Sam McGlone is best known for amazing photos and videos of exotic travel destinations, from Bali to Greece, that he posts to Instagram, but this Australian social media star is working close to home these days, fighting fires with his dad, brother, and other members of the local community.
Amazingly, while raking away leaves and dousing the advancing blaze, Sam rescued a baby kangaroo that had gotten separated from its mother. In a video that has gone viral, Sam picks up the tiny, frightened joey and wraps it in a fire blanket.
After giving the baby kangaroo some water, Sam introduced his “little baby,” telling the frightened animal, “We got you buddy, don’t worry I’ve got you now.”
In the long struggle against the fires, finding the baby kangaroo alive was a hopeful moment. “The kangaroo is safe and healthy,” Sam told 7 News. “It felt so good to save the animal. It was amazing and worth it.”
Sam is trying to use the attention the video has garnered to convince people to donate to local animal rescue and firefighters. As he wrote on Instagram, “Australia is on fire! 500 million animals have been killed [...] This is heartbreaking. 10 Million acres burned. Please spread. Please donate.”
He has set up a GoFundMe page with proceeds to be donated to the Native Animal Rescue Group of Braidwood, which runs a Wombat Rescue center and has a 24-hour hotline for rescuing wild animals displaced by the fires. “We need to help these people as much a we can!” Sam wrote for the campaign, which has raised over $36,000 in just four days. “Your money will go towards helping injured wildlife.”
The social media star hails from Braidwood, New South Wales, about 60 miles from Sydney, and the area around his hometown has been severely affected by the months-long bushfires. “It’s been super hard and tiring,” he said to 7 News. “It’s been giving me anxiety because it’s long days, really hot and very dangerous.”
Besides his online travel exploits, Sam works as a builder and farmer in the local area and has devoted himself, along with family and friends, to putting out the blazes that are threatening houses in the area. Telling Today Australia that he has been working with a group of about 20 volunteer firefighters, he explained, “We’re a really big community and when something bad happens we get together and help as many people as we can.”
The fires have threatened his own house, which meant many sleepless nights and worries about what would happen next. “I was sleeping with one eye open for over 10 days,” he said. Sam noted that like other members of the Rural Fire Service, neither he nor many of the others in his volunteer brigade have specialized training or equipment.
“People haven’t been working for 30 days or more, and they’re using their own fuel or machines just to help people,” Sam said. While no one in his amateur firefighting team has been injured, there have been some “scary, close calls.” Sam told Today about one episode where he and his dad were “half-trapped at the top of the mountain.” “The fires fully surrounded us from every direction,” he said.
As for his baby kangaroo, which Sam named Ash, after seeing the vet, she’s been given a clean bill of health. The only injuries she suffered were some burns on her feet.
Ash is just one of 1 billion animals affected by the bushfires, as per an estimate by Professor Chris Dickman of the University of Sydney. “I think there’s nothing quite to compare with the devastation that’s going on over such a large area so quickly,” Dickman told NPR. “It’s a monstrous event in terms of geography and the number of individual animals affected.”
Dickman noted that Australia already had the highest extinction rate for mammals of anywhere on the planet before the bushfires. “It’s events like this that may well hasten the extinction process for a range of other species,” he adds.
