When wildfires ravaged Australia, she found purpose in saving wallabies

A bushfire turned the house where Chris Pryor had lived for a decade into a rectangle of ashen debris. She escaped with her two cats and little else as the inferno approached in early January, and when she returned a few days later, she braced herself for the sight of her ruined home. Only after arriving did she notice another dimension to the destruction.

The calls of magpies and lyrebirds, the chirping of cicadas and crickets, the wind rustling leaves in eucalyptus trees – the familiar sounds of the wild had fallen mute. The charred forest around her 25-acre property was enveloped in an unsettling quiet.

“You expect to see the devastation. But I didn’t anticipate the