To the Stantons it seemed remarkable their glossies had not only produced an egg but that it had thrived to become 0601.Įven as the fires raged, “that pair would have been there going through the courtship rituals”, says Mike Barth, who manages the island’s conservation programme to save the birds from extinction. They feed only on the seed cones of one tree – the drooping sheoak – and lay only one egg a year. The island’s glossies are a unique subspecies that conservationists have been working for 25 years to save. The fires came during Australia's hottest year on record and in a country that already has among the world's highest extinction rates because of invasive non-native species such as cats, foxes, deer, horses and various pathogens, along with habitat clearing and fragmentation.īut one year on from the start of those fires, what does the landscape look like today? With state borders closing because of Covid-19, the Guardian took a virtual journey through the blackened path of Australia’s summer of bushfires, talking to those who are investigating the state of the continent’s surviving flora and fauna. The habitat of an estimated 143 million mammals, 180 million birds, 51 million frogs and 2.5 billion reptiles was burned. Nearly 3 billion animals were killed or displaced by bushfire. By the end of February, they had burned through at least 32,000 square miles (85,000 sq km) of Australian forest, an area the size of Ireland. The wildfires that swept through many parts of Australia between July 2019 and February 2020 were of a scale and size that is difficult to imagine.

Glossy black cockatoo endangered