It was a tale that seemed too good to be true, and in fact, it was: During the devastating 2019-20 Black Summer wildfires in southeastern Australia, false reports circulated that wombats had protected other animals by herding them into their burrows.

But like any good fairy tale, the reports did contain an inkling of truth; it turns out that wombat burrows do serve as fireproof refuges for small mammals, birds and reptiles during and after extreme fires.

Dale Nimmo, an ecologist at Charles Sturt University in Australia, was asked to fact-check the rumors of hero wombats that spread during the fires.

“In going through the literature,” Nimmo said, “there was quite a lot of evidence that species other than wombats were regularly using wombat burrows.”

While it turned out that wombats weren’t gallantly ushering woodland creatures out of harm’s way, Nimmo decided to explore the role of their burrows in forest ecosystems affected by a fire. His colleague Grant Linley went searching for wombat burrows in Woomargama National Park and Woomargama State Forest.

Wombat burrows are impressive feats of subterranean infrastructure.

“They have multiple entrances, multiple chambers. They’re wide. They have temperatures that are far below the aboveground temperature, so they’re cool when it’s hot,” Nimmo said.

In a paper published last month in the Journal of Mammalogy, the team described how Linley set up trail cameras at 28 wombat burrows in areas that had experienced varying degrees of wildfire charring, including some that hadn’t been burned at all. The cameras snapped pictures of burrow traffic from June 2021 to April 2022, producing hundreds of thousands of pictures for Linley to review.

The pictures revealed that wombat burrows are a hub of animal activity. Some 56 vertebrate species were observed at the burrows, and several native species were seen more often at the burrows than at nearby sites without burrows, including bush rats and agile antechinus (a carnivorous marsupial related to the Tasmanian devil), the 6-foot-long lace monitor lizard and birds like the painted button quail and the gray shrike thrush.

Many species showed a preference for burrows no matter how burned the area was; the bush rats, agile antechinuses and quails were most active around burrows in areas that had been burned heavily.