
Intentional Fire-Spreading by “Firehawk” Raptors in Northern Australia - robin_reala
http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.2993/0278-0771-37.4.700
======
acobster
I took a basic falconry lesson with my dad last year. Besides being one of the
coolest things I did all year, I got to learn all about the species we worked
with: the Harris hawk. Native to the Southwest region of North America, they
are of the only (the only?) raptors that strategize together and hunt in
packs. Apparently if you introduce two groups who have never interacted
before, they will play games and talk to each other for a while, and just a
couple hours later go out hunting together (with their human trainers).

Also, according to our two instructors, the "universal" (read: they witnessed
two Harris hawks do this independently) call for a dog or wolf, their natural
predator, sounds like " _Dog!_ "

~~~
joshuaheard
I witnessed a Harris hawk attack a mockingbird in mid-flight outside my window
once. It was brutal, blood and feathers sprayed everywhere, though the
mockingbird managed to fly off with the hawk in hot pursuit. At first, I was
like WTF!? Then I became curious. I identified the Harris hawk based on my
brief sighting, and discovered that they were native to Texas, where I was
living, and one of their main sources of prey is the mockingbird.

~~~
tzs
It's cheap and easy to encourage birds (and other animals) to come by your
window more, if you want to see more of their behavior in person.

A coworker has been putting out food for birds for several months, and
regularly has something like 20 different species coming by for it, and
another 10 or so species that only show up occasionally. It's to the point now
that when he puts out food, he regularly has something like a couple dozen
birds at once showing up.

This includes some hawk species. He's got a camera running and has shown my
some impressive footage of the hawks hunting the other birds.

After seeing his videos and photos, and hearing his descriptions, I decided to
give it a try. For the last few weeks I've been going out and putting
unshelled unsalted peanuts on the rails of my deck, which I can watch from the
window in front of my computer desk. I've since added black oil sunflower
seeds to the mix [1].

I haven't seen nearly the variety of birds he has, and have seen no predator
birds. I've mostly got Dark-eyed Juncos, Black-capped and Chestnut-backed
Chickadees, Steller's Jays, Spotted Towees, and some kind of Crow (either
American or Northwestern). A couple of times I've had some kind of gull, and
I've seen one or two things about the size of the crows and jays but did not
see it long enough to remember enough to look it up.

Besides birds, he's also getting a lot of squirrels, some chipmunks, at least
one opossum, and at least one raccoon. His squirrels have gotten to the point
that they are not afraid of him. When he goes out to toss peanuts most of them
gather at the edge of the bushes and watch him, and then will come get the
peanuts while he is there if he doesn't get too close. (I think he also said
that the birds have grown much more tolerant of his presence, too, such as
eating from a feeder while he is right there filling it).

One, though, actually comes up to his window and jumps around until the
squirrel sees that it has been seen, and then runs to the door to wait for my
coworker to come out. That squirrel will actually come up and take an offered
peanut from his hand.

He's also had the raccoon approach, but was uncomfortable with that and so
tossed some peanuts behind the raccoon to get it to move away. A couple
evenings ago he went out, and the raccoon was there. It ran away and he
thought he'd scared it off and sat down on the porch. The raccoon had actually
just circled around the house to come up from the other side. The coworker
tossed the raccoon a peanut. It was a weak toss and only went a couple feet.
After a few more tosses, the raccoon would hold out his hands palm up, and
wait for a peanut to be handed to him. (He (the human, not the raccoon) was
wearing protective gloves just in case).

The only thing I've gotten besides birds is squirrels (at least that I've
seen). I've seen raccoons in my neighborhood before, but not recently, and a
couple of times I put out some seed and peanuts to close too the bird's
bedtime, and so there was food on my deck overnight, and it was all
undisturbed in the morning.

(I'm only putting out food. The coworker has also added some water features to
his landscaping that provide good drinking water for animals. From what he
told me and what I've read, that makes a place much more attractive to
raccoons, which could be why he's getting them. I do not want raccoons, so
will not be providing water to the animals).

I'm pretty sure a lot of the little birds I see live in the bushes and trees
in my front yard, because if I put out food near sunrise, I now get up to a
dozen of them quickly coming out of those bushes and trees, taking a seed or
peanut, and flying back.

If I do the same thing at random times throughout the day, the little birds
still mostly come from those trees and bushes, but instead of a dozen or more
at once, it is in ones and twos over a longer time.

Finally, if I put out food as sunset nears, it is back to a whole bunch
showing up at once.

Thus, I'm guessing that they live in those trees and bushes, and so near
sunrise and sunset that are all home. Hence the crowd. In the middle of the
day, they are mostly out roaming around looking for food, and so they only
find my food when their roaming brings them back home.

I wish I had thought to do some kind of survey of bird population in those
trees and bushes before I started putting out food. I'd like to know if they
have moved in there because of the regular food, or if they were always there
and I just didn't notice them.

