Greece fears fires hit rare animals and plants

By Robin Pomeroy

ATHENS (Reuters) - The thousands of Greek villagers forced to escape flames that raged across Greece over the last week were not the only ones on the run.

Animals also fled for their lives and conservationists fear that, like the 63 human victims of the worst forest fires in memory, many of them did not make it to safety.

Vast tracts of forest have been destroyed by the blazes, reducing living space and hunting grounds for wildlife and creating longer-term environmental hazards.

"We don't know what's happened to the golden jackals, whether they died or had a chance to get away," said Dimitris Karavellas of WWF (World Wildlife Fund) Greece.

Although not an endangered species globally, the jackals, with their reddish-yellow fur, were a key part of the fauna in the rugged mountains of the Peloponnese peninsula, a unique eco-system which will take years to recover from the fires.

The chunk of southern Greece, which is effectively an island as it is cut from the mainland by the Corinth canal, contains some of Greece's most valued natural landscapes.

"It's not totally burned, but because space there is restricted, for animals like foxes and rabbits, there is nowhere for them to go," said Greenpeace's Nikos Charalambides.

With some fires still burning and the immediate priorities restoring power and housing thousands of homeless, no one has yet assessed the extent of the damage, but conservationists said they feared some rare species might have been wiped out.