“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”. Waipuldanya of the Alawa, an Indigenous Australian people from Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, Australia
Waipuldanya discusses a similar use of fire by Indigenous Australians, even suggesting that it is possible the trick was learned from the birds, as told to writer Douglas Lockwood in the Aboriginal autobiography, I, the Aboriginal.
Most people believe that all wildlife flee wildfire “like the animated characters in the movie "Bambi." Instead, scientists that study animal behavior found that “during the 1988 burns in the Greater Yellowstone area saw no large animals fleeing the flames. Bison, elk, and other ungulates were observed grazing and resting, often 300 feet or less from burning trees”.
But smaller species such as reptiles, amphibians, insects and small mammals flee in instinctive terror. In Australia, small species rush right into the arsonists powerful beaks and talons.
IFL Science reports:
Astonishingly, it is only a few decades since textbooks confidently proclaimed that humans were the only tool-making species. In 1960, Jane Goodall's ground-breaking reports of tool use amongst chimpanzees overthrew this theory, and today tool use is studied from dolphins to parrots, with crows revealing a sophistication that outshines many humans.
Fire propagation, however, is considered a bright line marking humans apart from animals. Except that is, by the fourteen rangers interviewed by Bob Gosford, and many Australian Aboriginal people in north-central Australia, who say birds use it too.
A study published in 2017 in the journal BioOne, highlights the work of Bob Gosford, where he identifies at least three species of raptor firebomb the Australian landscape to flush small prey out of thick brush, Black Kite (Milvus migrans), Whistling Kite (Haliastur sphenurus), and Brown Falcon (Falco berigora).
According to LifeHacker Australia “numerous species of raptor around the world were already known to 'fire-forage', circling an active fire front looking for prey to eat as they flee the inferno. The idea of avian fire-spreading has been known to the local Indigenous communities and has even been practiced in religious ceremonies for many years, so the team looked to explicate the phenomenon by approaching members of the community for first-hand accounts of the behavior”.
Bushfires are currently widespread in some areas of the Australian continent during a brutally hot heat wave that has broken temperature records in the Sydney Australian Basin. In fact it has been so hot that the brains of bats have been fried.
Science Thrill in a January 10, 2018 article writes:
“We’re not discovering anything,” one of the team, geographer Mark Bonta from Penn State Altoona, told National Geographic.
“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.”
According to the team, firehawk raptors congregate in hundreds along burning fire fronts, where they will fly into active fires to pick up smouldering sticks, transporting them up to a kilometre (0.6 miles) away to regions the flames have not yet scorched.
“The imputed intent of raptors is to spread fire to unburned locations – for example, the far side of a watercourse, road, or artificial break created by firefighters – to flush out prey via flames or smoke,” the researchers write.
If the hypothesis is correct, it means we finally have confirmation of a new force in nature that can spread devastating wildfires – and local Indigenous people knew it all along.
“The birds aren’t starting fires from scratch, but it’s the next best thing,” Bonta told The Washington Post.
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