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

Abstract

Devastating wildfires in Australia are recognized with designations such as Black Friday (1939), Ash Wednesday (1983), and Black Saturday (2009). But the wildfires of 2019– 2020 persisted so long they were named for an entire season: Black Summer. Climate change was largely responsible for setting the stage for the catastrophe: 2019 was both Australia’s hottest and driest year on record and included six of the continent’s hottest days ever. During the conflagrations, at least one-fifth of Australia’s forest cover burned, a figure unprecedented on any other continent. Most of the fires were in the forested temperate southeastern states of New South Wales, southeastern Queensland, and eastern Victoria. However, fires also overwhelmed Kangaroo Island off South Australia, remote grasslands in the Northern Territory, and woodlands in Western Australia. An estimated 327 plants and animals lost at least 10% of their habitat to the fires. Of these threatened species, 114 suffered staggering losses to their ranges. Among the reasons the Black Summer fires were so devastating to threatened species was that they destroyed huge portions of conservation areas. The Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area and the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area lost 54% and 80%, respectively, of the acreage protected in parks and preserves. In February 2020, soon after the fires were contained by firefighters or extinguished by heavy rainfall, Australian journalist and award-winning science writer John Pickrell traveled to the burned areas to document the impacts by interviewing more than 80 research scientists, natural area stewards, Aboriginal rangers, wildlife rehabilitators, and restorationists familiar with the affected ecosystems. His work, and that of some of the recovery experts he consulted, was delayed by COVID-19 travel restrictions. In the end, though, his persistence led to this detailed and affecting account of Black Summer. Each of the book’s 11 chapters explores the fires’ effects on an endangered species. However, Pickrell uses these individual species as a springboard to examine the much broader range of challenges imperiling the continent’s threatened flora and fauna even before the wildfires. For example, in the sixth chapter, Pickrell profiles the iconic duck-billed platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) as well as other species that share the platypus’s aquatic habitat. Platypus populations, previously decimated by the fur trade, were already under duress because riparian land clearing exposes streams to sunlight, which raises water temperatures above thresholds the monotreme can tolerate. Grazing cattle trample stream bluffs, eliminating burrowing sites. Agricultural runoff leads to eutrophication, fouling the habitat for fish, crayfish, mussels and turtles as well as platypuses. Drought, irrigation diversions, and dams reduce the size of streams, or dry them up altogether; platypuses are ungainly on land and are unlikely to be able to migrate to alternate habitat. Platypuses drown after becoming entangled in fishing line or getting caught in crayfish traps. And, even if platypuses escape the direct effects of fire by retreating to burrows or diving underwater, soil, ash, and burned debris wash into streams following fires, further degrading habitat. Pickrell’s profiles include four other mammals (koalas, lemuroid ringtail possums, bare-nosed wombats, and northern quolls), three birds (‘‘firehawks’’ [several raptors that use fire to