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I don’t particularly doubt that as an estimate, it is probably conservative. What does not get a lot of public attention is that the insect life will have been decimated as well.
That cuts off the bottom of the food chain for everything small reptiles and upwards. As an example, 6 years ago before our place was burned (February will be six years) we had a pretty healthy population of bird life, including very small birds like blue wrens. Loads of possums etc, regular sightings of blue tongue lizards, echidnas etc. We have seen very few possums since, there are a couple now but nothing like the population we used to have, things like echidnas and blue tongue lizards are very rare sightings still, the grass parrots and rosellas have really only just started to show up in any numbers in the last year or so but we have not see a blue wren around the place since the fires. Most were probably killed directly by the fire but the rest would have moved on for lack of food and have not yet returned.
And ours was a relatively light, relatively cool grassfire, nothing at all like Black Saturday or the fires of this year.
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