Bouncing back

Bouncing back: Kangaroo Island rises from the ashes

In 2019 – 20, Black Summer bushfires burnt half of Kangaroo Island. Five years on, Alex Croft reports for Australian BirdLife magazine on the BirdLife Australia Bushfire Recovery Project that has nurtured the landscape’s regeneration and brought a community together in healing.

This story appears in the autumn 2025 issue of Australian Birdlife magazine. For more great reads, become a BirdLife Australia member and receive our quarterly, award-winning magazine in your mailbox. 

Into the inferno

On 20 December 2019, dry lightning strikes ignited Kangaroo Island.

Ten days later, as fire crews continued to battle blazes on the north coast of the island, lightning sparked more fires in the island’s west. Fanned by strong winds and soaring temperatures, they merged and became a hellfire.

Unprecedented in its heat and scale, the Ravine Fire tore through Flinders Chase National Park and went on to burn almost half of Kangaroo Island in the following four weeks. The world watched in horror as Black Summer, one of the country’s most catastrophic fire seasons on record, continued to rage on across southeastern Australia.

In total, fires burnt more than 200,000 hectares of Kangaroo Island, killing tens of thousands of livestock and destroying 87 homes. Tragically, two people lost their lives in what were the largest fires in the island’s recorded history. The impact on Kangaroo Island’s wildlife and habitats was immense, and photos of the aftermath showed an alien landscape reduced to its contours, lush greenery now sand and ash, a sea of charred and blackened sticks.

During Black Summer, as Covid loomed on the horizon, I had just joined the Australian Birdlife team when we profiled some of our hardest-hit branch members and volunteers from around the country. It was then that I first met Caroline Paterson – a former Ranger-in-charge, member of BirdLife Kangaroo Island and volunteer with our Beach-nesting Birds Program at the time. She was grieving the loss of her home to the Ravine Fire just weeks before, as well as the destruction of the wilderness and wildlife she had devoted her life to protecting.

In our interview, Caroline compared returning to the park for the first time to visiting a moonscape – deafening in its silence and dunes of ash. When I asked her what brings her hope, she spoke of the overwhelming love and support she received from family and friends, islanders, Australians and from people around the world. We both cried.

Later that same year, Caroline joined BirdLife Australia as our Kangaroo Island Bushfire Recovery Project Officer and has been working tirelessly ever since to help her community connect to nature and heal the scars of Black Summer.

Out of the ashes

Known as Australia’s Galapagos, Kangaroo Island is a popular tourist destination, world renowned for its natural beauty – for its raw and rugged coastlines and dramatic limestone cliffs, where white sandy beaches and turquoise waters stretch as far as the eye can see.

It’s also a sanctuary for wildlife, free of foxes and rabbits and home to the highest proportion of remnant vegetation of any agricultural region in the state. One of Australia’s Key Biodiversity Areas, over 260 bird species can be found here, including many threatened and declining species and nationally significant populations of Hooded Plovers and Bush Stone-curlews. Kangaroo Island is home to 16 endemic subspecies of birds, distinct from their mainland cousins and 45 endemic plant species found nowhere else in the world – more than any other region of South Australia.

After the fires, scientists held grave concerns for the fate of the island’s wildlife.

When rainfall finally helped extinguish the last of the flames, initial fire mapping by BirdLife Australia revealed many bird species suffered significant habitat loss – including the Kangaroo Island subspecies of Southern Emu-wren and Western Whipbird as well as the Western Bassian Thrush, for which the island was a stronghold, which lost up to 80 per cent of their known habitat in the fires.

BirdLife Australia and partners were swift in their emergency response. Our team identified high-priority species, including the endemic Kangaroo Island Southern Emu-wren and Western Whipbird, the Endangered Kangaroo Island Glossy Black-Cockatoo, Western Beautiful Firetail and Western Bassian Thrush. In 2021, our assessments saw eight of the island’s endemic subspecies added to Australia’s threatened species list, along with two South Australian subspecies in 2022.