[1] ...because they are cheap and birds like them. A 10 pound bag is around $9
at Walmart, and will last for me about 45 days. A 40 pound bag is around $20
dollars.

~~~
illumin8
Be careful with this. We hired an exterminator once to deal with a carpenter
ant problem and he said the number one cause of vermin infestation (rats,
mice, squirrels, chipmunks, etc) is putting bird feeders near your house.
Apparently the nuts and seeds attract vermin, which inevitably tunnel into
your house through openings, and make it their house. I love the sight of
birds, but after seeing chipmunks (ground squirrels) dig a huge tunnel network
under our front yard, to the point where the lawn was collapsing, I'm not
risking it.

~~~
jstarfish
My in-laws had similar problems. They decided they wanted chickens. The
presence of chicken feed near the house ended up attracting rats.

------
duncan_bayne
From [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-03/smart-bushfire-
birds/7...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-03/smart-bushfire-
birds/7216934):

> Mr Gosford said he had never actually seen a bird at a fire front,
> intentionally spreading the fire.

> So he said he decided to appeal to people to come forward if they had seen
> birds behaving in that way.

> Mr Gosford said he received 16 firsthand accounts from people who said they
> had witnessed birds spreading bushfires to flush out prey.

> ...

> He said he hoped by filming birds spreading fires, others would see how
> valuable Aboriginal knowledge could be to the broader community.

This is a much more speculative thing than a reading of that abstract makes it
out to be. It's not impossible, but there's no hard evidence of it as yet.
Certainly, there's no video.

~~~
gus_massa
I think that the abstract is clear, and probably they are using the correct
terminology in their field. But the first time I read it I didn't notice that
they are documenting first hand _stories_ about the events, but not the events
themselves (aka videos).

> We document Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and non-Indigenous
> _observations_ of intentional fire-spreading by the fire-foraging raptors
> Black Kite, Whistling Kite, and Brown Falcon in tropical Australian
> savannas. _Observers_ report both solo and cooperative attempts, often
> successful, to spread wildfires intentionally via single-occasion or
> repeated transport of burning sticks in talons or beaks.* [..]

------
taneq
So we're not the only:

\- tool-using animal

\- fire-using animal

\- language-using animal

\- animal which domesticates other animals

\- animal which builds complex structures

Aha! I know! We're the only animal which continually comes up with reasons why
we're special.

~~~
meri_dian
In each of those categories we're far and away the best. I really don't
understand this feeling that humans need to be modest or that describing
ourselves as special is wrong. We are special.

I think among some people that are frustrated with the human world for
whatever - either personal or abstract - reason, there's a feeling of
misanthropy that colors their thinking, and so they try to belittle humanity.

~~~
rtpg
I bet a little bit of it in the modern world is rationalization for eating and
generally mistreating animals.

~~~
dorfsmay
Which animal we morally can eat is a huge and difficult concept...

In some cultures eating horse meat is normal, in others vegetarianism is the
honourable goal. Have you ever asked yourself why you eat or why you don't eat
some animals? It is typically a product of the culture we grew up in, rarely
the product of an intentional thought process.

Would you eat another human? What about another ape? An elephant? A monkey? A
cat? A rabbit? A cow? Where do you draw the line?

I once decided that the "mirror test"[1] was my litmus test for eating or not
an animal. But then as I looked more into it I realised that that test isn't
as straight forward as I thought, lots of false positive, methodology issues
(eg: some animal start passing the test after being exposed to mirrors for a
long time). And the final blow was that most humans under 6 months fail the
test and I decided not to use this test rather than starting to eat human
infants.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test)

~~~
indubitable
In my opinion it's quite simple. I eat what I would be willing to personally
kill and butcher myself. I think trying to justify why 'A' and not 'B' to
ourselves is somewhat unproductive. Two people watch a movie, one person likes
it - the other dislikes it. Both can give their reasons for such, but neither
is right or wrong.

Attempting to quantify subjective matters is arguably one of the big reasons
so many of the social sciences are facing replication crises. There are so
many factors in play that the quantifications, or justifications, we provide
to explain social phenomena like this are not very meaningful even if we think
they are! The most important thing is to be aware of the facts, so much as
possible, but beyond that simply to take your opinion as what it is - a
subjective view based on a complex series of mental interactions that even you
are not fully privy to.

~~~
dorfsmay
So if your neighbour is willing to kill and butcher a human being, you're OK
with that?

What about another ape or an elephant?

~~~
indubitable
I'm not really sure by what you mean "OK with that." I'm perfectly fine with
people having views I find detestable. Going further there, I suspect if we
were all 100% honest then any two people could find at least some reason to
find the other detestable.

------
viridian
This is super cool, if a bit scary. Man Australia has it all though, 8/10 of
the deadliest spiders, half the deadliest snakes, crocodiles, rockfish, and
now firebirds.

Inhabiting Australia is a testament to man's arrogance.

