Sam Amico
An Irishman has gained 15 minutes of fame for an act of kindness in Australia. And not just among humans, but perhaps koala bears, too.
Videos by Rare
The person in question is a fellow by the name of Will Barton, who stopped traffic on the Gold Coast Highway as a koala slowly sauntered across the interstate. His mother-in-law posted a video of the rescue to Facebook, clearly with a twinge of pride.
“Our Irish son-in-law escorting koala across Gold Coast Hwy in Burleigh Heads this morning,” Katrina Boyle, she wrote above the video.
A Hero Saves The Day
Thornton, 39, was barefoot as he paused cars and kept the koala from meeting his tragic doom. He first saw the koala while having coffee on his porch, he told the Courier Mail.
“Myself and my wife were having a coffee on the balcony, and we noticed a koala coming out of the tree below us, and I thought it was pretty cool,” Thornton said. “He started moving towards Gold Coast Highway, I thought that would be bad, so I bolted down to help him.
“He was hellbent about getting across the road. He just sort of kept going so I had to try and stopped the traffic. I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing. I was trying to get the cars to look.”
All of the drivers were fairly understanding, he added.
“You can see in the video there’s a cyclist (and) he had a good chuckle at me. People gave me the odd thumbs up,” he said.
Hi from Australia – thanks for the cute story. Just to clarify Koalas are not bears they are marsupials with pouches for their babies like kangaroos and possums. They are the sleepiest creatures on earth – only awake 2-4 hours a day. But they don’t hibernate. So not bears and not like bears at all. Australia has most species of marsupials on the planet. They are ancient, soft footed, tiny brains, adapted to living on gum leaves (low nutrition !) and dry conditions. But they struggle to adapt to humans – they learn their feed trails from travelling with their mothers and repeat them endlessly – so these tree to tree trails are centuries old and if you put a road through the middle they just keep trying to cross it and have no awareness at all of traffic. They just know where they want to go and that’s it.
They have zero ability to adapt to things like roads. It is such a challenge to protect them from getting run over. So we have to always look out for them and try to find ways to make our roads safer for koalas with fencing and underpasses. Very grateful to this man for realising that koala was approaching the road and sure to get himself in trouble and needed his help.