Dying for a drink: native fauna desperately seeking human help
Did native animals seek human help during the fires because they sensed our compassion – or was it sheer desperation?
Beyond the fury of the keening fires, firefighter Mark Hawkins’ memories of summer have been troubled by a softer, yet equally aberrant, sound. It’s a sound he’d never heard before. One that shouldn’t happen. A sound so strange that, over this past, apocalyptic season, it sent viral videos fanning out to the world, and surprised animal behaviourists, wildlife rescuers and ecologists. It still echoes loudly in Hawkins’ ears: the frantic scratching of koala claws on plastic water bottles.
Battling the blazes that racked the Adelaide Hills from late December, the Cudlee Creek brigade captain and his men came across scores of koalas scrambling from the fire grounds on gasps of smoke, scorched and desperate. They found nearly all of them would drink from their hands. Wild animals, tame as house cats. Reaching out to grab at bottled water, their need so urgent they’d scrabble their paws on the sides for purchase.
“You’d find them on the road, obviously their feet are sore or burnt,” Hawkins says. “They’d all take water from you if you found them. The boys would cut open water bottles with their pen knives and make little cups for them. It’s amazing how much water they’d drink, they’re that dry.” He recalls one in particular, a thickset male with a smudge of a nose, emerging from the flames like a bad miracle. Blackened fur. Singed ears. Crumbs of charcoaled bark on his flank. A survivor. “I put two or three bottles in him,” Hawkins says. “Massive amount of drinking.”
Here’s the thing: koalas don’t ordinarily drink water. (The animal’s name is derived from an Aboriginal word meaning “no water”.) A koala should draw all the moisture it needs from eating eucalyptus leaves, up to half a kilogram a day. But these were far from ordinary times.
In the wake of the merciless fires that roared through Australia’s south-eastern seaboard over summer, leaving a scar the size of Ireland, social media was awash with bewildering scenes. Tree-dwelling koalas venturing into suburban backyards and onto roads, sitting docile as lambs while taking water from plastic bottles and makeshift bowls, ice-cream lids and upturned firefighter helmets. Here’s one drinking from a garden hose clutched in its paw, tolerating a pat, even as a dog barks loudly off screen. Another climbing up the frame of a bicycle to chug water offered by a cyclist. Six koalas huddled on the slate floor of a laundry in the Adelaide Hills, the smallest clutching at the wall. In Inverell, northern NSW, cattle farmer Libby Swan found a male koala sitting under a tree on her property. When she tried to leave a pot full of water at his feet, he grabbed her and sat, paw resting on her hand, for half an hour as he drank his fill. “Everything inside me was saying this was wrong,” she later reflected. “Wild animals avoid humans; they don’t ask them for help.”
Mark Eldridge, principal research scientist at the Australian Museum, fielded calls from researchers throughout the ranges and tablelands of NSW over the summer. “The sense I get is that so many of these animal populations are at the very extreme edge of their access to resources and so you’re getting these remarkable things happening,” he says. “Wild animals almost never seek out people and I think for these animals to actually tolerate being that close to us just speaks of their absolute desperation.”
It’s not just koalas. From Kangaroo Island to Gippsland, Port Macquarie and south-east Queensland, kangaroos, echidnas, wallabies – even a baby platypus – have been crowding in with humans on their turf: huddling under a Hills Hoist on a suburban lawn, climbing into backyard wading pools, drifting, disoriented, by the side of a road. On a golf course in south-western Sydney, a tiny ringtail possum sought refuge from the heat and smoke in the arms of volunteer firefighter Edwina Illman. “I haven’t had any animal encounters until this season,” says the six-year veteran. “But I haven’t seen fires like this before either. It’s bizarre when you’re picking up koalas and seeing wild deer so close to the highways in urban areas.”
Desperate for a warm and fuzzy boost amid the despair, we shared these snapshots eagerly, trying to anthropomorphise our way out of the gloom. Look how our furry friends trust us! A harmonious merger of species under pressure; a heart-lifting sign that humans and the scampering, buzzing, blooming natural world can flourish together. See, we are not the worst! Our fierce instinct for uplift filled the vacuum left by the relentless horrors of a crisis that killed 33 people, destroyed thousands of homes and burnt nearly 13 million hectares.
But, in the same way koalas don’t hug trees so we can marvel at their cuddly-toy adorability – it is, in fact, a biological imperative to lower their body temperature – these confused creatures were not clambering up our wheel spokes looking for a friend. “That’s a red flag to us. It’s almost always in renal failure,” says Adelaide Koala Rescue director Jane Brister. In a normal month, AKR volunteers tend to about 40 koalas, usually victims of car strikes or dog attacks. Across December-January, the fires resulted in more than 300, forcing them to fill a local primary school’s gymnasium with portable cots to house the overflow.
