Food dropped from planes to feed animals amid bush fires

Thousands of pounds of food were delivered to Australia to aid animals whose homeland has been destroyed by the horrific bushfires.

The food was dropped from planes across New South Wales on Saturday to help the colonies of brush-tailed rock-wallabies that inhabit the state in southeastern Australia.

A photo of carrots being dropped — as well as another showing a wallaby eating the orange root vegetable — was posted to Twitter by the state’s minister for energy and environment, Matt Kean.

Kean dubbed the initiative #OperationRockWallaby and noted that mostly carrots and sweet potatoes were delivered for the animals.

“One happy customer,” he captioned the image of a wallaby eating a carrot.

Last week, Professor Chris Dickman, a scientist at the University of Sydney, estimated that more than 1 billion animals across Australia have been killed by the fires, including more than 800 million in New South Wales alone. That was a significant jump from his estimate a few weeks earlier that more than 480 million animals had died.

At least 28 people have died since the bushfires began last September.