“The ones that eat grasses, there is nothing for them really,” he told The Age. The CFA and RFS fire maps show the blaze as a vast black monolith rolling across the land, killing everything it touches. Most of the fire ground is still too hot and dangerous to access, so Australia’s scientists have been able to do little but overlay those maps on known species habitats and assume everything underneath the black polygon is burnt and dead. Burnt trees in the Wingello State Forest Credit:Getty But Lembit says that is not the case. The fire burnt intensely but indiscriminately. It consumed whole paddocks but left small stands of button grass ashy but untouched. In the forests, the fire missed small coupes of trees entirely, for no reason Lembit can see.

“I would not say it’s good news,” says Lembit. “But there are small glimmers of light wherever I look.” There are insects, too. Lembit says he can hear the shrill call of cicadas ring over the fire ground. He spotted a wombat nuzzling into its burrow. Some of the burnt trees at the bottom of valleys – where their roots are closer to the water table – have already started to re-sprout. “There is room for optimism,” says Lembit. But only if we act now. Those tiny green areas and then animals they shelter are all we have left of vast chunks of burnt environment.

They represent our best chance to preserve what was there and help it regrow. “They are much, much more valuable than they were before the fire,” says Professor Don Driscoll, director of Deakin University’s Centre For Integrative Ecology. “We need to protect them.” And they are in imminent peril. The trees, many of which have survived years of drought, need water. The animals need food and water and shelter. Tree-dwellers have lost most of the hollows they used to hide in. Grass-dwellers now have nowhere to hide at all. They are exposed and vulnerable. Thousands of kilograms of carrots and sweet potato are being delivered to endangered Brush-tailed Rock-wallabies in NSW.

In response, scientists, wildlife carers and government agencies around Australia are mobilising. They stand ready to go into the burnt-over areas, saving injured wildlife, protecting what remains, and starting the long, long process of regeneration. “This is a race against time,” says Dr Marissa Parrott, a reproductive biologist at Zoos Victoria. “We need to get in as quickly as possible when it is safe. And we need to have everything as ready as possible for supplementary feeding – or for evacuation.” But so far, the roadblocks remain down in most areas. Only small teams of wildlife carers have managed to make it in, escorted by the military. They emerge with carloads full of badly burnt animals.

“The animals we are seeing are animals that are right on the fringes of the burnt areas,” says Zoos Victoria’s CEO Dr Jenny Gray. “We’re in the calm before the storm. We can anticipate what is coming, but we don’t know yet. Some areas may have got off lightly. Some areas, from the pictures, are absolutely destroyed.” *** How well animals survive a fire depends on a few things, including the intensity of the fire, but also the availability of food and water after the blaze. “At the moment we’re in a worst-case scenario, because we’re in the middle of a drought,” says Deakin University ecologist Darcy Watchorn.

Some endangered animals have had their whole ranges burnt out. “There would be real concern about how well they have come through this,” says Museums Victoria’s top animal scientist Dr Jane Melville. “And we’re not through the fire season yet either.” She and her colleagues spent the last few years studying several different native species in the path of the fire. “Are they still there?” wonders Dr Melville. The road back is a difficult one. Thanks to the climate crisis, Australia’s climate is getting hotter, dryer, and more unpredictable. Our fire seasons are getting longer and more intense. “We don’t anticipate anything getting any easier for these species,” says Professor Brendan Wintle, an ecologist at the University of Melbourne. ”As we see more bushfires in the near future, then absolutely the pressure mounts. “They lose their habitat. They lose their capacity to migrate and repopulate burnt areas, as they fall to such small population sizes.”

To work out what needed to be done - both urgently and long-term - on Tuesday about 50 scientists and bureaucrats packed into a small office on Lonsdale Street. Despite the tight quarters, the mood was sombre. A top member of state government spoke first. Things are much worse than we thought, the scientists were told. Almost all the Victorian habitat of the eastern ground parrot, a shy green creature that hides among buttongrass stalks and plucks fallen seed from the ground, had been burnt through. Nearly all the habitat for the alpine tree frog, green and golden bell frog are gone. Perhaps one in four of the state’s greater gliders are dead.

The sooty owl takes its name from feathers that seem perpetually covered in ash. In government pictures, two dark eyes stare out from the owl’s heart-shape facial disk. Half its habitat is now gone. A quarter of Victoria’s population is dead. Some 31 per cent of the state’s rainforest has burnt. A quarter of our wet forests. A third of our lowland forests. A third of the state’s national parks have been entirely burnt-out. Many of those forests, particularly the rainforest, may never recover. One species of fern, Lastreopsis decomposita, is likely extinct. The bureaucrat stopped. Everyone took a breath. And then the government representatives turned to the assembled scientists, and asked something unexpected. What should we do? “When everyone arrived, there was a pretty sombre mood in the room, because everyone realised how much devastation had occurred,” says Dr Euan Ritchie, a Deakin University ecologist who was in the room.

“But I felt there was a real willingness from everyone to work together to make the best of a bad situation... to try to save what is left.” Authorities wanted to know what needed to be done to help injured animals, to protect what was left, and to spur recovery. There wasn’t time for mourning, not when there were things that could be done right now. Several scientists in the room told The Age they could remember nothing like it in terms of the speed or urgency of the response from the government. “We have never had this kind of response,” says Professor Don Driscoll, an ecologist at Deakin University.

And the most pressing issue, several scientists told The Age, was dealing with the ferals. *** Most animals flee from fires. But some are drawn to them. They know the scorched earth makes a perfect hunting environment. Researchers call this pyric‐carnivory. Hawks and raptors are strongly attracted to fire grounds. American researchers found their numbers increase seven-fold after a blaze. Feral cats travel tens of kilometres to get to a fire ground, and stay there for weeks. Researchers think they are drawn by the sight, or perhaps the smell of the smoke plumes.

And surveys after bushfires tend to show large numbers of foxes hunting through the burnt remains. After injured animals are triaged, treated, and possibly evacuated – along with any surviving endangered species – from the fireground, the next step must be protecting those green patches. We need to immediately initiate a culling program, focussing on feral cats, foxes, deer and horses, several scientists told The Age. “Targeted baiting, trapping, and maybe shooting,” says Professor Driscoll. Targeted watering systems need to be set up to keep the trees alive. Food needs to be distributed to starving animals. Then there is shelter. Nestboxes need to be installed for animals who have lost their tree-hollows.

For ground-dwelling animals, one option currently being trialled elsewhere in Australia are cheap, simple shelters made of chicken wire and shade-cloth. “Small animals like bush rats, pygmy possums and small birds can enter and exit from them from any point,” says Deakin University’s Watchorn. “And they are not accessible by cats and foxes.” Mr Watchorn is trialling the shelters for animals hit by planned burns in the Otways. The data is not in yet, but there are positive signs, he says. Fish will also need to be taken from streams, even ones far down-river from the fire ground. Heavy rainfall in burnt areas will wash the ash – full of toxic chemicals – into rivers. We’re in the middle of a drought, and fires are still burning, but scientists find themselves in the strange position of praying for it not to rain just yet. But there is only so much that can be done. As Australia’s climate warms, things get harder and harder for our native species every year.