On 20 December 2019, lightning ignited the first of the fires that would go on to burn around 211,000 hectares of Kangaroo Island, roughly 48 per cent of the island, before being declared safe in early February 2020. Two people tragically lost their lives, along with an enormous toll on stock, homes and habitat. We shared the immediate picture in our 2021 update, when we’d lost a remote lunch site and access to some of our favourite places.
Many people continue to question “How is Kangaroo Island going after the fires?” or “Has Kangaroo Island fully recovered?”
Six years on, with the bush thick and green again, it feels like the right time to share the longer story: what’s happened to the wildlife, the landscape and the businesses that make Kangaroo Island what it is.
Wildlife Bouncing Back From the Brink
Few species captured the world’s attention like the Kangaroo Island dunnart, a critically endangered marsupial found nowhere else on earth. The fires destroyed around 95 per cent of its known habitat, and for a while it looked as though we might lose it altogether. Within weeks, the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Kangaroo Island Land for Wildlife, and local landholders, the Doube family, fenced a predator-free refuge at Western River. Recent monitoring found dunnarts thriving well beyond expectations, including evidence of communal sheltering behaviour that had never been recorded for this species. Five years on, the AWC team describe the site as having gone from a moonscape to vegetation so dense it’s difficult to walk through.
The monitoring that is ongoing uses lots of different techniques with one of the most effective being drift fences with cameras at either end, triggered by heat and movement. Many species are logged with this method, a selection of which are shown below:
The Kangaroo Island glossy black-cockatoo, the only remaining population of its subspecies, has had a similarly heartening trajectory. More than half of its sheoak feeding habitat and around 40 per cent of known nests burned in the fires, yet the population census taken later that same year still counted 454 birds, very close to pre-fire numbers. The 2025 island-wide census recorded a minimum of 446 glossies, and the most interesting trend isn’t the headline number but the shift in distribution: the fire-affected west is still rebuilding, while flocks on the eastern half of the island, including a record 51 birds at Baudin Conservation Park near Penneshaw, are flourishing on the back of years of sheoak planting. We’re fortunate to regularly see glossies feeding in she-oaks at Cygnet Park Sanctuary, where the not-for-profit Bio-R has helped increase bird numbers from around 1,000 to more than 4,000 (with a broader species mix) in under a decade through habitat reconstruction.
Koalas tell a different kind of recovery story. An estimated 82 per cent of the island’s koalas, around 39,000 animals, were lost in the fires. Because koalas were overabundant on Kangaroo Island before the fires (they’re not native here; around 400 were introduced to Flinders Chase and elsewhere from the 1920s), this was never a question of species survival, and numbers have since rebuilt from a low of around 8,500 to at least 15,000. Our marine wildlife, meanwhile, was never impacted by fire; the sea-lion colony at Seal Bay and the long-nosed fur seals at Admirals Arch carried on exactly as they always have.
A Landscape Transformed by Fire and Time
Australian bushland doesn’t just survive fire; much of it depends on it. Within Flinders Chase National Park, where around 96 per cent of the park burned, the regrowth has been extraordinary to witness. Epicormic shoots, dormant buds along blackened trunks that spring into leaf once the suppressing hormones from higher branches are gone, had many trees looking green again within months. Grass trees (locally known as yaccas) sent up flower spikes over a metre tall within weeks of the fire passing. This flowering response is triggered directly by the heat and smoke. Seed banks that had been waiting in the soil for decades, in some cases for species not recorded for 70 years or more, germinated in extraordinary numbers.
The rebuilding of visitor infrastructure has kept pace with nature. A new $19.5 million Flinders Chase Visitor Centre opened in July 2024, and Remarkable Rocks and Admirals Arch both now have rebuilt boardwalks, viewing platforms and interpretive signage. The Kangaroo Island Wilderness Trail, which weaves through the heart of the fire scar, fully reopened to walkers in December 2023.
What’s caught us by surprise, six years on, is just how robust that regrowth has become. The understorey across much of the western end is now so dense in places that it has made spotting terrestrial wildlife genuinely more difficult than it was even a few years ago, a very welcome problem to have, but one that has changed how we design our touring days, which we’ll come back to. There has been a natural lag in flowering, as immediately after the fire, plants are in growth mode, recovering lost leaves and energy. Now the flowering has begun en masse, and the nectivores (pygmy possums, lorikeets, bats and a multitude of insects) will boom.
