About Island Press
Since 1984, the nonprofit organization Island Press has been stimulating, shaping, and communicating ideas that are essential for solving environmental problems worldwide. With more than 1,000 titles in print and some 30 new releases each year, we are the nation’s leading publisher on environmental issues. We identify innovative thinkers and emerging trends in the environmental field. We work with world-renowned experts and authors to develop cross-disciplinary solutions to environmental challenges. Island Press designs and executes educational campaigns, in conjunction with our authors, to communicate their critical messages in print, in person, and online using the latest technologies, innovative programs, and the media. Our goal is to reach targeted audiences—scientists, policy makers, environmental advocates, urban planners, the media, and concerned citizens—with information that can be used to create the framework for long-term ecological health and human well-being. Island Press gratefully acknowledges major support from The Bobolink Foundation, Caldera Foundation, The Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, The Forrest C. and Frances H. Lattner Foundation, The JPB Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Summit Charitable Foundation, Inc., and many other generous organizations and individuals. The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of our supporters.
Island Press’s mission is to provide the best ideas and information to those seeking to understand and protect the environment and create solutions to its complex problems. Click here to get our newsletter for the latest news on authors, events, and free book giveaways.
Flames of Extinction
The race to save Australia’s threatened wildlife John Pickrell
© 2021 John Pickrell First published in Australia by NewSouth, an imprint of UNSW Press All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street NW, Suite 480b, Washington, DC 20036 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021931753 All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Conversion Chart 1° Celsius = about 34° Fahrenheit (Multiply degrees Celsius by 1.8 and add 32.) 1 kilometer = about .62 miles 1 meter = about 1.10 yards 1 kilogram = about 2.2 pounds 1 liter = about 33 fluid ounces or 4.2 cups 1 Australian Dollar = about .78 US Dollar Keywords: Aboriginal land management, Australia, Australian ecosystems, Australian wildlife, biodiversity, Black Summer, birds, bushfires, climate change, conservation management, drought, echidnas, endangered species, extinction, Great Barrier Reef, habitat destruction, fire ecology, firefighting, kangaroos, koalas, threatened species, wildfires, wombats
CONTENTS
Author’s note Introduction: Hope from the embers
xi 1
1.
Emblem of a crisis – Koala
14
2.
A land shaped by fire – Firehawk
36
3. The retreat of the rainforests – Nightcap oak
55
4. The climate conundrum – Lemuroid ringtail possum
85
5. Australia’s biggest ever bushfire – Regent honeyeater
106
6. The perils to our waterways – Platypus
127
7.
145
Extreme conservation – Wollemi pine
8. An army of animal lovers – Bare-nosed wombat
168
9. Devastation of an island ark – Glossy black-cockatoo
193
10. The tallest flowering plant on Earth – Mountain ash
217
11. Ancient knowledge and the future of fire – Northern quoll 236 Acknowledgments
250
Notes
253
Index
272
About the Author
281
AUSTRALIA
DARWIN
WUNAMBAL GAAMBERA IPA CAIRNS
GREAT BARRIER REEF
T EA
NORTHERN TERRITORY
GR
THE KIMBERLEY
DI VI DI
NG
RA
QUEENSLAND
N
WESTERN AUSTRALIA
G
E
SOUTH AUSTRALIA
NG
E
BRISBANE
NG
DI VI G
VICTORIA
DI
CANBERRA
AT
ADELAIDE
RE
PERTH
RA
NEW SOUTH WALES
MELBOURNE
0
500 km
TASMANIA HOBART
SYDNEY
FIREGROUNDS OF FOCUS
QLD
SA
BRISBANE NIGHTCAP NATIONAL PARK NGUNYA JARGOON INDIGENOUS PROTECTED AREA GUY FAWKES NATIONAL PARK NEW ENGLAND NATIONAL PARK
NSW
WOLLEMI NATIONAL PARK KANANGRA-BOYD NATIONAL PARK
ADELAIDE
WINGELLO
KANGAROO ISLAND
VIC MELBOURNE
MOGO
WIDDEN
SYDNEY FITZROY FALLS
BATEMANS BAY
EAST GIPPSLAND
ORBOST
MALLACOOTA
0
COFFS HARBOUR
200 km
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book was written on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation in Sydney and the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji and the Yirrganydji in Far North Queensland. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this book may contain names of people who have since passed away. Latin names are only included for species that are major features of the following chapters, as listing them all would have made the text overly lengthy. When stating months, such as April or October, without a year, the author is typically referring to 2020. As this book was originally published in Australia, temperatures are given in degrees Celsius, the metric system has been used for all measurements, and unless otherwise noted, all costs are given in Australian dollars. To ensure accuracy, these figures have been left in their original units. Please consult the chart on the copyright page for guidance on basic conversions.
| xi
INTRODUCTION: HOPE FROM THE EMBERS
New Year’s Eve 2019 is a day that will be indelibly etched into the memories of Australians. Spectacular and superlative, our beaches have always held a special place close to our hearts. But as footage of 4000 people huddled on the waterfront at Mallacoota in Victoria was beamed worldwide, beaches came to represent something else entirely. Bathed in an eerie red glow and thick with bushfire smoke, the shoreline had become a fallback line from the advancing threat of climate change; a final refuge from the flames. As morning progressed, red turned to black and thunder reverberated ominously as the fire generated its own gigantic pyrocumulus clouds. At Malua Bay, 280 kilometers to the north on the NSW South Coast, 1000 people, horses, dogs, cats, and chickens were packed onto another beach, hemmed in by a wall of fire. The story was repeated at other locations along the nation’s southeastern coastline as we faced bushfires of a severity and scale never previously imagined. In bushland all around, kangaroos and birds attempted to make good their escape, while tree-bound koalas succumbed to the flames. | 1
These defining moments of the 2019–20 bushfire crisis, captured as never before from the frontlines on myriad smartphones, were more like scenes from Blade Runner, or perhaps Dunkirk, than anything that usually comes to mind at the mention of an Aussie summer. Though most Australians accept the reality of climate change, few could have believed its impacts would be felt so hard, and so soon. Perplexingly, those seemingly caught most off guard were our politicians, despite the warnings of fire chiefs and meteorologists that a monster lurked, waiting to be unleashed. ‘Red flames like giant devil’s tongues lapped up the trees around us, thunder from the fire’s own weather system boomed and crashed, winds threw flames to the side, above and beyond, koalas shrieked as they burnt alive,’ Mallacoota eyewitness Mary O’Malley wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘Nature has spoken, and she is furious.’1 With 200 fire fronts burning, and record heat bearing down, more than 100 000 people were advised to leave high-risk zones of NSW, Victoria and South Australia in the nation’s biggest ever evacuation. Navy vessels rescued people from Mallacoota, in East Gippsland, and other fire-affected communities along the coast. Never before had severe bushfires hit so many states simultaneously. ‘This isn’t a bushfire,’ NSW transport minister Andrew Constance told ABC Radio. ‘It’s an atomic bomb.’2 A few days later, thousands of dead birds washed up on the beaches near Mallacoota. Crimson rosellas, honeyeaters, rainbow lorikeets, robins, king parrots, whipbirds and yellow-tailed black-cockatoos, which had also sought refuge in the ocean, had succumbed to smoke inhalation and exhaustion. They were some of what University of Sydney ecologist Chris Dickman would later estimate were the nearly three billion wild animal victims of the catastrophe, making it one of the worst ecological disasters in modern history.3 This mind-numbing figure is an extrapolation from previous estimates of numbers killed or displaced by land-clearing and includes 2 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
mammals, reptiles, birds, and frogs. It doesn’t even factor in fish or insects and other invertebrates, which were likely lost in the trillions. One estimate of the number of trees lost was seven billion.4 ‘I don’t think we’ve seen a single event in Australia that has destroyed so much habitat and pushed so many creatures to the very brink of extinction,’ Kingsley Dixon, an ecologist at Curtin University in Perth told the Associated Press.5 The enormity of the devastation was so great, it required new words to adequately convey it. While ‘ecocide’ already describes the killing of ecosystems, the University of Sydney’s Danielle Celermajer argued we should instead refer to the unimaginable losses of Black Summer as ‘omnicide’ – the killing of everything. Similarly, with the planet burning around us on a scale never before seen in human history, US environmental historian Stephen J Pyne insists we are blazing into the ‘pyrocene’ – a new epoch, christened by fire.6 The situation was undoubtedly grim. Yet, from the ashes following these flames of extinction, encouraging signs emerged; indications that hope might be hewn from the embers. Soon after the fires, conservationists, wildlife carers and rescuers, and Indigenous rangers worked tirelessly to shore up remaining habitat and feed and rescue the survivors; while ecologists, botanists, and others looked to study fire responses and adaptations to help bring species back from the very precipice of extinction. These people were seeking a new way forward, beyond the devastation. They were asking: ‘How can we save these plants, creatures and ecosystems, and how can we help them adapt to a warming world?’ Over the course of 2020, I spoke to more than 80 of them, recording their stories of hope amid the embers. With the exception of the firehawk and the northern quoll, all of the following chapters build on an example of a particular species that was badly impacted by the fires, but which now has a brighter future, due to these heroic efforts.