In February, BirdLife Australia and National Parks and Wildlife SA sent ecologists to the island to assess the damage and determine what bird species were still present in unburnt vegetation within the fire scar. The fires burnt so hot and so fast that ‘patchily’ burnt areas were hard to come by.

While the landscape appeared post-apocalyptic, initial findings of the first rapid assessment surveys gave some hope. The team encountered Kangaroo Island Southern Emu-wrens and Western Whipbirds in nearly all survey areas. They found a pair of Western Bassian Thrushes in a burnt-out swamp and even counted eight Kangaroo Island Glossy Black-Cockatoos in a nearby gully. Still, they were shocked at the scale and intensity of the devastation they saw.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about how animals move through the landscape after a fire to access food and shelter – especially on an isolated island of this scale. Post-fire analysis of bird records revealed a surprising lack of data on the population and distribution of many Kangaroo Island species – and without data, we can only guess at how birds respond to fire and their ability to recover.

In the months after the fires, repeat, systematic and species-specific surveys helped fill these knowledge gaps. BirdLife staff established 98 transects in the west of the island and conducted repeated, standardised searches of these sites every 6‒8 weeks for the first two years of the project.

But a small team can’t capture the long-term data needed to detect changes in bird populations over time and plan and prepare for future bushfire events alone – it takes a village. Caroline, who was already conducting her own threatened species recovery efforts on the island, engaged local BirdLife volunteers, residents and landowners to assist in surveying birds.

Through our initial Kangaroo Island Bushfire Recovery Project, Caroline established an additional 101 public Birdata shared sites across the island, which went live in 2021. Local and visiting volunteers have delivered more than 1,200 surveys to date. In addition, with the help of Kangaroo Island Land for Wildlife, 38 landowners set up private surveys on their properties to build up baseline data and learn more about our priority and highly-specialised endemic subspecies. Over time, this long-term dataset will help detect changes in bird populations and distributions. This data also informs land management and conservation decisions and priorities, helping direct efforts to where they’re needed most.

Catching hope

As fires still smouldered on the north-west of the island, staff from Zoos SA and Kangaroo Island Land for Wildlife discovered at least 20 Kangaroo Island Southern Emu-wrens sheltering in a small patch of unburnt vegetation on the edge of farmland.

Once relatively widespread in the south and west of the island, our researchers determined the Kangaroo Island Southern Emu-wren was among the hardest hit of any Australian bird during Black Summer – with as much as 60 per cent of their population lost to the Ravine Fire.

Together with experts from Zoos SA and Kangaroo Island Land for Wildlife, BirdLife Australia ecologists undertook an emergency relocation. To give them the best chance of survival, the team captured six Kangaroo Island Southern Emu-wrens in mist nets and carefully transferred them to a larger area of suitable vegetation that could better support them.

In August 2022, BirdLife ecologist Rebecca Boulton trialled the use of rubber band harnesses in radio tracking cryptic species on Kangaroo Island. Both the Kangaroo Island Western Whipbird and Western Bassian Thrush were uplisted to Federally Endangered following the devastating Black Summer fires. However, neither subspecies had been radio-tracked before, and researchers lacked the data to accurately monitor or estimate their population sizes and recovery post-fire. Both birds are notoriously cryptic and difficult to find, and their preference for dense vegetation made finding a suitable harness for a transmitter especially challenging.

After many unsuccessful attempts, Bec and her team managed to capture and band a male and juvenile Western Bassian Thrush and a pair of Kangaroo Island Western Whipbirds. Each bird was fitted with a small rubber band backpack harness and transmitter, and radio-tracked daily to assess how long the harness would remain on. Remarkably, the male whipbird led researchers straight to a nest in a completely burnt area of the park where he was incubating two eggs – providing invaluable data on their little-known breeding biology.

