When we rang WIRES for assistance, they told us that there is just a small window of opportunity to help injured sugar gliders because after five days away from friends and family, they are not permitted back into glider society.

Fortunately, our Wedderburn animal recovered overnight at Bradbury vets and was released the following day at the gorge.

Like koalas, sugar gliders are marsupials that can feed on gum trees.

However, the gliders eat the sap rather than the leaves and also eat insects, as well as pollen, nectar and seeds from a variety of plants, especially wattles.

In turn, the gliders are food for owls, snakes, goannas, kookaburras and, sadly, cats and foxes. In the woodland ecosystems, therefore, the sugar glider affects many different component species and with its high reproduction rate and high density (up to 10 a hectare) appears to be an important component.

The koala, in contrast, appears to affect few other species. With a low natural density (0.1/hectare), it would be a very minor component of the diet of the powerful owls, goannas, dingoes and humans which were the koalas' original predators.

With a diet almost wholly of eucalypt leaves, koalas would probably affect their food species only if they reached unnaturally high densities such as on Kangaroo Island and isolated patches of woodland in Victoria where the normal programs of dispersal and predation are not functioning.

Koalas, unlike most mammals, have only one intestinal worm that depends on them. This is a tape-worm that rejoices in the scientific name of Bertiella obesa.

Most of our Campbelltown koalas carry one or two in their small intestines and the worms seem to have little effect on the koalas.

Then there's a small moth, Telanepsia stockeri, that lays its eggs in koala scats where they hatch into caterpillars that feed on the scat contents and leave through a small hole that they make in the scat. Koalas may have a broader role in the ecosystem in the pruning of eucalypts and the distribution of nutrients around the landscape but if so, it is yet to be discovered.

Please report all koala sightings (after looking carefully and noting the colour of eartags one in each ear) to our koala pager: 99629996.