It's mating season, and the natural urge to reproduce is in the air.
There are hopes of welcoming a new joey at the National Zoo and Aquarium after visitors spotted resident koala couple Matilda and Bailey cozying up to each other.
Avid zoo goer Maureen Chambers was there with a friend last week and was delighted to see the koalas being energetic.
The Canberran has been a regular at the zoo, visiting nearly every week for the past decade, and had only ever seen them sleeping.
"I had never seen them moving, so to see them being active and moving around was so amazing," she said.
Initially, Matilda and Bailey were in two separate enclosures but were brought together after Ms Chambers let a zookeeper know they were making noises and moving around.
After a brief peek into both their enclosures he immediately got on his walkie-talkie and said: "Koala alert! Koala Alert!"
The zookeepers brought the pair together in the same enclosure. It only took two minutes and a few calls to each other before they began mating.
"It was a little bit confronting, but very exciting," Ms Chambers said.
Zookeeper Brendan Sheean said koalas weren't the most "romantic" of animals during breeding season (August to early January).
"They can get a bit rough and hurt each other so we want to monitor to make sure that especially the boy doesn't end up hurting our girl," he said.
"Once the mating started we then separated them again so they can have a rest and a break from each other."
Koalas are an endangered species in the ACT, NSW, and Queensland as of February 2022.
A parliamentary inquiry in NSW even found that the marsupials could become extinct by 2050 unless habitat loss was urgently prevented.
Naturally, Mr Sheean was over the moon to hear about Bailey and Matilda, especially since they had a break during last year's breeding season.
He was thrilled to see the pair going through all the stages of mating as they would in the wild, as well as knowing they could have a new joey in the next six months.
"It's a pretty exciting moment for us keepers, especially when they're happy. You'll find animals won't breed if they're unhappy," he said. "Fingers crossed, we get a little joey."
Koalas have a gestation period of only 35 days.
But it could take months to find out whether Matilda has given birth because her joey would be the size of a jelly bean inside her pouch.
Bailey and Matilda were already parents to young females Namadgi and Kirra. Namadgi was the first koala to be born at the zoo in 2020. The family of four are the only koalas at the National Zoo and Aquarium.