Despite high rates of predation, initial results were promising – birds retained their trackers for over a fortnight, providing much information about their habitat preferences and range. In using these methods, future studies will hopefully help reveal the secrets of these evasive and endangered birds.

Who’s ‘hoo’ on Kangaroo Island

Little is known about the population and distribution of Kangaroo Island’s seven nocturnal bird species, which are unlikely to be recorded unless flushed in our shared site surveys. So in 2023, Birdlife Australia coordinated Kangaroo Island’s first nocturnal bird survey. This week-long, audio only survey saw 35 volunteers listening across the island for their calls, noting location, direction of the call and approximate distance away. Despite cold and windy conditions, participants recorded six of the seven target species over the week – including a Little Penguin and an Australian Owlet-nightjar.

Healing together

Five years since the fires, Kangaroo Island is once again cloaked in green. Birdsong has returned to the island, and the yacca (grass trees) that offered the first hopeful green shoots now stand tall and proud like sentinels. Slowly, the bush is returning.

While the resilience of the Kangaroo Island community in the aftermath of the worst bushfire crisis in the island’s history and a global pandemic is just as inspiring, their healing process isn’t so linear or conspicuous. It can take many years for wildfire survivors to recover from the trauma they experienced.

Although there is no one-size-fits-all approach to healing after a natural disaster, the physical, mental and emotional benefits of time spent in nature are well-reported. Reconnecting with nature can help survivors re-establish their sense of place and identity, while many find solace in watching nature regenerate in the months and years after a fire.

After the devastating 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, research found that a strong emotional connection to the natural environment was associated with reduced psychological distress and higher levels of resilience and post-traumatic growth. In other words, bushfire survivors reported healing alongside nature.

With Caroline at the helm, we developed free educational resources for locals and visitors to raise awareness of the island’s threatened species. This included producing the Kangaroo Island Bird Identification booklet – a 76-page pocket guide to finding, identifying and monitoring bush and waterbirds on the island, especially those impacted by the fires. The families of all school-aged children, nature-based tourism operators, local landholders and visitors received a free copy.

Thanks to the Bendigo Bank Community Enterprise Foundation grant, our ‘Community and nature – healing together after fire’ project aimed to do just that: to help the Kangaroo Island community connect and heal with nature. BirdLife Australia’s Bird-friendly Rodent Control brochure was revised and reprinted to empower people to control rodents without harming pets and wildlife. Five thousand copies of this free resource were printed and distributed across the island to retailers, tourism centres, post offices, land management and Government agencies and the local vet.

To engage local students, the team developed curriculum-aligned lesson plans on ‘Birds of our Island’ – educating pupils from years 3‒6 on Kangaroo Island’s endemic birds and their conservation.  Teachers and educators were provided with a 20-minute instructional video to support their professional development and delivery of this toolkit, which was also made accessible to homeschooling families.

Art from the heart

But perhaps the most exciting initiative was our partnership with Kangaroo Island Community Education (KICE), the island’s multicampus school. In 2022, students at the KICE Penneshaw Campus from years 7‒9 created striking mosaic portraits of the island’s endemic birds. Titled ‘Nowhere else but here’, their mosaics are now a feature of the popular Kangaroo Island Sculpture Trail.

And in 2024, 75 students from years 5‒9 at the nearby Parndana Campus created seven murals – each depicting a different habitat type found on the island and the threatened species that rely on them. The completed murals will be installed alongside an interpretive sign at the newly-rebuilt Western Districts Community Memorial Sports Club, after the original building was destroyed in the Black Summer wildfires. Almost half of the families at the Parndana Campus were directly impacted by Black Summer, including some of the students, teachers and artists that contributed to this project.

