Some Australian birds of prey spread wildfire intentionally in order to prey on the animals that try to flee from the fire!

Australia is packed to the brim with dangerous, weird and cool animals, and now we apparently have to add arsonist falcons to the list of quirky Australian animals. The native aboriginal people of Australia has claimed that the raptors were in fact pyromaniacs, but scientists have been skeptical to the claim for a long time. However, a recently published paper is most likely going to change that!

The phenomena of arsonist falcons happens in the tropical Australian savannahs in Northern Australia. This area is very flat, has dense grass with scattered trees, and has frequent forest fires. This does of course sound really bad, but it’s a normal part of the savannah’s ecosystem, and each summer (May to October) there will be several forest fires. This devastates the local fauna and flora, and small animals such as bandicoots, small kangaroos, possums, and sugar gliders will have to try their best to flee away from the fire. This is obviously a huge opportunity for the nearby raptors to get some easy food, and the paper I am writing about today documents that the raptors are taking it one step further than we had expected.

A bushfire in Australia. Image by 80 trading 24, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

How the raptors spread the forest fire

What happens is that a forest fire begins naturally, and this will mostly have a very limited range. However, what has been observed is that raptors of three different species have carried burning twigs in their talons or even beaks, and dropped these to the ground on areas that are not burning. This would of course start a new local forest fire at this location, and the raptors had another chance to capture fleeing animals. They pretty much used burning sticks to create fires as a weapon against their prey! That's a high-level intelligence for a bird.

An image of the Australian savannah. Image by Ethel Aardvark, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

There has never really been a debate that the raptors are responsible for spreading the forest fire in this area, but there has however been a big debate about whether they do it intentionally or by accident. Ornithologist Bob Gosford is one of the people who believed they did it on purpose after seeing this behavior personally several times, but most other ornithologist were very skeptical of his claims.

Gosford did however not waver from his belief, and decided to start collecting reports from other who also saw the same behavior. After getting over 20 different witness reports, he analyzed the data and published a paper about it in Journal of Ethnobiology. This paper concludes that the whistling kite (Haliastur sphenurus), black kites (Milvus migrans) and brown falcon (Falco berigora) all uses fire in order to scare their prey out of hiding.

A whistling kite, one of the birds who exhibited this type of behavior. Image by Jim Bendon, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

According to the paper, both individual bird as well as organized groups of cooperating birds exhibited this behavior, and they would even do it multiple times if the fire did not light properly up the first time.

Thanks for reading

I hope you enjoyed reading about the pyromaniac behavior of the Australian birds of prey! I for one find it extremely interesting that birds are capable to use fire to do tasks such as this one, and it really shows that we are not the only intelligent species alive. Thanks for reading, and please leave a comment below if you got anything to share with the rest of us.