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. After a couple of days of feeding in captivity, Brister released the koala back into the wild. Koalas, often inaccurately described as “bears”, are marsupials, an order of mammals whose young are suckled in a pouch. 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.

Source: Otago Daily Times September 16, 2017 09:00 UTC