“We see a lot of bushwalkers with the same story: ‘A koala was grabbing at my water bottle; oh, it was holding my hand!’” Brister says. “Well, it’s not really. Your hand was on the water bottle and it wants the bottle. It’s not doing it because it likes you and it’s being cute. It’s in trouble.” (Also, she notes, best to offer water in a bowl rather than a bottle to prevent aspiration pneumonia.)
Scientists talk about flight distances – how close a human can approach before an animal moves off. For most native species, it’s hundreds of metres; they know to avoid an apex predator with a history of hunting them to near-extinction. But prolonged drought and successive heatwaves, followed by the knockout blow of the bushfires, have combined to outstrip this instinct.
“If these animals had their wits about them, a human would be the last thing to seek help from,” says Dale Nimmo, associate professor in conservation biology and wildlife ecology at Charles Sturt University. “But they’re heat-stressed and starving so they’re hampered in their ability to collect information about the environment and assess risk.” These trans-species pleas for help are “a phenomenon we see when animals have judged that the only other option is certain death”.
When it comes to biological weirdness, Australia leads the pack. Isolated for millions of years on what was effectively a continent-sized liferaft, our fauna and flora have evolved and adapted in distinctive ways, not least in their ability to co-exist with fire. Consider the short-beaked echidna. It has developed an impressive survival tactic, burrowing into the ground and going into a state of torpor until the fire passes. Occasionally, the fire will eat away its spines, leaving a flat, sorry-looking echidna. But spines are like hair: they grow back. Australian plants, too, have developed a range of mechanisms for tolerating fire; some even require fire for their seeds to germinate.
But Nimmo, who specialises in the study of animal movements in fire-prone ecosystems, is concerned that climate change is increasing the scale and intensity of bushfires too rapidly for ecosystems to adjust. “Australian animals and plants have adapted to a particular fire regimen – the timing, its intensity, its seasonality,” he says. “Scientists become most worried when we see a shift in all those parameters and this has been a particularly brutal, off-the-charts fire season.”
In January, the president of the Australian Academy of Science, Professor John Shine, declared the scale of the bushfires “unprecedented anywhere in the world” and new and frightening images lit up our TV screens nightly. Treetops exploding into fireballs. Rainforests alight. Fire tornadoes. “It’s a whole new way of experiencing summer,” Nimmo says.
On February 28, the Morrison government released a list of 113 native animal species, including the brush-tailed rock wallaby, the Kangaroo Island dunnart and the mountain pygmy possum, at imminent risk of extinction due to the scale of habitat loss. Koala populations in some regions have been decimated, pushing the species closer to the endangered list, with 8000 estimated to have been killed by bushfires in northern NSW and as many as 30,000 on Kangaroo Island.
Even before the fires, there were signs koalas were in trouble. In 2017, University of Sydney researchers in Gunnedah, home to the largest colony in inland NSW, reported that parched koalas had begun to climb down from the safety of their gum trees to drink from artificial water stations, sometimes for 10 minutes at a time. “It’s believed koalas are particularly vulnerable to climate change because they rely exclusively on trees,” postdoctoral researcher Valentina Mella said.
Eucalypt leaves are toxic to every living thing besides koalas, which have uniquely evolved the ability to flush the toxins quickly. In times of drought or stress, however, when the tree itself is struggling, it will increase the level of toxins in its foliage, rendering the leaves completely inedible.
With even their food sources turning foe, the koalas have been inching closer to the coastal fringes, closer to humans. “We’ve noticed over the last decade that populations in western NSW and south-western Queensland have contracted further east,” says the Australian Museum’s Eldridge. “Areas where they used to be common 10, 20 years ago, such as The Pilliga [Nature Reserve], they’ve basically gone from that area now after the millennial drought.” Macropods, too, have been getting more accustomed to people. “Agile wallabies are moving into Darwin, swamp wallabies are moving into the suburbs of Sydney,” he says. “Eastern grey kangaroos have moved into coastal towns in NSW and Victoria. Things are getting more stressed and we’re seeing these quite extraordinary images over the summer.”
When Gisela Kaplan left for a working holida y in Antarctica shortly after Christmas, her Coffs Harbour home was wreathed in dense and choking smoke from bushfires. Kaplan, an ornithologist and emeritus professor in animal behaviour at the University of New England, returned a month later to find the smoke still there and her beloved birds struggling. “It is so desperate,” she says. “And this is not just a crisis in terms of water, it is food availability as well. The resourcefulness that Australian wildlife has developed to gather fluids and food has been pushed to the limit.” Even marsupials and rodents not classified as insectivores will, in a pinch, consume beetles for their fluids. “But the insects have disappeared,” she says. “The flowers have disappeared, so nectar sources are limited. There isn’t enough to go around. I said that in December.” She sighs. “We should treat all native animals like refugees that are on their last gasp.”