Introduction: Hope from the embers | 3
Even from my home in central Sydney, the nation’s most populous city, we could not escape the impacts of the crisis back in December 2019. As the Gospers Mountain fire blazed 100 kilometers away in the Blue Mountains, and people sheltered on the beach at Mallacoota, we heard renewed calls for the city to cancel its famous harborside fireworks display. In the preceding weeks and the ones that followed, as the acrid smoke swirled outside my window and the tang of the bushfires stuck in my throat, I wrote article after article about the terrible toll the fires were having on wildlife, national parks and reserves, Aboriginal heritage sites and human health. In December, Sydneysiders barely ventured outside. Ash and blackened gum leaves rained down on the balcony of my apartment. Several times I awoke in the night alarmed at the smell of smoke that had infiltrated my bedroom. In early January, I opened my inbox to a flurry of emails from overseas editors looking for coverage of the crisis. I reported stories for Science, Nature, National Geographic, Science News and The Guardian, mostly about the impacts of the fires on wildlife and ecosystems. As I spent long hours on the phone to scores of scientists about the impacts of the fires on threatened species, it became apparent that what was happening that summer was not normal. It was also clear that dedicated ecologists, conservationists and others would not rest until they had done all they could to aid the process of recovery from the flames. I began to feel that the devastation to wildlife and ecosystems, and the heroic efforts to save them, was a story that needed to be told, and the idea for this book was born. These saviors of our wildlife now faced a race against time – not only to save species from the immediate catastrophe of the bushfire crisis, but also the increasing threat of evermore frequent fires and the climate change behind them. They are fighting tirelessly to document the damage, protect remaining unburnt refuges of habitat, formulate future plans to rescue 4 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
wildlife from the path of flames, battle political complacency and reinstate Aboriginal cultural burning to guard against the mega-blazes that are so damaging to our ecosystems.
On my journey to report this book, and document the efforts of these innumerable helpers, what struck me most deeply was the incredible extent of the firegrounds. Eleven million hectares sounds bad, but it wasn’t until I drove for days on end through slowly recovering forests – blackened but resplendent with regrowth – that I fully comprehended the immensity of the crisis and the challenge ahead for ecologists and conservationists. I spent a week traveling through the World Heritage-listed Gondwana Rainforests of northern NSW, then later the NSW South Coast, and Blue Mountains – and everywhere I went, the story was the same. I drove endlessly through recovering landscapes of charred and skeletal eucalypts, the trunks by then smothered with a verdant fuzz of post-fire epicormic regrowth. I had started to work on this book in February 2020, and my initial plan was to complete a draft swiftly, so the book might hit the shelves by the next bushfire season. Then COVID-19 struck. I flew up to Coffs Harbour on the North Coast of NSW and spent a week visiting torched Gondwana Rainforest reserves and meeting experts between there and Nimbin, 230 kilometers north. But already there was talk of a lockdown. By the time I got home to Sydney in mid-March, my fate was sealed; state borders soon began to close, and my plans were upended. It wasn’t until June that I got out to do on-the-ground reporting once more, and August before I could fly to Queensland. The pandemic had also hindered scientists from getting out to do vital monitoring and survey work of threatened species in the wake of the bushfires. Many researchers I spoke to had their fieldwork shut down entirely for the duration of the lockdown. Thankfully, many restrictions Introduction: Hope from the embers | 5
eased in June, and experts could assess the scale of the damage and the rate of recovery. At least 21 percent of Australia’s entire forest cover had burned, a figure unprecedented on any continent. More than 11 million hectares had been consumed in the 2019–20 bushfire season, an area bigger than Guatemala, most of which was in the forested southeast (nearly 19 million hectares if you also include savannah fires across the remote grasslands of the Northern Territory).7 An estimated 327 plants and animals lost at least 10 percent of their range to the fires, while a staggering 114 of these had between 50–80 percent of their ranges burned.8 But during 2020, plans were thrown into action to save those most perilously endangered. These included: the Nightcap oak, a primitive dinosaur-era tree; an alpine fish called the stocky galaxias; a pretty bird known as the regent honeyeater; the tiny and striking northern corroboree frog; and a hare-sized relative of the kangaroo, the long-nosed potoroo. These had all either been rescued from the path of the flames or were now being saved from threats following the fires, such as feral cats and foxes.
