Australia burns

- the echidna

Trump and his minions, like Australia's prime minister, pretend to believe climate change is a hoax. They know it isn't, they're just in the pockets of the industries that are causing it. Here is what they have wrought: Australia fires kill half a billion animals as crisis mounts.

Australia is, or has been, the home of a a large number of unique creatures ...

Australia consists of a huge variety of animals; some 83% of mammals, 89% of reptiles, 90% of fish and insects and 93% of amphibians that inhabit the continent are endemic to Australia.[2] This high level of endemism can be attributed to the continent's long geographic isolation, tectonic stability, and the effects of an unusual pattern of climate change on the soil and flora over geological time. A unique feature of Australia's fauna is the relative scarcity of native placental mammals. Consequently, the marsupials — a group of mammals that raise their young in a pouch, including the macropods, possums and dasyuromorphs — occupy many of the ecological niches placental animals occupy elsewhere in the world. Australia is home to two of the five known extant species of monotremes and has numerous venomous species, which include the platypus, spiders, scorpions, octopus, jellyfish, molluscs, stonefish, and stingrays. Uniquely, Australia has more venomous than non-venomous species of snakes ...

I used to watch The Crocodile Hunter and learned so much about the animals, birds, and sea creatures of Australia. It's incredibly sad to see they're being destroyed in such numbers by the fires.