MORE than a million native animals may have been killed in the Victorian bushfires, a wildlife expert says. The massive effort to rescue animals caught in the fire has begun with triage centres set up to assess injured wildlife at staging posts at Kilmore, Whittlesea and Redesdale near Bendigo. 
The animals are then being treated and assessed by vets at nearby shelters, who make the agonising decision about which ones need to be euthanased. Those animals still able to may wait several weeks before walking out of fire-affected forest, said Gayle Chappell from the Hepburn Wildlife Shelter. Ms Chappell is among those working to rescue the animals and says the extent of the devastation may never be known. “It (the animal death toll) will be in the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions,” Ms Chappell said. “We are not just talking the animals we are familiar with, there are gliders and all sorts of possums, antechinus (a mouse-like marsupial), bandicoots, birds – there is so much wildlife. “It is devastating, the actual size of the destruction is devastating to a number of wildlife populations.” It is feared endangered populations of gliders, owls and lizards may be among the dead. For those that have survived, the recovery process will be long and slow. “They have lost their homes too and they are not going to be rebuilt in a year or two years, it is a much longer-term picture,” Ms Chappell said. “You can’t reconstruct a forest.”
A million native animals may have died in Victorian bushfires Turtle’s shell melts in Australia’s fires
