The Fire-loving Birds of Australia

The other day I was on my way to see a friend who returned during the Christmas when I noticed a familiar sight: birds circling in large numbers.

Soon enough we drove closer and noticed smoke rising in the air. We have two major seasons here; the rain and the dry season. Just like the name depicted, the rain season (mostly between March and November) is a period of rains, and the dry season is a period of no rain (usually between November to March).

Temperatures in the dry season fluctuate between 22° Celsius (71.6° Fahrenheit) to 42° Celsius (107 ° Fahrenheit). That is a perfect recipe for a forest fire as even a careless cigarette butt thrown off a vehicle could start a massive forest fire.

That I day I noticed there was one such fire happening right in the bush along the express road and as usual, the birds of prey (raptors) which include kites, eagles, vultures, falcons, hawks, etc. were out looking for preys. These include small animals flushed out from their hiding places, those killed by the fire, etc. were all fair game.



^{Wikipedia Creative Commons: Hawks circling wildfire}


I commented on this their opportunistic trait for survival, and my friend remarked that it was survival of the fittest; that birds who did not have this inherent nature of hunting style might have probably died off before now.

Those Who Wait vs Those Who Dont

There are two types of people; those who wait for things to happen and those who make things happen. It is a cliché you must have heard a few times. But these birds I saw fell into the category of those who wait for things to happen.

But some 14,000 km (8699 miles) away their cousins in Australia is making things happen.

These birds of prey, like their cousins in Africa, are attracted by fire to feed on insects, dead animals, fleeing animals etc. But they take it a step further; they pick smouldering flames and fly off with it, drop it about a mile off and thereby spreading the fire!

Say hello to the flying arsonist; these are the Black Kite (Milvus migrans), Brown Falcon (Falco berigora), and the Whistling Kite (Haliastur sphenurus).

These observations may be new to the scientists, but to the aborigines, these are an age-old practice of these birds that they have observed for centuries.

"We're not discovering anything," cautions co-author Mark Bonta, a National Geographic grantee and geographer at Penn State University. "Most of the data that we've worked with is collaborative with Aboriginal peoples... They've known this for probably 40,000 years or more."^{National Geographic}

Between 75 to 820 million hectares of tropical forest burn as a result of bushfires. These fires releases between 1.7 to 4.1 gigatons of carbon into the environment.

Deliberate or by Mistake?

Are these birds of prey mistakenly picking these smouldering sticks mistaking them for small animals and once they realise their mistakes drop them in another part of the bush starting a fresh forest fire? Or could it be intentional?

Well, an indigenous doctor, Roberts, tends to favour the latter.

“I have seen a hawk pick up a smouldering stick in its claws and drop it in a fresh patch of dry grass half a mile away, then wait with its mates for the mad exodus of scorched and frightened rodents and reptiles,” wrote Waipuldanya Phillip Roberts in I, The Aboriginal, a 1964 autobiography of Roberts. ^{National Geographic}

Counting the Cost

Wildfires come at a tremendous cost to humanity with the ultimate prize of all being when it claims the lives of people. Just recently the California wildfire that started on Oct 8, 2017, claimed a total of 43 lives, destroying 245,000 acres (99,148 hectares) of land and making 100,000 people to abandon their homes according to this reuters report.

This fatality pales in comparison to the Black Saturday bushfires of Australia that occurred between 7th Feb 2009 to 14 March 2009. The burned area was 1,100,000 acres (450,000 hectares) with fatalities reaching 173.

Conclusion

Fires cost Australians about AUD 8,500 million per annum according to this article published in 2015.

But the cost to the earth is higher. The environment is severely harmed by all the vegetation lost, the massive pollution, leaving the ground bare; making it more erosion prone.

In some countries of the world, arson is a crime that comes with up to life imprisonment as punishment, but these Australian birds of prey are still free to roam and help spread the fire.

Though some scientist are still cautious and want more time to verify if the avians are doing this by deliberate measure or just by a fluke/coincidence

'The holy grail would, for all of us, to be sitting there with a fire and to see a hawk, or a few hawks, swoop down and pick up a fire stick, while our cameras are running, and then drop it and initiate a new fire. ^{ABC AUSTRALIA.}

Though the birds may not start the fire from scratch, the spread of the fire to an unaffected area is both scary and exciting to learn how an animal could best adapt to a seemingly novel approach of survival instincts taken to the extreme. That also may mean that birds discovered fire before man as this observation may suggest they know how to control fire. Who knows what the next step would be, could it be to start the fire from scratch?

References:

Wildlife and Australia's Fire

A Journal on "Firehawk"

Black Saturday Australia Fire