~~~
electric_sheep
Haha, this has been a well-trod rant of mine for years. Don't forget
scorpions, vampire bats, great white sharks, and the world's top 4 deadliest
jellyfish!

~~~
jacques_chester
I grew up in Darwin and lived to tell the tale.

It's really very simple. Here is a diagram:

    
    
        [place where bad things are]
    
        
    
        
    
        
    
        
    
        
    
        
    
        
    
        
        
                                        [me]
    

So long as I am not doing something dumb like going near an estuarine river
filled with invisible deathbeasts, or getting into an ocean filled with
transparently-tentacled murder-squigglies, or stomping through grass near logs
with dozing fangjectors, I will be fine.

It's just not difficult.

~~~
a3n
It's seems likely that people growing up in a place called Darwin would, in
time, evolve a particular fitness to thrive.

~~~
jacques_chester
I love it.

Its only rival in my heart is New York.

------
DrBazza
The sixth referenced paper:

Bird, R. B., D. W. Bird, B. F. Codding, C. H. Parker, and J. H. Jones. 2008.
The “Fire Stick Farming” Hypothesis: Australian Aboriginal Foraging
Strategies, Biodiversity, and Anthropogenic Fire Mosaics. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 105:14796–14801. Crossref, PubMed, Google Scholar

Not quite an aptronym, but close.

~~~
nakedrobot2
The paper was written by two people called "Bird" ?!

File under "nominative determinism"!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism)

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
I wonder if they're also self-professed pyromaniacs? :^)

Kidding aside, I'd never heard about "nominative determinism" before. That's
rather neat.

------
saycheese
Stating the obvious, this clearly shows man is not the only animal to use fire
as a tool.

~~~
agumonkey
oh god I thought it was a team name not an actual animal.

~~~
philbarr
To be fair "Firehawk Raptors" is a pretty cool name. Even maybe for a death
metal band. Or the next javascript framework.

~~~
agumonkey
I dearly thought it was an anarchist group burning strips of land
preventively..

------
nerdponx
I don't have full-text access so I can only read the abstract. Why would a
bird want to spread a forest fire?

~~~
davidhariri
I’m in the same boat as you, but in the book Sapiens it’s written that bush
fires in Australia are started to force animals out of the forest and to
create plains where they can be more effectively hunted in the future. Maybe
the birds do this too (or learned it from people?)

~~~
jmts
You may have conflated a couple of things here that I think might be worthy of
clarification.

1\. Fires will force animals out of the forest for hunting. It sounds to me
that this is the most likely reason for animals learning to spread fire.

2\. While I expect sufficiently fierce fires will create plains, much of
Australia's native flora is adapted to bush fires, and use it as an
opportunity to regenerate. Many plants have seed pods that will only open
after being burned. Thus, while much of Australia's bushland is dry, bushland
that has been burned recently tends to be quite green and full of life, and
many of the trees remain - however much furrier for their fresh growth of
leaves.

3\. Australian Aborigines (to my best recollection) were known for cycling
parts of their territories as part of their nomadic lifestyle, farming
somewhere, burning the land as the left, moving on, then returning again later
when the land is restored and more plentiful.

------
jurasource
Reminds me of the fire starting birds in Vernor Vinges "Marooned in Realtime",
awesome book.

------
Tarq0n
First website I've seen in a while that disallows viewing it with first-party
cookies disabled.

~~~
dp-tyvek
It's not that uncommon for scientific journals, sadly.

------
padobson
Anyone know if the researchers took any pictures/video of the hawks at work?

------
adrianratnapala
Wait, is it the raptors that are intentionally spreading fires by carrying
burning sticks around, or is it the local people intentially spreading fires
by giving them by burning sticks to carry?

And if so, why do the raptors do it?

------
duncan_bayne
"Journal of Ethnobiology"

"Though Aboriginal rangers and others who deal with bushfires take into
account the risks posed by raptors that cause controlled burns to jump across
firebreaks, official skepticism about the reality of avian fire-spreading
hampers effective planning for landscape management and restoration. Via
ethno-ornithological workshops and controlled field experiments with land
managers, our collaborative research aims to situate fire-spreading as an
important factor in fire management and fire ecology."

I'll believe this when I see video proof, thanks. In the meantime I'm going to
mentally file it with UFOs that are alien spacecraft, and reptilian overlords.

~~~
yipopov
Yes, this story definitely has a certain WE WUZ feel to it.

~~~
weirdwitch
Can you explain what this means?

~~~
inteleng
He's referring to the "WE WUZ KANGZ" meme, in that he sees the research as not
believable.

~~~
weirdwitch
Sorry there may be a cultural gap here. I'm not familiar with that phrase at
all.

~~~
anigbrowl
It's a racist trope in which a questionable/exaggerated historical claim is
conflated with any suggestion of knowledge/innovation originating outside a
eurocentric historical paradigm.

[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-wuz-kings](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-
wuz-kings)

------
YeGoblynQueenne
Does anyone have any idea why the birds do that? Is an attempt made to provide
an explanation, in the full article?

