Originally published 2020-01-11.
Three of the animals at the centre of the Kangaroo Island story: a koala, a dunnart and a black cockatoo in flight.
In late December 2019 and January 2020, bushfires burnt through roughly half of Kangaroo Island, off the coast of South Australia, killing two people and devastating some of the country's most important wildlife refuges. Early reports feared that whole species had been wiped out, including the critically endangered Kangaroo Island dunnart and the island's glossy black-cockatoos, and that tens of thousands of koalas had died.
The losses were real and heavy, but the worst fears about extinction did not come true. Surveys later found surviving dunnarts in unburnt pockets, a cockatoo population that held steady, and a koala population cut by around 80 to 90 per cent. This article explains what happened, why the island matters so much, and what scientists found once the smoke cleared.
Why Kangaroo Island is so important for wildlife
Kangaroo Island covers about 4,400 square kilometres, making it Australia's third-largest island after Tasmania and Melville Island. It lies about 13 kilometres off the Fleurieu Peninsula, south-west of Adelaide. Because it has been cut off from the mainland for thousands of years and has no foxes or rabbits, a large share of its native bushland and wildlife survived.
About a third of the island is protected in parks and reserves. The largest and best known is Flinders Chase National Park at its western end, home to the Remarkable Rocks and Admirals Arch. The island also hosts the world's only pure-bred, disease-free population of Ligurian honey bees.
How much burnt, and how fast
Lightning sparked fires on the island in December 2019. In early January, extreme heat and wind drove them across the western end in days. By 6 January at least 170,000 hectares, about a third of the island, had burnt, which is what the first news reports described. The final area grew to around 210,000 hectares, close to half of the island, including most of Flinders Chase.
Two people died, many homes were lost, and farmers lost tens of thousands of sheep and cattle. For wildlife, the speed of the fire was the cruellest part: animals that cannot run or fly far had little chance once the front arrived.
The Kangaroo Island dunnart: on the edge before the fire
A dunnart. These mouse-sized carnivorous marsupials hunt insects and spiders at night; the Kangaroo Island species, Sminthopsis aitkeni, is found nowhere else.
Dunnarts are small marsupials in the genus Sminthopsis, about the size of a house mouse but with pointed snouts and sharp teeth. About twenty species live across Australia and New Guinea, from deserts to forests. They are night-time hunters that feed mostly on insects, spiders and other invertebrates.
The Kangaroo Island dunnart lives only on the island and is listed as critically endangered. Before the fires, government scientists estimated there were only 300 to 500 of them, almost all in the island's western scrubland. More than 90 per cent of their known habitat burnt. Local ecologist Heidi Groffen of the nonprofit Kangaroo Island Land for Wildlife told The Independent she hoped some had sheltered in rock crevices and burrows.
Some did. Remote cameras picked up dunnarts at a previously known site within days, and later in about a dozen unburnt patches inside Flinders Chase and the Ravine des Casoars Wilderness Protection Area. Recovery teams then built a cat-proof fence around one site and stepped up feral cat control, because cats hunting across bare, burnt ground pose an even greater threat than usual.
Glossy black-cockatoos: a recovery story under threat
A black cockatoo in flight. Males of the glossy and red-tailed black cockatoos both show red tail panels; the glossy is the smallest member of its group.
The glossy black-cockatoo, Calyptorhynchus lathami, is the smallest of Australia's black cockatoos, and its closest relative is the red-tailed black cockatoo. The Kangaroo Island subspecies is listed as endangered. It is a fussy eater, feeding almost entirely on the seeds of drooping she-oak trees, so losing those trees can mean starvation even for birds that escape the flames.
By the 1990s the island's population had fallen to about 150 birds. A long recovery programme, backed by landholders and volunteers, protected nest trees from possums with metal collars, installed nest boxes and planted she-oaks. By 2019 the population had grown to around 370. When the fires came, about three quarters of South Australia's glossies lived inside the fire zone, and some flocks lost more than 90 per cent of their feeding habitat.
The birds proved tougher than feared. A 2020 count recorded 454 glossy black-cockatoos, and the census reported in January 2024 counted 453, showing a population that held steady despite the damage.
Koalas: an introduced population with special value
A koala in a eucalypt. Kangaroo Island's koalas descend from animals brought from the mainland and are free of the chlamydia that affects most wild populations.
Koalas are not native to Kangaroo Island; people introduced them in the twentieth century, and they thrived so well that they damaged their favourite manna gums. Before the fires, about 50,000 lived there, many in blue gum plantations. What makes them precious to conservationists is their health: because of the island's isolation, they are free of chlamydia, a disease that causes blindness and infertility in many mainland koalas. That makes them an insurance population for the species.
Initial reports suggested around half had died. South Australia's environment department later estimated that only 5,000 to 10,000 remained, with about 85 per cent of their habitat burnt. Rescuers took injured and orphaned koalas into care, and some were moved to Cleland Wildlife Park near Adelaide.
A video report on the toll the 2019–20 fires took on Australian wildlife.
Beyond the island: the billion-animal estimate
Kangaroo Island was one part of Australia's 2019–20 Black Summer, when fires burnt millions of hectares across several states. University of Sydney ecologist Chris Dickman estimated that more than one billion mammals, birds and reptiles had been affected nationally, up from an earlier figure of 480 million for New South Wales alone.
That number is often misquoted as a confirmed death toll. It is an estimate of animals living in the burnt area, based on density figures from earlier studies, and it excludes bats, frogs and insects. Some animals survived, and many that survived later died from starvation, predators or loss of shelter. The figure shows the scale of the disaster, not a body count.
Australia's wildlife is unusually exposed because so much of it lives nowhere else: around nine in ten of its reptiles and frogs, and a large share of its mammals, are endemic. When a fire takes out the only range of a species, there is no backup population elsewhere in the world.
Further video coverage of the bushfire crisis and its effect on animals.
What recovery looks like, and how people can help
The island's bushland is adapted to fire and much of it has regrown. Recovery work since 2020 has focused on feral cat control, nest boxes, she-oak planting, and surveys to track which species are bouncing back. Other surprises followed, including the rediscovery of pygmy possums that some had feared lost.
- Support established groups such as Kangaroo Island Land for Wildlife or state wildlife rescue networks rather than unverified online fundraisers.
- If you visit, stay on tracks, follow fire bans and give wildlife space.
- Treat dramatic headline numbers with care: check whether they describe animals killed, affected or simply living in an area.
Sources: Department for Environment and Water, South Australia: Kangaroo Island wildlife recovery update; Landscape South Australia, January 2024: Glossy black-cockatoo census; University of Sydney: More than one billion animals impacted; Wikipedia: Kangaroo Island; Wikipedia: Kangaroo Island dunnart; Wikipedia: Glossy black cockatoo
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