Australia’s worst bushfire disasters are given names such as Black Friday (1939), Ash Wednesday (1983), and Black Saturday (2009). But this time, the catastrophe lasted so long it was named for an entire season. The statistics from the 2019–20 ‘Black Summer’ are sobering. More than 80 percent of the Australian population was impacted by the fires or smoke. Six thousand buildings, including 3500 homes, were destroyed. Thirty-three people tragically lost their lives – nine of whom were firefighters, including three Americans piloting a water-bombing aircraft protecting the Two Thumbs Koala Sanctuary near Cooma, NSW.9 But the true human toll is likely to have been far higher, as health scientists estimate that smoke pollution led to 400 premature deaths 6 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
and 4000 hospital admissions.10 Sydney alone experienced 81 days of poor or hazardous air quality in 2019, more than the total of the previous 10 years combined.11 Smoke generated at the zenith of the crisis in late December and early January billowed out into the Pacific Ocean, reaching New Zealand and then South America before entirely circumnavigating the globe by 14 January, according to NASA satellite imagery. In fact, so much was generated that between 650 million and 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) was pumped out, equivalent to the annual emissions of all the world’s commercial airliners and more than Australia’s typical total annual CO2 emissions of about 531 million tonnes.12 The hand of climate change was writ large across the catastrophe; 2019 was both Australia’s hottest and driest year, and included six of Australia’s hottest ever days. On 17 December, Australia’s average high reached 40.7 degrees Celsius, beating the high of 40.3 degrees Celsius in January 2013. The next day, the record was broken again when the national average reached 41.9 degrees Celsius. On 4 January, Sydney’s western suburb of Penrith recorded 48.9 degrees Celsius, the hottest place on Earth at that time.13
The first signs of an unusual bushfire season in 2019 came in July and August – usually the lowest fire-risk months – when fires ignited in southern Queensland and northern NSW. Vast fires also burned across Cape York in Australia’s far north, though they received little attention in this remote and largely unpopulated region. Fires in the Gold Coast hinterland in early September set the tone for fires that would soon spread across this region of Australian’s eastern coastline. Lamington National Park, a place of normally lush, fire- retardant rainforests and peaceful walking trails, was one of the first to ignite on 2 September, destroying the 86-year-old Binna Burra Lodge eco-retreat. It was among more than 30 parks and reserves that would go up Introduction: Hope from the embers | 7
across the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area in the coming months, destroying 54 percent of the total area of these protected areas. By 9 September, 80 fires were burning in Queensland, with a further 50 across the border in NSW.14 Soon afterward, ecologists, wildlife workers and others would lead small bands of volunteers into action to cut fire trails into the rainforest and rake leaf litter away from old-growth trees to save the most valuable tracts of forest. Elsewhere, scientists were leading detection dogs on rescue missions to find injured koalas and deliver them to wildlife workers and animal hospitals. Further south, on 26 October, a lightning strike at remote Gospers Mountain in Wollemi National Park – part of the sprawling Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area to the west of Sydney – ignited a fire. It barely rated a mention at the time, given that a great number of fires were blazing across the state. But within a month, it had burned 85 000 hectares.15 By mid-December, when it joined with two other fires, the Gospers Mountain blaze had destroyed a million hectares of forest, making it Australia’s biggest-ever forest fire. In the southern sector of the Blue Mountains, and the NSW Southern Highlands, the Green Wattle Creek mega-blaze took out a further 278 000 hectares – which, along with the Gospers Mountain blaze, ravaged about 80 percent of the total area of the eight parks and reserves that make up the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.16 In late December, remarkable rescue efforts were launched here to scoop koalas from the path of the flames and helicopter-in firefighters to protect the few remaining wild Wollemi pines, a critically endangered living fossil that dates back to the time of the dinosaurs. Following the fires, scientists would swiftly set out to secure remaining Blue Mountains habitat for the regent honeyeater, Australia’s most threatened songbird. For some animals, the ongoing drought was even more of a threat than the fires it had led to, and at around the same time, near Canberra, 8 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
ecologists and zookeepers rescued a number of platypuses that would otherwise have starved in dwindling waterways. In late December, the focus of the bushfire crisis moved south as fresh blazes erupted down the south coast of NSW and across East Gippsland in Victoria, resulting in the incredible scenes of people sheltering on the beach in Malua Bay and Mallacoota. As the fires menaced Nowra, Cobargo, Lake Conjola and Wingello, heroic wildlife workers battled to rescue creatures such as eagles, wombats and kangaroos. Here, successful efforts to rehabilitate survivors and keep food and water stations stocked would go on well into the second half of the year. Within days, huge blazes on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island had torched its protected areas and gum plantations, threatening species such as the Kangaroo Island dunnart and glossy black-cockatoo, and killing an astounding 40 000 or more koalas.17 Conservation workers were soon in the ground, implementing measures such as camera traps to find survivors and exclusion fences to keep out feral cats. On 11 January, three fires around the NSW–Victoria border merged to create another mega-blaze that burned 896 000 hectares, one of which got within spitting distance of the Australian Capital Territory. In late January, a different blaze – the Orroral Valley fire – burned across 80 000 hectares of the Namadgi National Park, throwing Australia’s capital city, Canberra, into a state of emergency.18 In early 2020, the Tambo fire complex, the Snowy River complex and the Mallacoota fires together burned through more than a million hectares of remote East Gippsland, which made up the majority of the Victorian firegrounds.19 Fires were still burning near Mallacoota in February, necessitating a daring rescue effort for endangered eastern bristlebirds, which might act as a blueprint for similar missions to save species in the face of future fires. Though most of the fires were in southeastern Australia, significant blazes also burned in Western Australia around Perth and in the Introduction: Hope from the embers | 9
Stirling Range National Park, 340 kilometers to the southeast. Between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve that fire took out one-third of the 115 000-hectare park, a biodiversity hotspot home to 87 endemic species, rare mainland quokkas and 1500 plants – more species than the entire British Isles.20 Though the fires were less extensive in southwestern Australia than the southeast, some regions were repeatedly battered. Part of the reason the Black Summer fires were so devastating to threatened species is that they took out huge areas of two of the east coast’s largest and most important networks of protected areas – the Blue Mountains and the Gondwana Rainforests – as well as the majority of reserves on Kangaroo Island, previously regarded as a biodiverse haven, abundant with wildlife. Across NSW, 70 parks and reserves were more than 75 percent affected by fire.21 NSW had, by far, borne the brunt of the crisis. Over the season it recorded a staggering 11 000 bushfires, which blazed over 5.4 million hectares, or about 7 percent of the state, killing more than 7000 koalas. The findings of the NSW Bushfire Inquiry, released in August 2020, said there had been ‘bushfires through forested regions on a scale that we have not seen in Australia in recorded history’.22 After heavy rains, the Rural Fire Service announced on 13 February that all remaining fires were contained.23 On 2 March, for the first time in more than 240 days, NSW was completely free of bushfires, while all the fires in Victoria were contained.
In early 2020, Americans looked on in horror as Australia burned, but the tables had turned by mid-year. Australians were looking back the other way with sympathy and understanding as California, Oregon, Washington and Colorado blazed with fires of a ferocity and extent never seen before. In August, as hundreds of wildfires blazed concurrently across multiple states, San Francisco and many other cities in the western United 10 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
States sweltered under skies an apocalyptic shade of orange, and temperature records tumbled. The situation was eerily similar to what had been experienced in Australia, just eight months or so earlier. On 6 September the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles recorded the city’s highest- ever temperature of 49.4 degrees Celsius (121 degrees Fahrenheit), mirroring the record of 48.9 degrees Celsius that had been reached in Sydney’s western suburbs back on 4 January. The same unprecedented fire conditions, driven by droughts and heatwaves spawned by climate change, had now hit both regions of the world. What had happened in Australia, and taken a terrible toll on animals such as koalas and kangaroos, had now shifted to another part of the planet. It was a terrifying taste of what will be experienced globally as climate change intensifies. ‘We’re seeing something similar play out over there as to what played out in our last season in terms of unprecedented fires, unprecedented area burned, unprecedented drought and heat,’ bushfire scientist Ross Bradstock of the University of Wollongong in New South Wales (NSW) told Australia’s SBS News. Australia’s turmoil, ‘is repeating itself in places like California,’ he added.24 By the end of the 2020 wildfire season, more than 3.3 million hectares (8 million acres) had been razed, and many experts began to look to Australia to see what the long-term effects might be on wildlife of a fire crisis of such extent and intensity.
