Volunteers rush to feed scared animals in fire-stricken France

The volunteer had barely put down the tomato when a small beak poked out from a bush and dashed towards it in an abandoned garden in fire-ravaged southwest France.

The tortoise had not eaten in days after the home's human residents fled in a hurry last week, fearing the country's largest wildfire since 1949 was fast approaching in the pine forest on the Atlantic coastline.

"The family asked us to help via Facebook," said volunteer Charlotte Darribat, as she fed the reptile near upturned sunchairs and strewn clothes in the town of Lege-Cap-Ferret.

"Like many others, they had only a few minutes to leave in the middle of the night and couldn't take their animals with them."

A team of animal lovers has come to the rescue of pets people left behind in their haste in the area west of the wine-making capital of Bordeaux.

Every morning, the team drives up and down the town of some 7,000 residents before the fires, with pet biscuits, grain and water to feed dozens of cats, dogs, rabbits, chickens and other animals that were left behind.

Fellow volunteer Aurelie Zucchello, from a local cat charity, stroked a purring ginger feline.

"We're lucky. For the moment we haven't found any dead animal. It's what we dread, because it's very hot," she said.

On the edge of the forest, the ruins of scorched homes stretched out along the road, after the flames consumed 42,000 hectares of woodland in the region -- an area as large as the US city of Detroit.

The two women whistled and shook a bag of food in the hope of drawing out a cat gone missing for days.

Charlene Leroux, from late screen star Brigitte Bardot's foundation for animals, said local charities had done "incredible work" since the fires broke out last week.

"When we've had to, we've been jumping over fences and breaking windows to save animals trapped inside" homes, she told AFP by telephone.

Firefighters have too, she said.

Near Le Porge, a village closer to the starting point of the fire, firefighters had to free Brittany Spaniels and German Shepherds from kennels to save them from the approaching inferno that ravaged more than 180 homes in the area.

Wildlife is also expected to pay a steep price as France's forests burn.

In hard-hit areas like Le Porge, experts say insects will have perished en masse and larger creatures from toads to lizards will not have been spared either.

Faster-moving wildlife like deer can in theory flee the immediate threat of flames, but do not always make it.

Earlier this week, an incinerated roe deer was seen lying on the blackened ground.

In recent days, AFP journalists have seen roe deer and fawns looking disorientated in the middle of scorched and barren woodland.

Volunteers on Wednesday rescued a terrified baby deer from a garden.

"Its hooves were completely burned, you could see the bones," one of them recounted.

"We gave it two litres of water, and it was taken to a vet... I don't know if it survived."