“Part of me thinks: Should we have known?” she adds. “Climate-change predictions suggested that catastrophic fires were going to happen and were going to become more frequent. But they’ve just never happened before at this scale.” The island last saw major bushfires in 2007, but the recent blazes have burned an area more than 12 times greater. They’ve even torn across farms and short-grass lawns, which don’t usually carry fires well. “Nobody foresaw over half the island burning,” Hohnen says. “And maybe we should have.”

Read: How long will Australia be livable?

Fire has been a recurring part of Australia’s landscape for millions of years, and many of its native species have adapted accordingly. Eucalyptus trees specialize in regrowing quickly after a blaze. Black kites, or firehawks, have been known to carry burning sticks to new locations to flush out small prey. Fire-seeking beetles use infrared-detecting pits to find infernos so that they can lay their eggs in charred wood. Other creatures that are less enamored of fire take precautions: Birds fly away and above, while small mammals burrow underground or shelter in tree hollows.

But when fires get big enough, birds get disoriented by the smoke and heat, while tree hollows transform from shelters into crematoria. That’s been the case in the recent season, as fires have been not only especially intense, but unprecedentedly thorough. Usually they burn patchily, creating a mosaic of scars that act as barriers to future flames and leaving behind unscathed vegetation that acts as nodes for rejuvenation. This season—again, due to unprecedented drought and heat—the fires have “brought down everything across the landscape in one fell swoop,” says Sarah Legge, an ecologist at the Australian National University. “That will make recovery harder.”

“There are also some habitats that are burning that we didn’t think should or would ever burn,” she adds. The subtropical rainforest on the border of Queensland and New South Wales “is not a flammable habitat. It’s evolved over many millennia without fire, and a lot of the species there aren’t resilient.”

The fires are especially devastating because they’re occurring against a long-running backdrop of biological annihilation. The clearing of land for agriculture and urban development has forced species into ever smaller and more fragmented pockets, which can be more easily snuffed out by a single bad event. Introduced predators such as feral cats and red foxes are already huge threats to native species but dine especially well in burned landscapes, where shelter is scarce. All the sins that have been visited upon Australia’s wildlife compound one another.

I wonder if we’re entering a new era of disaster-induced extinctions, in which beleaguered species can be more easily wiped out in one blow. That certainly happened to the Bramble Cay melomys, a rodent that lived on only one low-lying Australian island. Rising sea levels and repeated storm surges recently turned it into the first known mammalian casualty of human-caused climate change. The greater stick-nest rat may join it this summer, says Katherine Tuft of Arid Recovery, a conservation NGO. Its home, in what is already Australia’s driest region, has been hit by severe drought. With just three-quarters of an inch of rain falling in the past two years, the vegetation has run out of moisture, and the rats can survive for only so long.