Koala mittens and baby bottles: saving Australia’s animals
WATERHOLES, AUSTRALIA >> The convoy of vehicles fleeing an inferno in the forest of southeastern Australia ferried a copious cargo: 11 koalas, 15 kangaroos, five chickens, two possums, two dogs and a lorikeet.
Susan Pulis, who runs a wildlife shelter, had rallied her friends to pack the animals in blankets and baskets and take them to safety on the coast. One friend gutted her downstairs bedroom to house five of the kangaroos. Pulis has kept the youngest joeys in quilt pouches in another’s living room.
“Since the fires, they are very different,” she said of the animals, “very on edge.”
As wildfires have killed at least 24 people, destroyed more than 1,400 homes and ravaged 15 million acres, they have also inflicted a grievous toll on Australia’s renowned wildlife. Hundreds of millions of animals, many found on no other continent, may have perished in the devastation of the country’s unique ecosystems.
“We will have taken many species that weren’t threatened close to extinction, if not to extinction,” said Kingsley Dixon, an ecologist and botanist at Curtin University, in Perth.
Even the animals that survived, scampering away or hunkering down, may die from dehydration or starvation, Dixon added. “It’s a biological Armageddon rarely seen,” he said.
Wildlife in Australia was already under threat before these fires. Agribusiness is among the top contributors to deforestation, which decimates wildlife populations, scientists say.
The astronomical estimates of animal losses and the heart-rending images of singed koalas have spread the concern worldwide. Quilters in the Netherlands have made mittens for koalas with burned paws. New Zealanders are stitching joey pouches and bat wraps.
Some experts have been dubious of the high numbers that have spread widely on social media, which are based on estimates of population densities of mammals, birds and reptiles from previously published studies. The death toll is arrived at by multiplying the number of animals expected to inhabit a given area by the total acreage burned.
But it is impossible to know how many animals managed to flee, for instance. Limited access to the burned lands, as well as the difficulty of documenting individual deaths, complicate efforts to assess the scale of the damage.
At least a quarter of the koala population may have been lost in New South Wales, according to various estimates.
On Kangaroo Island, off the coast of South Australia, experts said thousands of kangaroos and koalas had been killed in the fire that has now ravaged a third of the island.