As the world warms, the crises in Australia and the western United States reflect what is taking place in forests globally, from the Amazon to Indonesia. Even forests populated by trees that flourish on cycles of burn and recovery are becoming less resilient in the face of bushfires that are growing in frequency, spread and intensity. Climate change is contributing to high-fire-danger weather and hot and dry conditions. Record blazes have struck regions with a Mediterranean climate, such as Portugal and Greece. In 2019, the Amazon experienced an Introduction: Hope from the embers | 11
11-year high in deforestation, mostly through deliberately set fires. Arctic forests are also burning, with mega-blazes devouring Siberia, Greenland and Alaska.25 While the majority of Black Summer’s bushfires were extinguished by March, their legacy will linger for decades – as they will in California, which lost more than 1.6 million hectares of forest in 2020. Although recovery is happening in many ecosystems, much of it is superficial and the complexity and richness of many of these habitats have been lost. Even previously common species such as the koala and platypus may be upgraded or listed as threatened following the fires and drought that preceded them. Ecosystems such as Victoria’s majestic mountain and alpine ash forests are slowly transitioning into other kinds of forest, as the frequency of fires prevents them from reaching maturity. Though the fires of Black Summer were unparalleled, they were not unanticipated. In 2008, the Garnaut Climate Change Review, commissioned by the Australian government, warned that if action on climate change was not taken, ‘fire seasons will start earlier, end slightly later, and generally be more intense. This effect increases over time, but should be directly observable by 2020.’26 As his predictions about devastating bushfires came to fruition, Ross Garnaut commented, ‘If you ignore the science when you build a bridge, the bridge falls down.’27 Globally, Australia is at the forefront of mitigating the risk of fighting bushfires, and our abilities have been honed and improved over many years. But experts fear that, despite these measures, managing fire risk and suppressing blazes will become increasingly unfeasible in the face of fires that are bigger and more ferocious than ever before. ‘Although we can review our bushfire prevention strategies and invest more time and money in their implementation, although we can work on species and ecosystem recovery and triage the birds and animals most at threat of extinction, we know that these are stopgaps,’ said conservation group BirdLife Australia. ‘The fires are a consequence of global inaction to reduce carbon emissions. The time has come to stand 12 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
together in the face of these terrible flames and act against the ravages of climate change.’28 People had watched across the planet in horror as the nightmare bushfire season unfolded. Already one of the world’s driest and hottest places, Australia was now ground zero in the climate emergency. Before Black Summer was overshadowed by COVID-19, it seemed like this moment, like none before, would persuade people of the urgency of taking meaningful action to stop the world from barreling past dangerous climate change tipping points. But in the face of the pandemic, I fear we have lost momentum. In the western United States, both the wildfires and pandemic had to be faced simultaneously. People understandably have climate change fatigue. There’s only so much bad news you can read. Australia already has the unenviable honor of being the first nation to lose a species to climate change – the Bramble Cay melomys, a rodent washed away by a storm surge. But we are now in a race against time to save many other Australian species and ecosystems, such as the lemuroid ringtail possum and the Great Barrier Reef. It is a battle in which we can still prevail, as long as we act fast. I have always had a love for nature and wildlife, but the seven years I spent as deputy editor and then editor of Australian Geographic magazine made a special place in my heart for our extraordinary plants and animals and astonishing natural environments. Seeing them trashed was almost more than I could bear. But meeting the many inspiring wildlife workers, ecologists, Aboriginal rangers and others who are formulating a way forward has given me faith that we can endure. With luck, hearing their stories will also fill you with hope – and inspiration. Of all the creatures severely impacted by the fires, the koala drew the most global attention, so this is where our tale will begin…
Introduction: Hope from the embers | 13
1. EMBLEM OF A CRISIS KOALA
Footage of burned and confused koalas being rescued captures the hearts of millions worldwide, making these charismatic creatures the posterchildren of the bushfire crisis. Koalas are also imperiled by traffic, chlamydia, land clearing and climate change, but dedicated conservationists – some with the aid of furry allies – have a plan.
Amid the ash, the brittle brown leaves and the blackened boughs of eucalypts, a dog scampers through the sepia landscape. With his head down and his tongue hanging out, ‘Bear’ zig-zags here and there, excitedly sniffing the ground, as he homes in on the scent of a koala. With a dappled grey coat and eyes the color of the ocean, Bear is a type of Australian working dog called a Koolie. On his feet are little booties, tightly fastened with Velcro straps, to protect his soft pads against anything sharp or hot in the fireground. ‘Go find!’ calls his handler, Romane Cristescu. ‘Find, find, find!’ Originally from France, Cristescu is a vet and koala ecologist with the Detection Dogs for Conservation project at the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) in Queensland. The pair are part of a team, 14 |
supported by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), that has made a heroic effort to find and rescue injured or malnourished koalas in firegrounds across southeastern Australia. These marsupials are notoriously difficult to spot in the trees – so much so that even trained human spotters routinely miss up to 80 percent of them. But with a sense of smell about 100 000 times better than ours, working dogs such as Bear are uniquely suited to the task. ‘He covers as much ground as he possibly can. He just loves to run, smelling everywhere until he’s finally in a spot where there’s been koala activity,’ says Cristescu. ‘He’s a hyperactive dog, so he’s obsessivecompulsive about playing. The moment you take him out, the game is on … He’s a ball of energy and happiness and doesn’t have a bad day in the field.’ Once Bear is sure he’s located his quarry, he will freeze and drop to the ground beneath the tree. Here he will lie, head held regally erect and tail frantically wagging, as he looks toward Cristescu, to see if she will spot a koala above and reward him with playtime. ‘And then you praise him, and he jumps around,’ she says. ‘He’s jumping in the air trying to catch the ball for as long as you have the energy to play. He would do it all day.’ Once the team successfully finds a koala, they coax it down from the tree using a variety of methods. They then catch the koala, weigh it and give it a health check. If it is disease-free, uninjured and sufficiently plump, it will be re-released, and in some cases, a radio collar is attached. If it needs medical attention or fattening up, it is taken to a vet or wildlife care centre – such as Friends of the Koala in Lismore, New South Wales (NSW), or the Currumbin Wildlife Hospital on Queensland’s Gold Coast – to get the help it requires before it can return to the wild. Aside from Cristescu and Bear, the team includes human koala spotters and skilled koala catchers, and employs technologies such as drones with thermal imaging cameras to look for koalas from above. ‘We kind of throw everything at it, because koalas are really cryptic Emblem of a crisis | 15
