As fires burn across Victoria, the scale of loss can feel difficult to put into words, yet too significant to ignore. When bushfires tear through landscapes, what they take is not always visible, and what is lost does not always get counted.
We are on high fire danger here in Tasmania too. The days carry that familiar tension, watching the weather, listening for updates, knowing how quickly everything can change. It makes what is happening in Victoria feel closer somehow. Not just something we are witnessing, but something we recognise in our bodies.
I’ve been watching the news from Tasmania, knowing that as the fire fronts move, countless animals are running, hiding, sheltering where they can, or not. I’ve also heard the story of Tarcombe Animal Shelter lost in the fires, including animals that were in care at the time. Its founder, Dr Robyn Coy, managed to escape with a small group of survivors, including six joeys, an adult kangaroo, a kookaburra, a tawny frogmouth, and two ringtail possums. In the days that follow, she plans to return to the burned landscape to walk through the blackened ground and search for any animals that may have survived. There are no words that feel adequate for this kind of loss. Only a heaviness that settles and does not lift easily.
What makes the loss of a wildlife shelter so devastating is not only the destruction of a building, but the destruction of a promise. Animals in care are there because they have already survived one disaster. Injury, fire, car strike, starvation, the quiet collapse of habitat. A shelter represents the place where that spiral is meant to stop, where safety, routine and recovery begin. To lose that space, and the animals within it, feels almost unbearable because it is the loss of refuge itself. It is the moment where even the places built for care are overwhelmed, and where the idea of sanctuary becomes fragile.
For carers, those animals are not numbers or temporary occupants. They are individuals with names, histories, feeding schedules, familiar sounds and known fears. They are lives in recovery, in the process of learning trust. Losing them to fire is not simply a professional loss. It is a deeply personal grief, one that sits alongside exhaustion, shock and the knowledge that there was nothing more that could be done.
The scale of destruction we are witnessing is both personal and ecological. Across Victoria, vast areas of land have burned, homes and outbuildings have been lost, and entire communities have faced prolonged power outages as fire fronts move through towns, forests and farmland. A state of disaster has been declared in affected areas, as communities brace for conditions that fire authorities and emergency services have compared to those experienced during the Black Summer bushfires of 2019 to 2020. For many, that comparison alone is enough to reopen old fear and grief.
The Black Summer fires were a national catastrophe, one of the most severe fire seasons Australia has ever experienced. Across multiple states and territories, millions of hectares burned, thousands of homes were destroyed, and vast areas of forest, woodland and protected land were lost, including ecosystems that had not burned for generations. The impact on wildlife was unprecedented.
Many people will remember the photograph taken during the 2009 Victorian bushfires, showing Sam the Koala being given water by firefighter David Tree, an image that came to symbolise the scale of wildlife suffering during that season.
For many Australians, Black Summer changed how fire seasons are understood and anticipated. Since then, warnings, forecasts and emergency declarations carry additional weight, shaped by recent experience rather than distant memory. Comparisons to Black Summer are made not to sensationalise risk, but to convey the seriousness of conditions that emergency services now recognise as increasingly common.
Extreme fire events are no longer rare. Fires are occurring more frequently, and in some landscapes they are returning before ecosystems have had time to recover. This shortening of recovery intervals has serious consequences. Habitats are lost faster than they can regenerate, and species already under pressure are left with fewer refuges and fewer opportunities to re-establish stable populations.
Post fire scientific assessments estimated that hundreds of millions to billions of animals were killed or displaced across Australia as a whole, as habitat was destroyed at a scale rarely seen before. Forests, understorey and water catchments were stripped away, leaving surviving animals exposed to starvation, dehydration and predation, and forcing already vulnerable species to contend with landscapes that no longer functioned as home. While vegetation may eventually return, the loss of complex habitat, shelter and food webs represents a far longer and more uncertain path to recovery.
Habitat loss in megafire seasons does not just mean fewer trees. It means shelter gone for small mammals and birds, food and breeding grounds erased, and the fragile connections that sustain entire ecosystems left in ruin. Almost every species in affected landscapes feels that loss, from threatened rainforest flora to vast populations of reptiles, marsupials and birds, and rebuilding those natural communities will take years of care and regeneration.
Fire is often described as a natural part of Australia’s landscapes, and in some ecosystems low intensity fire does play a role in renewal. But the fires we are increasingly facing are not those gentle, regenerative burns. They are hotter, larger, and more frequent, leaving little time or refuge for wildlife to survive, let alone recover.
In moments like this, it can feel inadequate to write at all. Words do not slow fire fronts or rebuild habitat. They do not save the animals already lost. But naming what is happening, and acknowledging what is being taken, matters. Silence allows loss to pass unnoticed. Witness gives it weight.
Care for wildlife has always existed in the space between hope and uncertainty. It persists not because outcomes are guaranteed, but because lives matter even when they are fragile. In fire seasons like these, when destruction feels vast and relentless, choosing to remember, to speak, and to hold space for grief is itself a form of care.
For those who want to help, the most meaningful support is often the simplest and the most direct. Reaching out to a local wildlife shelter, an independent carer, or a community based rescue group can make a lasting difference. These are the people on the ground, responding in real time, often with limited resources and little visibility. A phone call, a message of support, donated supplies, or direct financial assistance can help sustain the quiet, relentless work of rescue and recovery long after headlines move on. In a season defined by loss, connection and practical care still matter.
In times like these, caring is not a solution, but it is a responsibility we cannot abandon.
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