资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

By Elle Hunt

Juergen & Christine Sohns/Nature Pl

BY JANUARY, when the world turned its attention to Australia’s bush-fire crisis, Murray Ings had been battling blazes near his home in the hills of northern New South Wales for months. A third-generation forestry worker and volunteer firefighter, Ings worked shifts of up to 16 hours, sometimes through the night, in apocalyptic conditions. It got so hot, the sand in the soil melted to glass, causing the ground to shine. “That’s a furnace,” says Ings. But what he remembers most vividly is the “haunting, piercing” screams of dying animals. “It’s the worst sound you can ever hear,” he says.

With the fires now extinguished, parts of the native forest on Ings’s property resemble a wasteland. “In areas, we’ve lost the whole lot: all the trees, all the animals,” he says. That’s just on his 500 hectares. Across south-east Australia, some 19 million hectares burned. The federal government has set out a multi-million-dollar restoration programme. It is a huge task that could take decades – even if major fires don’t erupt again.

However, amid efforts to restore Australia’s native fauna, one animal is expected to continue dying. Dingoes, a type of semi-wild, primitive dog, are widely considered pests, the threat they pose to livestock trumping their status as a native species. Yet there is mounting evidence that these apex predators play a key role in maintaining ecological balance. They might even be as central to restoring the bush as wolves have been in rewilding Yellowstone national park in the US. But for that to happen, Australians will need to put an end to …