Australia fires: zoo staff take monkeys and pandas home to save them
- Staff from Mogo Wildlife Park convert houses into wildlife refugee camps after bush fires threaten zoo
- Huge bush fires have destroyed more than 4 million hectares with new blazes sparked almost daily by extremely hot and windy conditions
As the sky turned dark and a thick haze choked the air below, bush fires closed in on a small coastal town in southeast Australia. Chad Staples and his staff at Mogo Wildlife Park were running out of options; the local zoo, home to the country’s largest private collection of exotic animals, resembled the fiery front lines in an end-of-times battle.
With evacuation orders in place and flames burning everything in their path, zoo workers stayed behind, coaxing lions and orangutans into areas of the park they knew would be safe. But there were others – red pandas, monkeys, a tiger – that still needed someplace to ride out the deadly fires ravaging Victoria and New South Wales.
So the staff took some of the animals home with them, converting houses into wildlife refugee camps. They rallied to save a number of beloved creatures that would have otherwise added to a death toll that already includes at least three people, legions of livestock and possibly thousands of koalas.
As of early Wednesday morning, local time, every one of the roughly 200 animals was safe.
Staples, the zoo’s director, described an Ark-like scene: “Right now, in my house, there’s animals of all descriptions in all the different rooms so that they’re safe and protected,” he told Australian Broadcasting Company.
“No one is hurt, not a single animal,” Staples said.
He’s currently housing several species of small monkeys and some of the pandas. And another staffer is keeping a tiger in their backyard, a spokeswoman for Featherdale Wildlife, which owns the Mogo Zoo, told BBC.