During the dry Kaplan, a member of wildlife rescue charity WIRES, placed water bowls around her large suburban block and refilled them every day. A pair of kookaburras that regularly visits for the live mice Kaplan feeds them from her balcony now bring along offspring and demonstrate how to take food from her hand.
Kaplan noticed a huge variety of bird species flocking to her garden water bowls, from yellow-tailed black cockatoos to finches. But something else was peculiar. “They all tolerate each other,” she says. “Territorial animals would normally fiercely defend their borders but that seems to be suspended at times of crisis.” It’s a trait particular to Australian natives, she says. “I suppose when koalas and kangaroos come to people it is part of that generosity that they practise themselves. They will allow strange mobs to come to their own feeding and drinking source and equally they expect humans to be kind enough to give them water and perhaps even some food.”
Do animals really expect anything of humans? Can they understand our intentions? Do they sense our compassion and desire to help or do we present, to your average koala, as mere shapeless blobs attached to a water bottle? The term “theory of mind” describes the capacity to understand that other beings have thoughts, feelings and intent, and scientists and philosophers have long argued about whether it’s unique to humans.
Determining what another species is thinking is always going to be challenging. But the extremes of summer have provoked strong opinions. “We used to as scientists pooh-pooh those who anthropomorphised but now we’re coming back the other way,” says Melbourne animal behaviourist Kate Mornement. “There’s lots of research being done on cognition and emotions, particularly with companion animals but it’s relative to wild animals as well. We’re learning so much more about what they’re capable of and realising they are very similar to us in terms of the way they perceive situations and the emotions they feel.”
The Australian Museum’s Eldridge is tall, thin as a test tube, and a model of serious-minded objectivity. He is the self-professed wet blanket who, in 2016, shot down the “heartbreaking” viral image of an apparently grieving male kangaroo cradling a dying Mrs Roo by pointing out that he was, in fact, trying to mate with her. However, the images of distressed koalas, kangaroos and other native animals turning to humans for help broke through his scientific reserve. He says the summer left a lot of people working in wildlife biology feeling a “bit battered”. “These animals that we have spent a lifetime studying, that we have an enormous respect for and appreciation of – to see what they’re going through can be quite difficult. It’s really hard not to start anthropomorphising and putting a human veneer over what the animal is doing, but sometimes you do get the impression they know what’s going on. Animals are not as stupid as we might think.”
Jane Brister, from Adelaide Koala Rescue, doesn’t need science to tell her that animals have feelings. And personalities. Unlike kangaroos, for example, which suffer from a deadly, stress-induced muscle condition called myopathy, koalas are generally pretty relaxed. “They might get upset about something but they get over it quickly,” she says. “You take them back to the clinic, give them some leaves, they’re like, ‘No worries’.”
Not this time, though. “The koalas that came in from the bushfires, we saw in them a level of distress that we don’t normally see,” she says. “These were panicked koalas. When they’re stressed, you can’t really call it an expression, but the muscles in their face tense, almost like a person that clenches their teeth. And there was a look in their eyes. The best way I can describe it is that those koalas that we brought in almost looked haunted.”
Weeks after the fires koalas continued to stumble in from the firegrounds and secondary complications set in: badly burnt feet now infected, pneumonia resulting from smoke inhalation. Some lost claws. Others had no eyelashes, or patches of raw, pink skin where a nose used to be. They were skinny and scruffy and sad. Brister texted me pictures until I had to ask her to stop. But then she sent me a video of a koala named Isaac.
On Australia Day, Brister and veterinarian Sarah Toole accompanied the young male as he made the triumphant journey home, to a property near the Adelaide Hills town of Lobethal, where clusters of eucalypts stood shocked but dignified, like Victorian-era ladies with badly scorched skirts. The most intense blaze to hit South Australia had spared their canopies, and there was enough habitat left to support the only koala to have survived the inferno. “You’ll be OK,” Brister tells Isaac on the video as he forges an ungainly path to the nearest tree. “You’ve got lots of lovely people who will keep an eye on you and put water out.”
Isaac sniffs the wind in confusion; his formerly lush paddock resembles the surface of an ashen moon. “There’s not much here but it’s yours,” Brister says. “You’re the last man standing.” Isaac starts clambering up the tree but he stops when his eyes draw level with Brister’s and gives her a long, searching look. It was gratitude she saw in those unknowable brown depths, she will later tell me, and she won’t hear otherwise.