A blaze out of Australia's Grampians National Park continues to rage, sending animals scattering—and in one case, straight into Pam Turner's living room. Turner, who runs the Wildwood Wildlife Shelter in Victoria, ended up hosting 20 baby kangaroos, or joeys, in her home on the day after Christmas, after Turner herself rushed them inside as the fire got closer to her residence, reports the Guardian. "I just couldn't have left them, so I was prepared to stay," she says. Turner and her menagerie of hand-reared roos huddled inside as sprinklers tried to douse her home's roof and other buildings on her property.
"I was extremely anxious," she tells the Age. "I was preparing myself for a giant fireball to come over the mountains." In video of the scene, Turner can be heard comforting the on-alert joeys standing at attention in her living room listening to the sprinklers, telling them, "It's all right ... it's OK, everyone." Luckily, thanks to the way the wind was blowing, the fire didn't take out Turner's home. But the fire is indicative of a larger problem in the park, known to locals as Gariwerd, which has seen at least four big bushfires since 2006 that's touched 85% of the park's land, per Forest Fire Management Victoria.
"Our wildlife are on the front line of climate change," Lisa Palma, CEO of Wildlife Victoria, tells the Guardian. "They don't have anywhere to escape to from fires." The group notes that some of the "catastrophic and long-term impacts" suffered by local animals—in addition to death directly from the fires—include burns, dehydration, blindness, and starvation as their habitats and food sources are destroyed. One especially worrisome outcome: "having one big fire after another over very short periods of time," per Deakin University ecologist John White, who says that species don't have the time to recover when fires hit so rapidly one after the other. (More kangaroos stories.)
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