Spring Fire or Silent Slaughter
This blog was inspired by Spring Fire, a haunting and evocative poem (author unknown) Spring Fire captures that duality with aching precision—where renewal and destruction walk hand in hand, and where care is both a balm and a burden.
At Amaris Wildlife Sanctuary, spring is never just a season. It’s a reckoning. It brings new life, yes—but also heartbreak, urgency, and the sharp edge of choices no carer ever wants to make. This blog is our reflection on that truth: the fire of spring, and the love that rises to meet it.
We share the poem below, with gratitude for the way it captures our deep concern for biodiversity and the precious landscapes that cradle the wildlife we love and strive to protect.
A Call to Rethink Prescribed Burns in Western Australia
They call it care. They call it management. But when the flames roar ten metres high through forests still dripping from winter’s hand, what’s left to care for?
Every spring, as numbats stir in their hollows and black cockatoos return to nest, the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA) ignites the land. Not with reverence, but with bureaucracy. Not with cool, regenerative burns, but with aerial incendiaries that torch 200,000 hectares of native forest annually.
Spring is the season of birth and bloom. Yet it’s precisely when DBCA chooses to burn. Why? Because the fuel loads are high, they say. But why are they high? Perhaps because we’ve decimated our kangaroo populations—natural grazers who once kept undergrowth in check. Perhaps because we’ve disrupted the ancient rhythms of the land, replacing Indigenous fire practices with industrial-scale infernos.
Gone are the gentle mosaic burns that Indigenous custodians once used—cool fires that crept slowly, allowing wildlife to flee and ecosystems to regenerate. In their place: diesel, driptorch, and data sheets. Flames so hot they incinerate not just leaf litter, but entire canopies, fungal networks, and the very soil life that sustains biodiversity.
The toll is staggering:
Critically endangered numbats scorched in their last strongholds.
Echidnas, quendas, and joeys caught in the blaze before they ever learn to run.
Fungal communities permanently altered, disrupting ecological functions for years.
Air pollution from smoke plumes that choke towns and trigger respiratory illness.
And all of it sanctioned—permits issued with ink still wet, no surveys, no counts, no ears pressed to the woodland’s neck.
This isn’t conservation. It’s a silent war on the voiceless. A massacre wrapped in green tape.
The government insists prescribed burns reduce bushfire risk. But when the burns themselves become infernos, when they destroy the very biodiversity they claim to protect, we must ask: Who benefits? Because it’s not the numbats. It’s not the joeys. And it’s certainly not the people coughing through spring smoke.
We need a radical shift:
Independent review of DBCA’s burning regime.
Integration of Indigenous fire knowledge, not just token consultation.
Protection of biodiversity hotspots, not arbitrary burn targets.
Transparency and accountability, not aerial firebombing in secret.
Spring should be a time of renewal—not ash. It’s time to listen. To the land. To the wildlife. To the people who still remember what a cool burn felt like.
A Reflection from Amaris Wildlife Sanctuary
This spring, as the wildflowers bloom and joeys peek from pouches, we find ourselves asking a painful question: is this season of renewal also a season of destruction?
Inspired by Spring Fire, a powerful poem, we reflect not only on the beauty of rebirth, but on the heartbreak that often shadows it. The poem captures the tension between fire and life, between what is necessary and what is lost. Her words echo through our sanctuary, especially now.
This year, prescribed burns have swept through parts of the Walpole Wilderness and Gull Rock, areas rich in biodiversity and home to vulnerable species. In Walpole, conservationists have raised alarm over the felling of ancient red tingle trees—giants that have stood for centuries, now reduced to ash in the name of hazard reduction. In Gull Rock, the burns threaten fragile coastal ecosystems and the wildlife that depend on them for survival.
We understand the need for fire management. We know the risks of inaction. But we also know that fire, when misapplied, can become a blunt instrument—one that erases habitat, scatters wildlife, and undermines the very biodiversity we seek to protect.
At Amaris, we see the aftermath. We take in the displaced, the orphaned, the burned. We cradle joeys whose mothers fled flames. We treat birds whose feathers singed in smoke. And we do so with hearts that break and beat and keep going.
This blog is not a protest—it is a plea. A plea for nuance, for ecological sensitivity, for fire plans that honour the complexity of our landscapes. A plea to listen to the carers, the ecologists, the communities who live with the consequences.
This is a photo of our beautiful Elsie, whose mum was killed in a hit and run while trying to escape the fire. At Amaris, we’ve seen the toll fire takes—we have taken into care possums left homeless, joeys orphaned, and our own Jade who broke her leg fleeing a “controlled” burn that surrounded our sanctuary on three sides. The fear is real. The cost is personal.
"Spring Fire"
They call it care,
this yearly blaze—
but it comes in spring,
in the time of birth and bloom,
with smoke that silences
the morning birdsong too soon.Forests still dripping
from winter’s hand,
but already they torch
with bureaucratic command.
No survey, no count—
no tally of nests or den.
Just diesel and driptorch,
again and again.The fires rage
as hot as wrath,
not cool mosaic,
but a cleansing path
for empire gums and data sheets,
and “fuel load targets” none can meet.They issue permits
with ink still wet,
to take—yes, kill—
what little is left:
numbats, chuditch, quenda too,
even the black cockatoo.A silent massacre
wrapped in green,
with no witness
and no in-between.
No eyes to see the joey char,
the echidna caught, the dragon star
that never hatches,
whose patch is ash
before it’s ever known.They’ll say "recovery,"
they’ll say "plan,"
but not one ecologist
walked that land
before the burn.
They never check—
no ears pressed
to the woodland’s neck.This isn’t management.
This is war
on those who can’t
petition or implore.
The silent, the scaled,
the furred, the small—
in DBCA’s spring,
they burn them all.