Just six months on from rolling disasters of drought and bushfire, the region's fire-scorched wildlife have started having kids again.
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The New England's WIRES volunteers have never seen anything like it: a frenzied breeding season that just shouldn't be happening, because it's autumn and temperatures are dropping.
To David McKinnon, chairman of the Central Northern WIRES branch, it is "the strangest thing".
"It's all just been thrown out of whack. We've got a lot of juveniles here that we're raising, because the parents just keep having juveniles," he said.
"This is supposed to be happening in spring, not supposed to be happening at the end of summer.
"I'm in shock that you'll look up and see a pee-wee sitting on a nest. That was about a week ago, and it's nearly frosting. She's going to have to raise her young through a frost, it's crazy stuff. There's no real explanation for it."
It's a bittersweet sight. On the one hand, it's a good sign that the population is recovering, but for many of the newborns it will also mean death by abandonment or freezing in sub-zero temperatures, without help.
Dozens of Wildlife Information, Rescue and Education Service (WIRES) volunteers across the New England have assumed the responsibility of raising the juvenile animals by hand. About 20 to 25 of the local helpers for WIRES are busy raising the newborns. That's about half their overall numbers.
"Juveniles in care is a profound amount of work," said Mr McKinnon
"Some of them have to be fed through the night because we can't keep enough up to them during the day.
"We've all got to work [jobs] and we've got to take time out to feed them.
"It does make a lot of work. Raising a clutch of ducklings it's like six to eight months of pretty intensive cleaning and feeding."
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Mr McKinnon said the late breeding season was a testament to the severity of last year's bushfires. The fires hit so hard because the region's trees had been massively dried out by the worst drought in the region's history. Wildlife suffered just as hard from the big dry as New England's farmers.
Like a young married couple facing unemployment, many animals chose to put off having kids they couldn't feed or keep safe. So the region's wildlife balance was already fragile when the first fires hit.
Despite the efforts of thousands of RFS, NPWS, Fire and Rescue NSW and other firefighters, backed by international volunteers over five horror months, the blazes smashed thousands of people's homes, burned out 18.6 million hectares of land and killed 34 people.
Over a billion animals died in the Black Summer bushfires across Australia. Mr McKinnon called the fires a "holocaust". The worst blazes left scares that ran for hundreds of kilometres, he said.
"You were down to black sticks in the tops of trees, which is not a standard Australian fire ... I doubt anything survived in there."
Far more would have starved to death, died of dehydration or been euthanized by a compassionate farmer or parks worker. Even more would have died without the help of the region's green army of wildlife volunteers.
But the long-term damage still goes on. The Black Summer bushfires has driven communities apart, disrupting usual birth patterns.
Many wild animals live in mobs or herds that have been split up while fleeing the firefront, or have suffered too many deaths to be sustainable. That has broken up the ordinary family unit of animals like Kookaburras.
Other animals, from more territorial species, have found themselves getting bashed up or killed by neighbors whose patch they have been driven onto by the flames.
WIRES have done their best to help protect the children of the flames.
The National Parks and Wildlife Service estimates almost 550,000 hectares of national park and reserve land was affected by bushfires, in 62 New England parks.
In 23 parks, over 90 per cent of their land was burnt.
The NPWS has undertaken fauna surveys in forests around Torrington, plus the Washpool and Gibraltar Range national parks.
A spokesperson for the service said there have been "arboreal mammal sightings" in surveys of burnt areas, but unburnt parts of the two national parks are well-populated.
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David McKinnon estimates it will take a decade or two for the worst fire-affected areas to recover fully assuming no future fires.
Except they will happen again, and bigger, again and again, he said.
"How are they ever going to get back to normal numbers, I don't know, I can't see it.
"When you talk biodiversity you're talking about an important chain and link that all benefit from. As soon as you reduce that you're often impacting much more exponentially than you can imagine.
