Flames of Extinction: The Race to Save Australia's Threatened Wildlife

By John Pickrell

In the early months of 2020, the world’s attention was riveted on Australia, where the nation’s iconic wildlife fought for survival in the face of unprecedented wildfires. Images of koalas drinking from firefighters’ water bottles went viral and became the global face of a catastrophe that would kill as many as three billion animals. Known as the Black Summer, the fire season was responsible for more wildlife deaths and near-extinctions than any other single event in Australian history. Flames of Extinction, written by a journalist at the heart of this news coverage, is the first book to tell the stories of Australia’s record-setting fires, focusing on the wild animals and plants that will be forever changed.

As news of the fires spread around the world, journalist John Pickrell was inundated with requests for articles about the danger to Australia’s wildlife. The picture seemed grim, from charred koalas to flames that burned so hot not even animal skeletons remained. But Pickrell’s reporting exposed a larger picture of hope. Flames of Extinction tells the story of the scientists, wildlife rehabilitators, and community members who came together to save wildlife and protect them in the future.

As climate change intensifies and devastating wildfires become more commonplace, Australia’s Black Summer offers a poignant warning to the rest of the world. Through evocative and urgent storytelling, Flames of Extinction puts readers on the ground to witness the aftermath of one of Australia’s greatest tragedies and inside the inspiring effort to save lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642832037

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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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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