Carved Hollows for habitat

Thanks to the long-term dataset and monitoring of habitat as part of the KI Glossy Black-Cockatoo Recovery project, delivered by the KI Landscape Board, we know that Black Summer destroyed 64 per cent of large hollow-bearing trees on Kangaroo Island – which provide critical nesting habitat for hollow-nesting species like this iconic Endangered bird. Remaining hollows are now prime real estate, and breeding glossies face growing competition from other threatened birds as well as more abundant hollow users.

While constructed nest boxes – typically made from PVC stormwater or poly pipe – have been used for many years on the island, carved and natural tree hollows have more suitable thermal properties and are more likely to protect their inhabitants from extreme heat. In 2024, BirdLife Australia joined forces with the Kangaroo Island Landscape Board and secured funding from the Letcombe Foundation to purchase a ‘HollowHog’ wood-carving tool to trial on the island. Less invasive than carving hollows with a chainsaw, the HollowHog tool can create large hollows in living and dead wood with relative ease, which can then be installed on trees much like a traditional nestbox.

The project, titled ‘Carved Hollows for Habitat’, saw 15 hollows carved from fallen timber, each fitted with an extended entrance to prevent brushtail possums and Galahs from moving in. The hollows were installed at a range of heights, while some were carved directly into standing trees. The trial was targeted at the Kangaroo Island subspecies of Crimson Rosella – uplisted to Vulnerable after the fires – and they were observed using unsuitable nest boxes with low nesting success.

Five hollows were installed within habitat burnt during Black Summer, and another four were fitted with remote, motion-activated cameras to monitor whether Crimson Rosellas were inspecting or using the hollows. These cameras will remain in-situ until after the nesting season.

In looking to the future, more work is needed to determine the long-term effectiveness of these carved hollows, and whether this tool can be used to create hollows large enough to support cockatoos and other hollow-nesting species.

The road to recovery

Five years on, the last of BirdLife Australia’s funded bushfire recovery projects on Kangaroo Island have now been completed – and there’s a lot to celebrate. These projects have helped raise the profile of Kangaroo Island’s threatened and fire-affected species, while helping us better understand their ecology, distribution and response to fire.

Providing educational resources and hands-on opportunities for locals to get involved in monitoring and conservation efforts has helped foster a greater understanding of, and appreciation for, the island’s unique wildlife – while inspiring students, landowners and residents to reconnect with and advocate for nature.

After losing her home, Caroline and her family moved onto their conservation property on the north-west coast of the island to start over. Miraculously, their property and its old-growth stringybark, sugargum and sheoak woodlands were mostly unscathed in the fires, and provide critical unburnt habitat to the island’s wildlife, including the 81 species of birds Caroline has recorded.

The drooping sheoaks Caroline planted immediately after the fires in 2020 are now producing shiny bronze cones – the only food source of the Endangered Kangaroo Island Glossy Black-Cockatoo, which visit her property to feed on the seeds inside. As a member of Kangaroo Island Land for Wildlife, Caroline has also installed artificial hollows and is participating in a cat-trapping program on her property.

Five years ago, the long road to recovery for Kangaroo Island seemed endless and insurmountable. But under Caroline’s guidance, this all-important work has helped illuminate a pathway towards healing for the community and nature of Kangaroo Island alike. Beyond rebuilding homes and restoring habitat, it has helped rebuild hope.

Acknowledgements

BirdLife Australia’s bushfire recovery projects were funded by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (Government of South Australia), the 2022 Landcare Led Bushfire Recovery Grant, the Bendigo Bank Community Enterprise Foundation SA Bushfire Recovery Grant and the Letcombe Foundation, with generous support from The Wood Foundation, the Australian Communities Foundation (Alf and Meg Steel, Melliodora and Worrowing sub-funds) and the Community Impact Foundation (Dragonfly sub-fund). 

These projects were delivered in partnership with BirdLife Kangaroo Island, Kangaroo Island Landscape Board, Kangaroo Island Land for Wildlife, Kangaroo Island Community Education, the Penneshaw Sculpture Trail Committee and the Western Districts Community Sports Club.