Rescuers are dropping tons of vegetables, mostly carrots and sweet potatoes, to feed starving animals that have been displaced by the devastating Australia wildfires that have scorched an area measuring about twice the size of the state of Maryland.

The New South Wales government over the weekend dropped about 4,000 of food from helicopters to feed colonies of brush-tailed rock-wallabies that survived the fires only to face certain starvation, reports ABC News.

"Initial fire assessments indicate the habitat of several important Brush-tailed Rock-wallaby populations was burnt in the recent bushfires," New South Wales Environment Minister Matt Kean said Sunday. "The wallabies were already under stress from the ongoing drought, making survival challenging for the wallabies without assistance."

Food was dropped to colonies in the state's Capertee and Wolgan valleys; Yengo National Park; and in the Kangaroo Valley, government officials in New South Wales said. 

"The provision of supplementary food is one of the key strategies we are deploying to promote the survival and recovery of endangered species," he said. "The wallabies typically survive the fire itself, but are then left stranded with limited natural food as the fire takes out the vegetation around their rocky habitat."

According to experts, more than a billion animals have died since the fires began in early September. The fires have also killed at least 25 people and destroyed more than 2,000 homes. About 800 million animals have died in New South Wales alone, leading experts to fear that the continent's iconic species' will fully recover. 

"I think there's nothing quite to compare with the devastation that's going on over such a large area so quickly. It's a monstrous event in terms of geography and the number of individual animals affected," University of Sydney ecologist Chris Dickman told NPR last week. "It's events like this that may well hasten the extinction process for a range of other species. So, it's a very sad time."

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