'It hurt me deeply': Wildlife carer's tough decision to save a life
With her world destroyed by bushfires, a kangaroo carer was forced to make a difficult choice between burying one of her babies and feeding a hungry goanna.
Rae Harvey from Wild2Free escaped the savage New Year's Eve blaze that ripped through her sanctuary near Batemans Bay.
She returned to find her home destroyed, but a small group of her precious kangaroos had survived.
Kangaroos are sensitive animals and due to the stress of the fires, one mother was not able to carry her joey to term.
“A sad discovery in the tent yesterday,” Ms Harvey wrote on the Wild2Free Facebook page.
“This little girl, I presume Clover’s daughter is no longer alive.
“I was going to bury her, but I’d seen a lace monitor that day, so I took her little body and placed it in the same spot to provide feed.”
Ms Harvey and a small band of volunteers are working around the clock in harsh conditions to save the surviving animals.
Clover the kangaroo suffered horrific burns to her feet in the fires and is being treated with burn cream and antibacterial spray.
While burying a joey would be normal practice in better times, rescuers are having to do whatever it takes to save our native wildlife.
Bushfires have destroyed key habitat across parts of NSW, Victoria and South Australia, leaving many animals without food.
The fear is now that surviving animals will starve to death.
“It hurt me deeply to do it, but I know deep down, that’s what would have happened in nature and the lace monitor is hungry too,” Ms Harvey wrote.
“RIP little girl. I’m so sorry.”
The bushfires have been burning for almost three months and estimates suggest more than a billion native animals have been killed.
Last week, wildlife officials in NSW began dropping carrots and sweet potatoes from helicopters to feed endangered brush-tailed rock-wallabies.
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"The wallabies were already under stress from the ongoing drought, making survival challenging for the wallabies without assistance," said NSW environment minister Matt Kean said in a press release.
Many wildlife carers including Ms Harvey are calling on the NSW government to suspend commercial kangaroo culling and logging of native forests to allow wildlife to recover.
People wishing to donate to help Wild2Free can do so here.
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