Australia's animal rescuers have found an exhausted koala bear sitting and mourning its dead friend floating without a breath of water in the water • Most of the koalas population on the "kangaroo island" has gone extinct
Koala mourns his friend in Australia // Photo: AFP
Heartbreaking: Animal rescuers, searching for surviving koalas on Australia's kangaroo island this week, have found an exhausted koala bear sitting and mourning its dead friend floating lifelessly in a puddle of water. Those who took the painful picture are members of an animal rescue organization called HIS, which scour the island in an effort to save the remaining animals after half of it was completely burned.
It is estimated that some 60,000 koalas lived on the island, when it was unclear how many of these delicate and slow animals managed to survive the fire. The organization's head, Kelly Dunitan, told the BBC that "this play of the koala sits but next to its dead friend it was heartbreaking and hard to watch."
She said, "For the surviving koalas, they are sitting on the ground huddled with little ability to move and we just pick them up from the floor and save them. Often you find a live koala bear sitting in the center of a circle of his dead friends around him, not only physically but also very mentally. We are working hard to reach every surviving koala and move it to a nearby island treatment center to save the island population. "
Koala in the heart of a burnt grove in Australia // Photo: Reuters
Another species the organization is intensively searching for is the Rocky Wolby, which is also endangered. The search for this special Wolby is carried out across the continent and around the islands to gather enough details that can be captured and returned to nature. It is a population of rocky wolves that stood before the fires of only 15,000 individuals and it is difficult to know how many details of this rare species have survived.
Ecologist Kingsley Dixon of Curtin University in Perth estimates that more than a billion native animals have been burned to death. "This is the largest destruction disaster ever known on the continent of Australia," Dixon said. Ecologist Guy Ballard of the University of New England at Armdale, concluded: "It's awful. You walk around the area and the rocks that the animals ran away from the fire roast the animals, which stink of death."