and hard to find,’ Cristescu explains. ‘Any method has its strengths and weaknesses, so we use as many methods as we can to increase our detection.’ Prior to the bushfire crisis, five-year-old Bear had not done this kind of search-and-rescue work before, but the scale of the fires in late 2019, persuaded them that they had to at least try, says Cristescu. Their gamble paid off – between November 2019 and May 2020 he helped find more than 100 koalas, mostly at Kandanga in Queensland’s Gympie region, in the NSW Southern Tablelands and in the Snowy Mountains, south of Canberra. The summer’s bushfires were all extinguished by March, but many koalas struggled to find enough gum leaves to eat. Their terrible condition meant the search-rescue mission went on for five months, much longer than the scientists had anticipated. Bear is one of five detection dogs in the program, which is headed up by Cristescu and geneticist and animal behaviorist Celine Frere. But Bear is the only dog trained to find the scent of koalas themselves. The others detect koala scat, which, due to their diet of eucalypt leaves, is greenish, pungent and relatively easy for dogs to find. All dogs in the program work with Frere and Cristescu to find koalas, or other threatened animals, so that surveys for these species can be conducted in patches of potential habitat. This helps the team determine the conservation value of these pieces of land and whether they need to be protected. The scientists also collect scat to extract DNA for genetic analyses, which help reveal the health of koala populations. ‘One of the positives of koalas is that they poo a lot. And so … we can use their scats to identify if certain habitats are being utilized by koalas,’ explains Frere.1 Until 10 years ago, Cristescu had relied on her own eyes to find koalas and scats, but found the process slow, laborious and error-prone. ‘I did that for several months in a row [during my PhD], and it gave me an enormous amount of time for reflection,’ she says. ‘This is where 16 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
I got the idea that we should train a dog to help, because koala scats … have a very strong eucalypt smell.’ In 2011, she got help from an expert to train Maya, the first dog in the program, and the first in the world capable of detecting koala scats. ‘I quickly realized that this was an awesome method,’ Cristescu says. ‘She was much quicker and more accurate than humans, so we could quickly classify more sites as koala habitat … We thought it needed to be promoted as a better method for ecological surveys in general.’ Bear, a rescue dog who’d proven too much of a handful for his previous owners, soon followed Maya as a recruit. He became an unwitting celebrity during the bushfire crisis, featuring in news reports and social media feeds across the planet. ‘The extent of the bushfires has touched the world,’ says Frere. ‘Bear is a good news story. He’s goofy, with his little boots, and he’s doing something good in the context of the bushfires, and I think that that’s enabled some people … to engage with the conversation around climate change and around bushfires.’ Tragically, more than 7000 koalas were killed in NSW during the fires – which is perhaps 15–30 percent of the state’s entire population. A detailed World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Australia survey of the impact of the fires on six populations in northern NSW, found that 71 percent of the koalas there had been killed.2 Many koalas were also lost in Queensland, as were a staggering estimated 40 000 of the 50 000 on Kangaroo Island in South Australia (see Chapter 9).3 While the koala is already recognized as ‘vulnerable’ at the national level in Australia, the toll on the species was so bad, that IFAW, WWF and the Humane Society International called in April 2020 for its conservation status to be upgraded to ‘endangered’ in NSW, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). They cited evidence that Queensland’s koala population had crashed by at least 50 percent since 2001, with declines of 33–61 percent in NSW over the same period.4 As of November 2020, the proposal was being considered by federal environment minister Sussan Ley. Emblem of a crisis | 17
One koala refuge in particular – the Two Thumbs Wildlife Trust, in Cooma, two hours south of Canberra in the subalpine region of NSW – was so devastated, that the team spent more time searching for koalas there than anywhere else. Over the course of the summer, fires would strike this reserve several times, eventually destroying everything, including all the buildings, enclosures and koalas they housed. In late January, it also became the site of one of the summer’s saddest human tragedies. This bushfire season was shaping up to be one of the worst ecological disasters Australians had ever witnessed …
With footage of burnt and dehydrated koalas snatched from the flames and drinking from firefighters’ water bottles broadcast worldwide in late 2019, the species quickly became the global posterchild for the unfolding calamity. Numerous videos and images emerged from different bushfire-hit regions, illustrating the scale of the crisis Australia faced. One video that struck a chord with many showed a NSW woman, Toni Doherty, taking the shirt off her back to scoop up a singed and distressed koala from the Long Flat bushfire near Port Macquarie, on the state’s Mid North Coast. He went to the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital, where they named him Lewis after Doherty’s grandchild.5 As a much-loved Australian icon, people were understandably concerned. Claims that the koala had fared so badly that it was ‘functionally extinct’ (meaning there were so few koalas left they could no longer breed effectively) soon began to circulate in loosely reported news stories, and went viral in Facebook posts and tweets. While the species was unquestionably dealt a major blow by the fires, koala experts concurred that things were not yet that dire and many parts of the species’ range, which runs almost the length of Australia’s eastern coastline, had escaped the fires. Christine Hosking, from the University of Queensland in Brisbane where she is studying the affect of climate change on the distribution of 18 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
koalas, was the lead author of a 2016 study estimating there were then about 329 000 koalas in total in Australia.6 She says that while the crisis certainly made a hole in healthy populations, we’ll probably never know exactly how many died in the bushfires. ‘We didn’t even know how many were there in the first place, so it’s even harder to count what we lost.’ For the same reason koalas are difficult to spot for rescuers – they are cryptic, quiet and blend into the foliage of the canopy – they are almost impossible to count. The possible range of the total Australian population figure they came up with was 144 000–605 000, highlighting the level of uncertainty koala researchers face, she says. For some local populations, such as those in northern NSW, the impacts of the bushfire crisis may have been catastrophic, but only monitoring over years will reveal if they have been hit so badly that they won’t recover. What is of wider concern to experts is the ongoing decline of the species seen over the past 40 years or so, Hosking says, which is largely due to land clearing (for which Australia has a woeful record) and climate change. Dog attacks and car strikes linked to land clearing and the creeping spread of urban areas are also major problems. There’s also chlamydia – a sexually transmitted infection, brought to Australia with the livestock of European settlers, which can kill koalas and infects up to 100 percent of individuals in some wild populations. ‘The bushfires are just another nail in the coffin for koalas; there are so many other threats happening synergistically at the moment,’ Hosking says. The issues facing them are also inconsistent across the nation. In Queensland and NSW, numbers have plummeted, but in parts of Victoria and South Australia, where koalas were wiped out by fur trappers (with millions killed, mostly for international export)7 and later reintroduced, numbers have boomed, and some regard them as pests. Prior to the fires on Kangaroo Island, for example, their numbers there Emblem of a crisis | 19
were controlled by sterilizing koalas or translocating them to the South Australian mainland. Climate change is now creating a triple whammy – not only are droughts and heatwaves allowing more bushfires to take hold in koala habitat, they are also impacting the physiology of koalas directly, and shifting the geographic range of the trees they eat. ‘There are more than 800 species of eucalyptus in Australia, but koalas are very selective and only use a small number of those for food and moisture,’ Hosking told reporters in 2015.8 ‘The geographic range of food-tree species that are favorable to koalas is shifting and decreasing owing to the increasing severity and frequency of heatwaves and drought.’ The result of this will be that areas where koalas can live will shift eastward toward the coast, where they are more likely to clash with development, traffic and dogs. In some parts of Australia, climate change is leading to unusually prolonged droughts and also ‘extreme heatwaves where you’d have 10 days in a row above 46 degrees Celsius,’ Hosking tells me. ‘The typical maximum temperature they tolerate is 36–37 degrees Celsius … so they can’t thermoregulate with that sort of heat, and you get them literally dropping out of the trees. Their food trees also become very dry, and that’s their main moisture source.’ In late 2019, following a prolonged drought, conditions were so dry that koalas were already suffering. In some regions, they were being brought to wildlife carers in record numbers, even before the fires hit.
