The screech of a cockatoo shouldn’t sound out of place high up in the forested hills of Ruffy, but when a flock of them erupted in cacophony 20 days after a bushfire all but levelled the place, it did.
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I’d been chatting with volunteers who are helping with the area’s recovery in the grounds of the public hall and CFA complex, the only two buildings that survived the January 8 blaze there.
I commented how it was nice to hear the sounds of birdlife, particularly when the landscape looked scorched as far as the eye could see in most directions.
The volunteers told me the bird sounds had only returned a couple of days earlier.
Ruffy’s Felicity Sloman said her home, which is still standing about 2km from the main hub, usually had an abundance of birds, but that there hadn’t been as many since the fires.
She was delighted to have seen a blue wren that morning in her garden.
Colleen Furlanetto said she’d spotted black cockatoos.
“The kookaburras were starting to have a laugh up in those trees the other day,” she said.
Miraculously, the grounds at the hall were also spared the fire’s fury.
A great deal of animal habitat has been destroyed.
Photo by
Bree Harding
Just like an oasis of gleaming blue water in a hot sandy desert, lush-leafed green trees tower above the hall’s courtyard among the blackened paddocks that stretch all around it.
The trees are memorial trees, Colleen tells me; one is her grandfather’s, others are tributes to her aunties.
“Everyone comes into this space and it’s so calming,” she said.
Phoenix, the large male koala with the burnt nose, has risen from the ashes.
The area is also a sanctuary for a large male koala, affectionately named Phoenix by the townspeople after his nose was burnt during the disaster.
They suspect the quick-moving koala was burnt by radiant heat in the area near the hall, which was his home patch long before the fire swept through.
Volunteers have placed dishes of water out for him.
“The wildlife people have said he’s got plenty of food still in his patch,” Colleen said.
“He wouldn’t normally drink water, but because of the intensity of the heat, it’s taken all the water out of what would normally give him all his fluids in the leaves.
“He’s very handsome.”
Colleen had also seen a little glider a day earlier.
“You don’t see them very often, but I saw one crossing Creightons Creek Rd yesterday,” she said.
“There was a truck coming, so I stopped in the middle of the road and put my hazard lights on.
“I think he was good — I couldn’t catch him if I wanted to — he went up a tree that was kind of half okay, so that was pretty amazing.”
Colleen said farmers were the biggest conservationists she knew, so dealing with the loss of stock and wildlife was “pretty hard”.
“But there’s lots of good stories, too,” she said.
