A year on from Black Saturday.

Many Australians are taking a moment to remember the 173 lives lost last year on this day. It's a horrifying figure, of course, but the man-made fires killed -- by conservative estimate -- at least a million animals. Many that survived the hellstorm died from stress-related illness and disease weeks and months afterward. Or starved. As is almost always the case, animals are bouncing back. Like many Australians close enough to smell the smoke of Black Saturday, I was motivated to become a wildlife volunteer, and as a result met a subset of truly remarkable men and women.

A pair of rescue calls brought me to Kinglake and Strathewen two months after the bushfires. I'd been to some areas at night looking for wombats, my first brush with the moonscape aftermath of many mountainsides, but these rescue calls were my first daytime views. As these photos show, regrowth had begun, but nearly all man-made structures were in ruins.