One Billion Animals Now Feared Dead in Australia’s Wildfires

As many as a billion animals may have been killed in Australia’s wildfires since September, a scientist said, doubling his earlier estimate as the unprecedented scale of the crisis in the world’s driest inhabited continent continued to emerge.

New figures released on Wednesday by the University of Sydney’s Chris Dickman indicate more than 800 million animals have been killed in the state of New South Wales alone, while one billion had died nationally. That includes mammals, birds and reptiles directly killed by the fires or indirectly through loss of habitat.