Conservation Partnerships Doing the Heavy Lifting
None of this recovery happened by accident. The Kangaroo Island Landscape Board was established to coordinate the island’s natural resource management, and its eight-member board includes both Dr Peggy Rismiller, a long-time wildlife researcher many of our guests have met, and Heidi Groffen, co-founder of Kangaroo Island Land for Wildlife. KI Land for Wildlife itself has been running its private land conservation program since 2018, and now protects close to 25,000 hectares across 80 member properties, with more than 1,500 feral cats removed and a 395-hectare exclusion fence built in partnership with the AWC.
Citizen science also played a genuine role in the early recovery, with the Kangaroo Island Dunnart Survey drawing a record number of volunteers to help locate survivors in the months after the fires, work that fed directly into the refuge-building and monitoring programs that followed. It’s the kind of grassroots, all-hands response that has defined the island’s broader recovery.
There’s also a less obvious recovery story written in pest management. Kangaroo Island had already earned a reputation as a pest-eradication leader well before the Black Summer fires, with a sustained ground campaign using the “Judas goat” and “Judas deer” tracking technique making it the largest island in the world to eradicate feral goats and the only island to eradicate feral deer, a program that ran from the mid-2000s through to around 2013.
Feral pigs were a far tougher proposition, until the 2019-20 fires inadvertently delivered the breakthrough: by killing an estimated 90 per cent of the remaining population and stripping away the dense cover survivors had relied on, the fires gave the Kangaroo Island Feral Pig Eradication Program the opening it needed.
Backed by $7.5 million in state and federal funding and using thermal-assisted aerial culling, detection dogs and a 500-camera monitoring network, the program removed the last confirmed pigs in March 2024 and, after two years of clear surveillance, the island was officially declared feral pig-free in June 2026, the largest island in the world to achieve that result. Combined with the earlier goat and deer programs, Kangaroo Island now appears to be the only place of its size and population anywhere in the world to have eradicated three established vertebrate pest species. The next community-driven project – this one an even larger challenge, is the eradication of feral cats.
Business Reborn Alongside the Bush
Southern Ocean Lodge, lost entirely in the fires, reopened in December 2023 after a four-year, $55 million rebuild that stayed remarkably true to the spirit of the original. We’ve worked alongside the Lodge since well before the fires, and that relationship remains as strong as ever, with a steady stream of guests choosing to explore the island privately with our guiding team to experience the good food, good wine and wildlife in the wild that has defined EKI’s touring philosophy since 1990.
On the land, there were massive losses of homes, fences, farm equipment and many domestic animals. Most people took what is hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to review their farm layout, locate fencelines for improved operating efficiency, and, in some cases, move homes to places with better soil, microclimate, or views.
Our own losses were comparatively modest. We lost one remote lunch site near Hanson Bay and, for a time, access to Grassdale within Kelly Hill Conservation Park. We’re pleased to say both have been resolved: a new private day-use camp has recently been completed in the backblocks of Flinders Chase, with handcrafted timber trestle tables, a stainless steel prep area, water tank and propane barbecue beneath 70 square metres of all-weather shade, and we’ve regained access to Grassdale, which continues to deliver some of our most reliable kangaroo encounters anywhere on the island.
The island’s wider visitor economy has recovered just as strongly. Kangaroo Island’s visitor expenditure hit a record $294 million in the year to June 2023, with international visitors alone contributing $38 million, the highest international spend of any South Australian region outside Adelaide.
Walking the Recovery With Us
That unexpected density of regrowth we mentioned earlier has genuinely shaped how we tour the West End today. On our Island Life tour, we now lean even harder into wildlife encounters across the north and south coasts. Our Flinders Chase Focus day, by contrast, leans into landscape, fire ecology and conservation history, alongside the extraordinary coastline at Remarkable Rocks, Cape du Couedic and Admirals Arch. Having said this, adding Grassdale back into the mix, where open grassland still gives us reliably clear sightings as kangaroos emerge to feed, is already amplifying the wild encounters on this tour.
Six years on, Kangaroo Island isn’t just recovered. In a lot of ways, particularly for the dunnart, the glossies and the bush itself, it’s more resilient than it was before.
We’d love to show it to you.