When fires ravaged Victorian communities west of Ballarat on Thursday, residents were forced to evacuate as their homes were threatened by the flames.

But some wildlife in the area had a harder time escaping.

Beaufort-based wildlife rescuer and carer Esther Hands found one injured koala in the fire zone with badly burnt feet.

Ms Hands said the fires — which Victorian authorities fear could flare in extreme conditions forecast for Wednesday — would have a devastating impact on the small koala population in the area and their habitat.

“Now we fear they will be wiped out again, as all of their food source has been burnt,” she said.

She is bracing herself for an influx of injured wildlife once the fires subside.

“I’m very concerned because I’m going to get inundated in the next few weeks once it all settles down. I’m concerned there’ll be lots of burnt macropods, possums, and birds,” she said.

Sanctuaries prepare for bushfires that ‘annihilate’ wildlife populations

The disastrous impact of bushfires on wildlife is something animal sanctuary owners like Kevin Clapson are all too familiar with.

When the 2019 bushfires were approaching Mr Clapson’s wildlife sanctuary, firefighters found him holding a hose, getting ready to try and protect his property alone.

“The firies pulled up they started laughing and said ‘had you stayed where you were you would have been just a little black spot on the ground’,” he said.

He said he was fortunate that four fire trucks were available that day to help protect his property from a firestorm.

With the help of the NSW Rural Fire Service, his house and wildlife sanctuary at East Lynne on the NSW south-coast was largely saved.

But all of the bush around the sanctuary was scorched.

While Mr Clapson’s wife evacuated the three joeys the couple had been caring for at the time, the true wildlife cost of that firestorm would become clear in the weeks that followed.

Mr Clapson, who is a volunteer with the wildlife group WIRES, had to euthanise 50 wild kangaroos that were too badly burnt to survive.

That number included roos he and his wife had raised and released.

“You can’t colour it up, it is just horrible.”

After the fires, the kangaroo population around his property dropped from 100 to fewer than 15.

The situation was mirrored around large patches of the country affected by fire that summer, with WWF Australia estimating nearly 3 billion animals were impacted by the 2019/2020 fires.

The experience of that bushfire has changed how Mr Clapson and his wife prepared for this year’s bushfire season.

Since 2019, the Clapsons have taken the bush 20 metres further back from their sanctuary, have changed their evacuation plans and are doing everything they can to keep their property tidy and at a lower fire risk.

Like many conservation and wildlife groups, they are trying to adapt to longer fire seasons and more intense fires, which pose a larger threat to animals and areas of high conservation value.

And with the bush around their property once again very dry, they’ve been worried about this summer.

For one conservation group, fire season started very early

They’re not the only ones changing how they try to protect wildlife or areas of high conservation value.

Rhys Swain is the national fire program officer for Bush Heritage, a large not-for-profit conservation group which buys land with high conservation value right across the country and then partners with scientists and traditional owners, to protect it.

Already, Mr Swain said Bush Heritage had battled blazes on its land in Queensland and northern NSW this fire season and he is worried about the mid coast of WA, NSW, Victoria and the East Coast of Tasmania.

The other concern he has is the impact of introduced weeds that can increase fire intensity.

“They also generally increase a fire’s frequency, so fires are burning more often and more hot than what they should and couple that with a hotter, drying climate and some of those results of that can be catastrophic for critical-weight-range mammals, also bird species.”

He said his organisation was doing what it could to protect its large landholdings, by using prescribed and cultural burns to reduce fuel loads and create fire breaks.

It worked with neighbours when there was a fire and spent winter maintaining tracks through its properties to improve firefighting access.

Some parts of the country, Mr Swain said, would recover quickly from fire.

But he worries about land like a Bush Heritage-owned reserve at Naree in northern NSW, which was affected by fire in 2014 and still hasn’t recovered.

With most of Australia’s population in urban centres, he wants Australians to care about how fire is impacting on our bushland and wildlife.

Time to map endangered species we most need to protect

Brendan Wintle is a professor in conservation ecology at Melbourne University, where he has studied the impacts of large fires on Australia’s biodiversity.

While he says some species recover from fire very well, at the moment large fires are threatening many vulnerable eco-systems and species.

“We have so many populations of threatened species and threatened ecological communities that are just hanging on, just grimly hanging on,” he explained.

“And we are not properly resourcing the recovery of those species and eco-systems, they remain very susceptible to events like big fires.”

He’d like to see more done to identify threatened wildlife species before a fire.

“I would like to have seen after the last big fires the development of statewide mapping projects which show all of the places we really, really know we have to protect during a big fire event and for which species and what kind of suppression or protection work would be deployed,” he said.

He wants states to come up with sophisticated plans to protect what is already endangered.

Without that work, he predicts we’ll entirely lose species to the next Black Summer bushfire season.