While many Australian animals have evolved avoidance strategies to protect themselves from bushfire (see Chapter 2), koalas seem perplexingly ill-equipped to thrive in landscapes that frequently burn. Their home and source of sustenance are eucalypt trees, filled with flammable oils, which can easily burst into flames. ‘Normally, in a fire, they will just move higher in the tree because 20 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
that’s their instinct. They get burned as the fire goes up and they have the smoke and heat to deal with as well,’ says Hosking. ‘They can run if they have to, but they are not good movers on the ground.’ When bushfires are low-intensity and mostly burn through the understory, climbing high can work as a strategy, although they still risk smoke inhalation and can burn their paws when they climb down to move between trees. But when fires are as intense as they were in the 2019–20 season, burning up to the crowns of gum trees, koalas stand little chance. (It’s worth noting that in much of koala habitat, the tallest trees have been logged, so climbing high may once have been a much more effective strategy than in the forests that remain 230 years after European colonization.) On occasion, they also seem to display puzzling behaviors that put them in harm’s way. In addition to having little defense against fire, they often walk into the path of dogs and cars – two big threats, which were leading to population declines long before the bushfire crisis. ‘They’ll just climb down from the tree, and a pack of dogs will be waiting at the bottom for them,’ says Hosking. ‘In the past 200 years since Europeans arrived, there has just not been enough time for them to evolve.’ Marley Christian, a veterinary nurse and long-time wildlife carer at Friends of the Koala in northern NSW, says many people were sending her the footage of Lewis’s dramatic rescue from the Long Flat fire, but she found it too hard to watch. ‘I didn’t want to see it because you think of all the koalas running into the fire because they get so confused,’ she says. ‘It’s not something they’ve maybe dealt with before [as fires here are rare], so they will run where they shouldn’t and get stuck, and sit there and just scream and scream.’ The normally wet, subtropical Northern Rivers region of NSW, where she is based, was so dry in late 2019 that it caused koalas to take unusual risks. ‘This is tropical, usually green and lush, but everything was brown. Emblem of a crisis | 21
The leaves didn’t have any moisture, so we were getting koalas in that were dehydrated and emaciated,’ she explains. ‘They end up having to come down to the ground to get water, which they shouldn’t often have to do; they should be able to get their moisture from the leaves. They are very vulnerable on the ground, so we had multiple koalas in from car hits and dog attacks.’ Koalas can also seem to behave in a fearless and tame way around people. Furthermore, they are rotund and furry, not unlike a teddy bear, and have forward-facing eyes and the general proportions of a human toddler. This perhaps explains why people find them so cute, and why they have become such an icon of Australia, featured on postcards and in tourism and advertising campaigns for more than 100 years (and also why koala-related tourism was estimated in a 2014 study to be worth up to $3.2 billion annually to the Australian economy).9 During the bushfire crisis and drought, videos were shared of koalas approaching people and taking water from drinking bottles. ‘That makes them even more special, doesn’t it, that they seem to be able to come and ask for help when they really need it,’ muses Cristescu. Normally, catching koalas in firegrounds can be challenging. But on one occasion, a koala literally ran into her arms. ‘That’s one in a thousand captures. It was hilarious. I couldn’t believe it,’ she says. ‘I wish I was a koala whisperer and could just call them all like this to come down and check us out.’ But drinking from water bottles is not normal behavior. They are perhaps coming to the ground and putting themselves at risk, simply because they no longer have an alternative. ‘People need to realize that’s a koala that’s really unwell and it might need to see a vet. Just giving them water might not be sufficient for them to survive,’ Cristescu says. ‘With extremely poor body condition, they find it hard to come back.’ The name ‘koala’ is said to have origins in ‘gula’ or ‘gulamany’ from the Dharug Aboriginal language of the Sydney region, and means ‘no drink’ – but the idea that koalas never drink water has been refuted, and some academics dispute this theory of the origin of the common name.10 22 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
Despite the fact koalas are marsupials, related to the kangaroo and wombat, their vague resemblance to bears meant that when European scientists described them in the 19th century, they were given the Latin name Phascolarctos cinereus, meaning ‘ash-colored pouched bear’. That the Latin for ‘ash’ is immortalized in the species name seems fitting, given the ordeal koalas suffered over Black Summer.
In early March, I meet my first bushfire survivor, 21-month-old Ember, at the Friends of the Koala care center in Lismore. She was rescued from Whiporie, one hour to the south, following the fire there on 23 November. All the koalas brought here during the crisis were given fire-related names such as Flame, Char, Blaze and Flare. Comfortably ensconced on a perch packed with fresh gum leaves, she leans toward me and stares curiously into my eyes. Instantly, I feel a sense of attachment to this slight and beautiful creature, and appreciate why the carers here and elsewhere have such deep affection for the koalas they rescue and rehabilitate. When I first arrived, Ember had been swaddled in a blanket, hugging a teddy bear. Soft toys offer juveniles something to cling to and provide comfort in the absence of their mothers, whom they’d normally stay with until two years of age. Of the more than 20 koalas that came here for care in the wake of the northern NSW fires, Ember was one of the most seriously injured. Her survival was nothing short of miraculous. The burns on her paws and claws were so bad, it would have been impossible for her to climb, and she was also suffering from dehydration, smoke inhalation and chlamydia. ‘She’s nearly ready to go into a plantation, but her nails still aren’t the greatest,’ says veterinary nurse Christian, whose position is funded by IFAW. ‘The burns went right through to the bones, especially in the back feet and where she was hunkered down [in a tree], she had huge pressure sores on her back. We didn’t think she’d make it.’ Emblem of a crisis | 23
After being rescued by Friends of the Koala, Ember went to the Currumbin Wildlife Hospital, 120 kilometers to the north in Queensland. There she made it through 20 or more operations. During the crisis, 500 extra animals, many of which were koalas, were admitted to the hospital, which is attached to the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary. The hospital reported in a blog post in January that the most common injuries were burns to the paws:11 If the fires haven’t burned the crowns of the trees, animals particularly like Ember have climbed to the top of the tree to escape the flames as they pass through. Once the fire has passed the koalas climb down the tree and hold onto the burnt trunk and get serious burns on their feet and that’s what we’re seeing. These types of injuries require intense treatment and regular bandage changes for months to get them better. We’ve had good success rates and it’s about management, controling infection and a lot of pain relief.
Ember’s survival became a powerful symbol of hope for her carers. When I visit Friends of the Koala in March, she’s nearly ready to be released, as long as they can find suitable wild habitat near where she was rescued, that has enough food and few enough koalas to allow her to thrive. In a few weeks, once her claws have improved further, she will be put into a ‘kindy plantation’, Christian tells me. This is a soft release into a fenced reserve that has about 60 trees of various species, including eucalypts favored by local koalas, such as tallowwood and red gum. Young koalas are monitored to see if they are climbing and eating properly. If all goes well, they are released back into the wild. Like koala-detection-dog Bear, Ember became one of the celebrities of the bushfire crisis, and, a few days before my visit, had been filmed alongside Australian superstar and Hollywood actor Chris Hemsworth for a National Geographic documentary he was presenting. 24 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
While Ember survived, many of the other koalas were not that lucky. Lewis, whose dramatic rescue went viral, was one that sadly didn’t make it. Though he had suffered bad burns to his paws, legs and chest, it briefly looked as though he might make a full recovery; he was eating gum leaves again and carers at Port Macquarie Koala Hospital were closely monitoring him. But a week after Doherty had rescued him, the hospital posted online that he had succumbed to his injuries. ‘Today, we made the decision to put Ellenborough Lewis to sleep. We placed him under general anaesthesia this morning to assess his burns injuries and change the bandages,’ it explained on Facebook. ‘We recently posted that “burns injuries can get worse before they get better”. In Ellenborough Lewis’s case, the burns did get worse, and unfortunately would not have gotten better.’ Lewis had ‘captured the hearts of millions across the world and served as a symbol of Australia’s devastating bushfire crisis,’ lamented Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC.12 The Port Macquarie facility became Australia’s first wildlife hospital when it was set up in 1973, and today is run by more than 150 volunteers in addition to staff. It is the only dedicated koala hospital in the world, and was one of Australia’s busiest centers for wildlife during the bushfire crisis. A total of 53 koalas were admitted here in the wake of the fires. The majority of those treated survived, with 26 released back into the wild in April. The surrounding Mid North Coast region was home to a significant population, but 30 percent may have perished, federal environment minister Sussan Ley said in December.13 At its busiest, Friends of the Koala had more than 30 koalas, some rescued by Cristescu and Bear. The center had so many, in fact, that they ran out of enclosures to house them. ‘We have never experienced anything like this ever, and I hope this is not a sign of what is to come. We were so unprepared with that magnitude,’ Christian says. ‘I got so stressed I ended up running down to Emblem of a crisis | 25
Bunnings [hardware store] on the Saturday, bawling my eyes out, thinking “what are we going to do with all these koalas?”’ Thankfully, Bunnings donated timber and other materials, and local tradespeople volunteered to erect the enclosures. Despite the large numbers of koalas coming into care, given the scale of the fires, many were surprised at how few were found in the firegrounds. ‘They generally just get incinerated in the tree,’ says Hosking. Christian says it was awful knowing so many koalas couldn’t be saved. ‘I felt so helpless. The impact was devastating. You see some hard things, and you will never get those pictures out of your mind or the screams of those poor animals,’ she adds, tearing up as we talk. ‘And we as humans are to blame in such a huge way … Sometimes, you can look down from a plane and you can’t even see a little patch of green.’ One thousand kilometers to the south, one wildlife enthusiast was working hard to protect habitat for koalas, but the fires here had created a major setback.
