56 Australian Geographic

W

HEN PAUL WAS handed to Barbara

Barrett in a washing basket to take

home last November, he was given a

sl i m cha nce of sur v iva l. He lay curled

up in a ball on old towels, burnt,

traumatised and barely moving.

“We thought he might not make it,” Barb, a koala carer with

two decades experience, recalls of the young male koala. But

there was a chance, so he was patched up, made comfortable

and entrusted to her to try to rehabilitate him. He’d been res-

cued by a man named Paul, hence his adopted name, from a

still-smouldering fireground near Port Macquarie, on the New

South Wales mid-north coast, after one of the first of the fires

that went on to rage throughout summer across south-eastern

Australia. His ears were singed and the fur on his rump and quite

a few of the nails on his paws had been burnt. Some of the claws

dropped off a few weeks later meaning that, if he did survive,

climbing vertically up a tree trunk would be near impossible.

His thick protective coat was still intact across much of the

rest of h is body, protect i ng h is sk in a s it shou ld have f rom d i rect

searing. But it was thought likely that, because he was singed,

he would have radiant burns beneath it caused by the intense

heat of the fire he’d survived.

U

LTI M AT ELY more than 16 million hectares of bush-

land, much of it national park, state forest or world

heritage area, burnt.

The world watched in horror and understandably wept

along with Australia at the tragic loss of human life and prop-

erties that resulted. But perhaps what was unexpected was the

widespread and heartfelt dismay about what the fires – hotter

and more widespread than anything seen before – were doing

to Australia’s largely unique biodiversity.

Leading ecologists around the country, including the

University of Sydney’s Professor Chris Dickman, did untold

interviews with media outlets from dozens of countries as it

became clear what the planet could be losing forever in the

Australian bushfires.

Based on animal density measurements that he’d made in

NSW forests during unrelated research before the fires, Chris

calculated that at least 800 million individual animals were

killed in the NSW fires alone. That figure, he determined,

could realistically be extrapolated to the other states affected by

the crisis – Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Western

Australia – to more than a billion. “And that was just terrestrial

mammals, birds and reptiles,” he says. “It doesn’t even take into

account forest bats, frogs and fish.”

Chris and some of his esteemed colleagues quickly got

together and estimated that between 20 and 100 species of

vertebrate animals and plants would be pushed close to the brink

of extinction. This included the long-footed potoroo, greater

glider, Kangaroo Island dunnart, black-tailed dusky antechinus,

silver-headed antechinus and Hastings River mouse. Professor

M i ke Lee, a n evolut iona r y biolog ist at F l i nder s Un iver sit y, SA,

estimated that the number of insect species that could now be

facing extinction was 700.

Now well on the path to recovery,

bushfire survivor Paul, named after

the man who found him, has his dressings

changed at the koala hospital.