91Èȱ¬

This is Claude, a koala on a crimewave to eat as many plants as possible.

Humphrey Herington realised someone was stealing seedlings from his plant nursery in New South Wales - a state on the east coast of Australia - after finding leaves all chewed up.

But he did not expect to come face-to-face with Claude.

Caught red handed, or should that be red-pawed? The koala was found dazed and too stuffed to move, surrounded by stripped eucalypt plants.

Ironically, the plants were actually being grown to help boost koala habitats in the region because the species is endangered.

"He looked like he was full. He looked very pleased with himself," Mr Herington told the 91Èȱ¬.

Staff are now building a koala-proof fence around their seedlings to stop Claude - whose snacking has cost the nursery 6,000 Australian dollars (£3,000).

Mr Herington said that it was hard to work out what was going on because there's wasn't much evidence linking the crime to Claude.

"There weren't really any signs - there was no tracks or anything - to indicate what it could have been," Mr Herington said.

"It was a mystery."

The culprit was only caught when he became a little too greedy.

"We came out to work one morning and there he was, sitting there on a pole."

"And there were lots of plants missing that morning... I guess that day he must have had a really big feed and was too tired to go back to his tree."

With Claude unmasked as the leaf thief, Mr Herington gently wrapped him in a towel and moved him to some trees a short distance away from the nursery.

But after being escorted from the premises, Claude refused to be denied and the naughty koala's crimes continued as the repeat offender returned for another snack.

"A couple of days later, he came back and continued with his nightly visits," Mr Herington explained.

But despite the cost of snacking on thousands of dollars worth of plants, Mr Herington isn't mad with Claude, and found the whole thing funny.

"I just couldn't believe that it was a koala," he said. "I was shocked but I was also... a little bit impressed."

In 2022, koalas were listed as endangered along most of Australia's east coast, after a dramatic decline in numbers. So there is some concern that Claude may have been stealing simply because he was hungry in the wild.

"I've been here for 20-odd years and this hasn't really happened before," Mr Herington said. "Is it that there is a shortage of food?"

Koalas, which belong to an animal group known as marsupials, were once thriving in Australia but the species has faced recent challenges such as a loss of habitat through land clearing, bushfires and drought as well as disease and other threats.

In 2021 a New South Wales inquiry said koalas would be extinct there by 2050 unless there was urgent action. There may be as few as 50,000 of the animals left in the wild, some conservation groups say.