One of the most shocking human tragedies of the 2019–20 bushfire season would hit on 23 January at a trio of koala sanctuaries run by the Two Thumbs Wildlife Trust in the subalpine Monaro region of NSW, two hours south of Canberra. Set up in 2013, Two Thumbs is the brainchild of wildlife worker and conservation hero James Fitzgerald who purchased a 315-hectare former grazing property and turned it into a reserve he named Hammer’s Hill. By 2016, he’d acquired two adjacent properties, named Kalandan and Irwin’s Corner, which covered a total of 732 hectares of granite outcrops and undulating eucalypt woodlands.14 As well as protecting prime koala habitat and offering a place for them to be released into, the reserve rehabilitated injured or sick animals and acted as a base for research. For example, scientists at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra showed that the koalas here in the subalpine region 26 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
are unusual in that they eat the bark of brittle gums to supplement their diet with sodium, which they struggle to get from leaves alone. Prior to the fires, Fitzgerald estimated that there were 2000-odd koalas living in the bush that stretched across his reserves and the 80 kilometers north to Queanbeyan, near Canberra. The sanctuaries were also home to squirrel gliders, Rosenberg’s goannas, greater gliders and tiger quolls. Sadly, much of that habitat was razed by intense fires that blistered through here in December and January, destroying more than 36 000 hectares of koala habitat. On 4 January, Fitzgerald, who is also a volunteer firefighter with the NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS), was helping to contain the Good Good bushfire, ignited by lightning on 29 December. As his niece, Clare Henderson, described on an online fundraising page she later set up, he and the other RFS volunteers were extinguishing spot fires to slow the spread of the fire when Fitzgerald could see in the distance that his reserves were ablaze.15 ‘Eventually, it was too dark to see, but he knew the horror that was unfolding at his sanctuary, as the wildlife he loves would try to outrun the bushfire,’ Henderson wrote. ‘The bushfire burned 2 kilometers into Kalandan Wildlife Sanctuary, stopping just 200 meters from his house. The burnt area, which previously abounded with the sounds and activities of native animals, is now heartbreaking, as not even a bird can be seen.’ The fire would flare up again on 23 January, destroying much of the remaining unburned area of the reserves, as well as Fitzgerald’s house, sheds, machinery, all of the animal enclosures and the recuperating wildlife they contained. ‘The koalas that James has rescued from these horrible fires and lovingly cared for over the last month have also lost their lives. We are devastated … He has lost his entire life’s work,’ Henderson added. While Fitzgerald was rushing an injured koala to the vet, further tragedy would strike. A C-130 Hercules water-bombing aircraft, crewed by three American firefighters, crashed while trying to protect his home Emblem of a crisis | 27
and the reserve from the swiftly moving blaze.16 All of them were killed. The plane, loaded with fire retardant, was flipped by powerful winds and came down on a neighbor’s property several hundred meters from Fitzgerald’s house.
Just two weeks after the tragedy, Cristescu, Bear and the USC Detection Dogs for Conservation team were on the ground with IFAW, ready to sniff out any surviving koalas. ‘The hardest part of our job is to see the impact not only on animals but also on humans, and this sanctuary had burned almost entirely … so that’s where we spent a lot of our time, because the situation was really dramatic,’ Cristescu says. The fact that there had been many koalas here, and that the impact of their loss was enormous for Fitzgerald, ‘made our rescue mission even more important, as we were helping both the koalas and the person that had witnessed the horrific impact of the fire,’ she adds. ‘You can imagine it’s really hard to witness that, when you had a beautiful sanctuary full of animals, and people were coming from all around to release the animals that they cared for.’ To begin with, both she and Fitzgerald had little hope of finding survivors, as the fire had burned very hot and the area was not thought to have been densely populated in the first place. But within five days, they found 15 survivors, some of which were radio-collared by researchers at ANU or driven a few hours away to the university in Canberra for treatment. ‘Everyone was surprised at how many there were post-fire and saw what an amazing sanctuary it must have been,’ Cristescu says. She and her team sometimes used koala catchers to get these marsupials down from the trees. But they also employed a more passive method that took advantage of the fact koalas often come down at night to move to a different tree. They would fence off a tree that contained a koala, with the only exit being via a pet carrier packed with gum leaves. 28 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
The koala would climb into the carrier, setting off a motion sensor that sent a message to Cristescu’s phone, alerting her to the survivor. They returned to the sanctuary a number of times, making a final effort to seek out survivors in May, four months after the fires. Perhaps because of the intensity of the fires, much of the environment had barely bounced back, and Cristescu saw little evidence of recovery. They took solace, however, in the fact that many koalas were somehow pulling through, giving them hope that koalas were finding food and surviving in other burned areas down the east coast of Australia. Initially, Fitzgerald slept in a swag on site, but has since moved into a caravan, while he works on rebuilding. On an area of unburned bush, he is building two enclosures with money from insurance, with two more not far behind. The fundraiser set up by his niece raised $137 000 toward the recovery work. Around 50 surviving koalas had been found by July, and Fitzgerald named three that escaped bushfires elsewhere, Ian, Rick and Paul, after the American firefighters who died. He also donated $100 000 in their names to koala research being carried out on his property by scientists led by Karen Ford at ANU, who made the finding about brittle gum bark featuring in the diet of koalas here.17 Ford is studying the movements of the radio-collared koalas here to better understand how they behave post-fire and what we can best do to help them. ‘What he’s lived through is just horrendous,’ Cristescu says of Fitzgerald. ‘But he is doing so much wonderful stuff.’ Four hundred kilometers to the north, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, there were also hints that more koalas than expected had escaped the conflagration.
