In her four years of caring for wildlife around and in Euroa, Sharon Andrews has encountered dozens of native animals in need of rescue.

She toys with a few numbers out aloud, starting somewhere near forty, before resigning to: “I’ve lost count of how many animals I have rescued.”

Sharon runs Euroa Pouch Babies, a registered wildlife care, rescue, and rehabilitation provider which supports injured and orphaned native wildlife.

Those rescue numbers were suddenly overshadowed on 7 January as the Longwood bushfires surged through the Strathbogies under catastrophic weather conditions, and caring for injured animals in the aftermath has become of course much more intense.

“I've been on the firegrounds since day three, rescuing, euthanising, feeding, and I'm still on the firegrounds now feeding, so they will still need our help,” she said.

“But there’s not as many now."

She flicks through the many photos on her phone of kangaroos and wallabies in various stages of recovery, smiling at some, beginning an unfinished story for another, or she simply scrolls in silence.

“We have well and truly lost half our macropods,” she said.

“And we will never know how many koalas have gone.”

A gruelling story unfolds as she speaks of one landowner she encountered just after the fire who had euthanised ‘countless’ koalas that were screaming among dying wallabies in a gully.

“He said to me ‘there were just too many to save’, so he decided they all needed to be euthanised.

“I told him to go back and make sure there were no more suffering.”

To help with her mission, last Thursday 2 April, Sharon collected a dozen animal nesting boxes that had been put together at the men’s shed by Brett Thomas and Ian Millardship, which she and daughter Christi Schultz will now get attached to trees at the right height.

A range of different openings in each box widens the scope to include all fauna.

One visitor to Euroa Pouch Babies not long after the fires swept through was Dutch conservationist Wyanda Luvlick.

“Wyanda came all the way from Airlie Beach,” Sharon said.

“She was once captain of Steve Irwin’s Sea Shepherd for ten years, so she was a Godsend because I knew she had the experience we needed – she was already trained in wildlife.

“Somebody from Melbourne knew her; she got the call and came here for six weeks, and she made a difference – a huge help.”

Sharon currently tends to 27 bushfire-affected properties and with most animals she has rescued now recovering in sanctuaries, one wallaby that came direct from the firegrounds looks like it will be a permanent resident somewhere special.

“I have that one burn victim still at home, who is surviving well, but unfortunately, he's un-releasable, a little baby swamp wallaby, who lost his ears and all the claws on one foot.

“He's survived his burns and he's fine, but he has to go to a permanent sanctuary now.

“Other than that, most of everything else that was saved is still in sanctuaries healing from their burns."

The newest challenges that await Sharon involve food dependency and the return of vehicular traffic to reopened roads.

“Now we're finding them dead on the road in the fire zones; they're being hit by cars.

“We're still feeding them twice a week, we're trying to return them back to nature and the wild, but it's very hard because now they're relying on our food - it’s a weaning process.

“They've survived the fires but, you know, we're still getting there."

Sharon describes the impact of the fires on the local ecology as 'pretty devastating'.

“We lost hundreds, hundreds, and hundreds of macropods, koalas, wombats, possums, foxes, deer.

“We came across a property in Gap Road that had a deer and a kangaroo huddled together.

“They weren't burnt, but they were dead (and) they had their arms around each other - they died of oxygen deprivation.

“It's been heroic really for some animals to survive."

Among the tragedy, there are some story gems that have only been made possible by Sharon's dedication.

“We've saved an echidna that had to have some surgery, and it survived,” Sharon said.

“She unfortunately lost her eye, but she survived and she's back in the wild.”

Go fund a trailer

Euroa Pouch Babies’ rescue trailer has reached the end of its life.

Pushed to its limit, it now needs replacing with a larger, safer, and more reliable trailer to completely change what Sharon is able to do for wildlife in the region.

A new trailer would give more space for rescue equipment and feed supplies and allow faster response times to animals in need.

Those able to spare even a few dollars are asked to make a real difference by visiting the group's GoFundMe page and helping them continue rescuing wildlife.

Almost $2000 of the needed $3.5K has been raised so far.

gofund.me/9ce2a6799