Damage On Kangaroo Island Staggering; Wildlife & Livestock Flattened, Visitors Gone [View all]

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Simon Kelly, center, a farmer on Kangaroo Island in Australia, lost most of his 9,000 sheep.

Kangaroo Island is Australia in miniature. It is a wildlife haven, with its own varieties of kangaroos, echidnas (a spiny anteater) and cockatoos, as well as a koala population seen as insurance should disaster strike the species on the mainland. It is a tourism magnet, with luxury cliff-top lodges and beaches studded with sea lions. It is a farming hub, producing veal, wool, grain and honey for purveyors at home and beyond.

Now, Kangaroo Island is unrecognizable. Wildfires that burned for weeks consumed half of the island — more than 800 square miles. Two people were killed, dozens of homes were destroyed, and wilderness parks were turned to cinders, littering the landscape with animal corpses. In a bush land once teeming with the activity of insects, birds, reptiles and mammals, there is only silence, and the scent of rot. “Everything is dead,” said Simon Kelly, a farmer who lost more than half of his 9,000 sheep and was burying them in mass graves.

In this season of unimaginable infernos in Australia, perhaps no place is facing more daunting questions about its future than Kangaroo Island. Tourism operators are fretting over an exodus of visitors during what is normally their busiest time of year, a problem only made worse as the coronavirus sweeping China has kept people from traveling. Farmers who lost everything must now reassemble herds, replace equipment and wait for land to regenerate. Many of the island’s 4,500 residents fear the community will suffer if people go to the mainland for work and never come back.

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Bush-fire damage on the island.

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The toll on wildlife has also been terrible on the island, often referred to as Australia’s Galápagos. Since the fires ended, there have been no sightings of the island’s native bee, the green carpenter. “Unfortunately, if it’s not extinct, it’s close to it,” said Bill Dunlop, the manager of Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park. “Anywhere they would have been living would have been burned.” About 30 percent of the population of a subspecies of the glossy black cockatoo, which is essentially extinct on the mainland and numbered about 500 on the island, is also gone, Mr. Dunlop said. Thirty to 40 percent of the island’s kangaroos are believed to have died, as well as a third of its 50,000 koalas.

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A kangaroo mother and joey.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/world/australia/kangaroo-island-fire.html