Arborist and koala catcher, Ben Richardson, is seated in a harness, 20 meters up in a narrowleaf peppermint, a eucalypt favored by koalas here at 1100 meters, the highest altitude population in Australia. Emblem of a crisis | 29
Watching him from below is giving me vicarious vertigo. Koala wrangling is not a simple task, and gum trees often have dead branches that could snap, so knowing where to put your weight and secure ropes requires skills and experience. ‘We can get the koala down about 80 percent of the time,’ he says. ‘It’s just the luck of the draw and the behavior of the koala. Some trees aren’t suitable for capture, as they have a lot of deadwood, fine vegetation and many avenues for escape.’ It’s a freezing July day, seven months after the Green Wattle Creek fire swept this region (see Chapter 5), and we pass patches of snow on our drive down 4WD tracks to the edge of Kanangra-Boyd National Park. Today, ecologist Kellie Leigh of Science for Wildlife, a local NGO, is leading a large group of volunteers and scientists who are collecting data for the Blue Mountains Koala Project. They are looking for radio-collared koalas – that, at this study site, have been named after mythological figures such as Eros, Medusa, Artemis, Kali and Lakshmi. Twelve were rescued from the path of fires in December and moved to safety before being released again before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in March (see Chapter 7). Along with any bushfire survivors we find, they will be weighed and checked to ensure they are healthy and finding enough food in this regenerating forest. Sitting on a branch above Richardson is a small koala, likely a twoto-three-year-old female. His job is to encourage her to climb down the tree (with tools such as a flag on the end of an extendable pole that gets flapped above the koala’s head) and into the arms of team members below. They will scoop her up and cover her head to calm her before she gets her check-up. Richardson is trying to be as still and quiet as possible, so as not to scare the koala further up or onto narrower branches where he can’t follow. ‘It’s a fine balance between scaring them with your presence and using the tools to scare them down,’ he explains. ‘Some will be so fixated 30 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
on the flag that they will be oblivious to your presence in the tree and will even use your legs on their climb down.’ A short while later, once the koala is safely secured on the ground, Leigh and her team examine her and are thrilled to discover a joey in her pouch, which must be the result of mating shortly after the fires. The covering briefly comes off her head while a punch of ear tissue is taken for DNA analysis. For the most part, she appears surprisingly compliant, if a little confused – it’s possible she has never seen humans before. A radio collar is attached, and then she’s off, swiftly scooting back up her tree. All in all, about six koalas are found today; several are new to Leigh’s study. The patch of forest here is unburned, and across the track is an area that was subjected to a low-intensity backburn by the RFS in December, meaning the crowns of the trees are intact. Leigh suspects koalas congregating here are refugees from parts of the park where fires were intense and food remains scarce. Still, the fact they are finding survivors, and they are breeding, is a hopeful sign. ‘It is very encouraging,’ Leigh says. ‘That female has been through the horrible drought, heat stress and bushfires and is still around, and the conditions are good enough to support them again.’ Until about seven years ago, ‘the general consensus had been that there weren’t many koalas in the Blue Mountains … and if they were around, they were at low density and not of great significance [to the overall conservation of the species],’ says Leigh, whose research project began in 2014. Existing knowledge suggested koalas were not found above 800 meters and avoided forests on sandstone country, where soils are poor, and the size of gum trees is limited. ‘But we have gradually been finding koalas breaking all of those rules,’ adds Leigh, whose team has been studying koalas at five sites across the Blue Mountains, coming up with a total population estimate of several thousand before the fires. ‘One of the interesting things about this region is that there are Emblem of a crisis | 31
100 eucalypt species … and so koalas have more food-tree choice here than anywhere else in the country, and we’re finding they’re using a lot more tree species [such as silvertop ash] than we thought they would,’ she says. Furthermore, the koalas here are free of the chlamydia that has ravaged populations to the north, and a DNA analysis of 22 koala populations across Australia has revealed that those in the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area have the highest genetic diversity in the nation. They are, therefore, special for many reasons and are not as badly threatened here in the wilderness areas by the land clearing and urbanization as they are in more developed areas. But fires that blazed over more than 80 percent of the World Heritage Area between October and February have made a significant dent in the population. ‘These koalas up here in the protected areas were pockets of hope for the species, but now with these fires ripping through under climate change, unless we manage them; then, there is the threat of extinction,’ Leigh says. ‘These areas are really worth protecting because they could be the last strongholds for koalas and many other species. It’s a big area; we’ve got a million hectares; so it’s worth trying to manage effectively.’ Her initial fear was that 80 percent of the population had been killed. But the fact that one of her radio-collared animals survived in tall trees in an area where the fire burned close to the ground, and that she’s finding more survivors than expected, gives her hope that koalas may still be alive in less intensely burned patches across the mountains. ‘I am hoping we’ve got a lot more left … but it’s very safe to say we’ve lost at least 50 percent of the koalas,’ she says. ‘The critical thing for population recovery is hoping there are some left in refugia, where they can recolonize from. Finding out where we have koalas left and planning population recovery around that is a priority now.’ Using post-bushfire funding provided by San Diego Zoo Global and the NSW Koala Strategy, Science for Wildlife plans to spend the 32 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
next year doing 400 koala surveys over the five study sites. They hope to discover exactly how many koalas are left, and where they need to focus their conservation efforts.
An outpouring of international grief for creatures such as the burnt koalas has led to a tsunami of donations to wildlife organizations. WIRES, Australia’s largest wildlife rescue group, was the biggest recipient, taking in $90 million, which it has started to distribute to wildlife carers. Crowdfunding via GoFundMe raised $383 000 for the Currumbin Wildlife Hospital, $2.7 million to support koalas rescued by the Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park and $7.9 million for the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital.18 Friends of the Koala used the money they raised to expand their enclosures and build a new hospital on site, which was given the green light to begin taking patients in August 2020. Port Macquarie Koala Hospital is embarking on an ambitious breeding program, partnering with zoos, universities and the NSW government, to create three separate breeding facilities that will maintain koala genetic diversity and create insurance populations to replenish local wild populations and protect the species against future bushfire impacts. ‘We have so many fantastic koala organizations and wildlife hospitals that received those donations, and it was invaluable, as they all run on the smell of an oily rag,’ says Hosking. Nevertheless, she warns this won’t slow the species’ path to extinction until there’s a sincere effort from federal, state and local governments to protect habitat from land clearing. ‘Locally, we can save koalas that would have perished from a car crash or bushfire because of these wonderful volunteers, but they then have to be put back into the same threats,’ she says. ‘So, it’s no good until we get the political will to actually value the environment over development and economic gain.’ Emblem of a crisis | 33
While the federal government listed the koala as ‘vulnerable’ in Queensland, NSW and the ACT in 2012 under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act), a report from WWF in April 2020 showed land clearing had actually increased since then. Compared to the period covering 2004–12, rates of destruction of koala habitat in Queensland and NSW were actually up by 7 percent and 32 percent, respectively, in 2012–18.19 ‘Under the EPBC Act, people are supposed to obtain permission before bulldozing threatened species habitat. But in the vast majority of cases, this doesn’t happen and afterward they are not investigated or prosecuted,’ WWF Australia scientist Martin Taylor told reporters. ‘It’s nice to have an Act that says they are vulnerable, and things are really dire, but nothing has changed in terms of protecting habitat,’ agrees Hosking.20 In July, a year-long NSW government inquiry into the prospects of koalas found they are likely to be extinct in the wild in the state by 2050 if drastic action is not taken.21 Leigh says that if she’d been asked 12 months ago if koalas could be extinct in NSW by 2050, she would have said it was very unlikely, but following such a catastrophic bushfire season and ‘without a change to our land clearing laws, which were diluted a few years back, I think they are now in serious trouble’. Hearteningly, in response to the inquiry, the NSW government, led by conservative premier Gladys Berejiklian, revealed an $84 million plan to protect koalas, including tough new rules around land clearing, the creation of the new reserves, including proposed Guula Ngurra National Park in the Southern Highlands, and the planting of more than 100 000 trees. ‘I don’t want to see the koala extinct by 2050. I want to see their population doubled,’ NSW energy and environment minister Matt Kean told reporters. ‘Koalas are the most iconic example of our mismanagement of the environment and we’ve got to say “enough is enough”.’
34 | FLAMES OF EXTINCTION
(At the time of press, due to pressures and conflicts within the government, some of these measures have been put on hold.)22 In August, the Queensland government also revealed a five-year strategy for stemming declines, which included the restoration of 10 000 hectares of koala habitat.23 In the meantime, with a growing bushfire threat driven by climate change, detection dogs such as Bear may become ever more crucial to recovery efforts. Cristescu says the team is already preparing for bad bushfire seasons in coming years. She hopes to get funding for more resources and to partner with new organizations to deploy dogs more widely. Another priority is using drones and other methods to find koalas more easily and let people know that these lovable marsupials are found right on their doorsteps. ‘Animals that are cryptic and hard to find are difficult to protect,’ she says. ‘So, once people know where they live, we hope they’ll be more willing to help. Because – you know that saying “it takes a village to raise a child”? – it’s probably going to take a village to save the koala.’ But while koalas, particularly, struggle to cope with bushfires, many Australian species have evolved some tolerance to fire.
Emblem of a crisis | 35
