On assignment for
The New York Times earlier this week @livia.ar and I spent time with Susan Pulis and her rescued animals from bushfires in Victoria.
Here is a bit of Susan’s story.
WATERHOLES, Australia — The convoy of vehicles fleeing a raging inferno in the forest of southeastern Australia ferried a copious cargo: 11 koalas, 15 kangaroos, five chickens, two possums, two dogs and a lorikeet.
Susan Pulis, who runs a wildlife shelter, had rallied her friends to pack the animals in blankets and baskets and take them to safety on the coast. One friend gutted her downstairs bedroom to house five of the kangaroos. Ms. Pulis has kept the youngest joeys in quilt pouches in another’s living room.
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For Ms. Pulis, evacuating her few animals — which had already been rescued, some of them more than once, from starvation, dog attacks and car accidents — was simply part of life.
In 2013, she founded a wildlife shelter on Raymond Island, a town just off the coast, with the intention of rehabilitating injured and abandoned creatures. In August, she relocated to Waterholes, 30 miles inland, because of the clearing of the island’s trees, which had made it impossible for her to release the koalas into an environment where they could find sufficient food.
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As she reached the track leading to her property, Ms. Pulis began to cry. “This was my koala feed,” she said of the scorched eucalyptus trees, which used to provide leaves for her animals. “It was absolutely alive.”
At her property, Ms. Pulis tended to the stressed and dehydrated kangaroos she had been forced to leave behind. She gave each an injection to relieve their pain — they had most likely hopped so frantically away from the burning forest that they had injured themselves — and refreshed their water, which was contaminated by ash.
By Livia Albeck-Ripka
