitat areas with koala “feed trees” was initiated five years ago. Some Australian zoos also have created their own eucalyptus plantations to provide a steady supply of high-quality leaves for koalas.
In parts of the United States that are too cold for eucalyptus, zoos with koalas have to hustle to find food supplies.
Growers in Florida and Arizona supply eucalyptus branches and bark to zoos in the North and Northeast. Fresh meals are flown in several times a week at a cost of $10,000 a year or more to some zoos.
When the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks grounded planes in the U.S., zookeepers in Cleveland rented a refrigerated truck and raced to Florida to pick up eucalyptus cuttings.
They returned with enough koala food to share with zoos in Toledo, Ohio, and Philadelphia.
Dee said Los Angeles often shares its eucalyptus with other zoos too.
“We’ve sent FedEx shipments that were wetted down and packed in flower boxes every other day to the St. Louis Zoo,” he said.
When a Los Angeles koala was lent to the Bronx Zoo in New York, fresh cuttings were sent from Encino so it would feel at home.
“The eucalyptus can look perfect to you, and the koala won’t eat it. Of the 500 different eucalyptus species, koalas only eat 25 or 30,” he said.
Although it looks radical, cutting a eucalyptus back to a stump that is 6 or 10 feet high provides sprouts that are easy to reach and perfect for koalas, Dee said.
That’s of little comfort to those who live next to the plantation, which covers the western corner of the Sepulveda Garden Center.
The center is a city-run community vegetable-growing area built on Army Corps of Engineers land near Magnolia Boulevard and Hayvenhurst Avenue.
One resident placed himself between a tree and a chainsaw in early 1997 when a stand of eucalyptus -- some up to 80 feet high -- was pruned to stump-level. That prompted city officials to convene a community meeting attended by dozens of angry residents.
When homeowners complained that the eucalyptus grove muffled noise from the nearby freeway, zoo officials proposed leaving a buffer zone between homes and the koala plantation.
These days, residents still shake their heads at the periodic tree trimming.
Some ask why eucalyptus cuttings from elsewhere in the city can’t be used at the zoo.
“It upsets all of us. It’s an ugly sight and it makes it noisier for us,” said Laura Reichow, who has lived on nearby McCormick Street for 33 years.
“It’s just a feeble excuse if they’re doing all that chopping for one koala.”
Dee said the zoo is careful about what it feeds Baz.
Eucalyptus taken from the Encino plantation is free of pesticides and is of a variety that he and other koalas find tasty.
Baz favors the eucalyptus species rubida, viminalis, sideroxylon rosea and citriodora. Zoo officials also have planted some acacia trees at the plantation for giraffes, gorillas and antelopes. But koalas won’t eat acacia.
Proving that Los Angeles zookeepers know how to properly feed and house koalas will be important when Australia once more relaxes the exportation of the creatures.
In the early 1980s, Australian officials had concerns about the effect that Los Angeles weather would have on six koalas they agreed to send.
So local officials hurriedly found private funds to pay for an indoor habitat nicknamed the Koala Hilton.
Later, when it appeared the koalas were spending too much time inside, officials designed an outdoor area to provide them with light and sunshine.
Several times in the 1980s, zoo officials enlisted the help of the conservation organization TreePeople and Scout groups to plant more than 100 varieties of eucalyptus at the plantation.
“We don’t know what type of leaves they’ll want at a particular time,” a koala keeper explained in 1985.
And that’s why the zoo decided to branch out at its own koala food farm.
