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Australian Birds of Prey Are Deliberately Setting Forests On Fire (cosmosmagazine.com)
An anonymous reader writes: If you've been counting the ways the Australian environment is trying to kill you, you can now add "arson" to the list. According to a six-year study published in The Journal of Ethnobiology, observers have confirmed what Aboriginal rangers have been observing for years: birds of prey routinely carry burning or smouldering sticks into dry grassy areas to scare small mammals into fleeing so they can be pack-hunted more effectively. This has implications for environmental management, since the best firebreak will not protect your controlled burn from a "firehawk" determined to breach it.
that I don't get targeted by a short-sighted wedge-tailed eagle.
That's a *hell* of a fear to overcome - and a hell of leap for a hunter to make. It's not like they'd accidentally pick up a burning stick and remember that dropping it in just the right area results in lots of dinner running about in the open.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
But not Pontiac.
Surely it's time to just give up on Australia. It's the same temperature as the sun, every single creature there wants to either kill you or give you an STD and now even the god damn birds are trying to set the whole country ablaze.
Maybe it's time to just board up the windows and move to a less murderous country.
That's interesting about the avian predators. We have a ranch where we have a pack of wolves that works with us to herd and defend our livestock against their wild cousins. Nothing keeps wild wolves away from our livestock like the wolves that adopted our ranch decades ago. Some of these ranching wolves use fire. They'll feed sticks into a bonfire and they'll take hot brands out of a bonfire and carry them away. This is an issue we have to be careful of and attentive to if we have a fire going. It's cute until they have a ring of fire going around you... Man is not the only hunter with intelligence.
Vernor Vinge predicted birds starting fires in Marooned in Realtime.
Things that want to kill you in Australia for $400 Alex.
If there was a concerted effort to clean-up brush before it created a firenado, the birds wouldn't have to...
It has bigger implications than that. Just how intelligent animals really are?
Some decades ago some friends and I were driving through the forest just north of "The Geysers" in northern California.
The road was a two-lane cut through tall trees. A buzzard (probably a california condor) flew out of the trees at about eight feet above the ground and dropped a squirrel on the road about 12 feet in front of our car.
The squirrel bounced, landed, rolled onto its feet, and ran pell-mell into the woods, getting off the road before our car reached him.
The Buzzard then followed our car for several miles on the low-speed road, buzzing us and sometimes trying to get into it through the open windows (air conditioner was out on a hot day), which we quickly closed. Eventually it gave up or was left behind.
We think the buzzard had figured out that, not only did cars often hit small animals, producing tasty road kill, but that if you dropped on in front of a car you could create tasty road kill.
We refer to this bird as "the mathematician" - because he was obtaining a squirrel dinner from a live squirrel by reducing it to a previously solved problem.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Humans can eliminate all other large species only by driving humanity to extinction at the same time -- and even at the cost of our own extinction, we're incapable of wiping out all insect life with all the nukes at our disposal. Also, if insects eliminate all humans they can continue happily on with their lives -- if humans eliminate all insects, we go extinct. It's clear whose position is stronger.
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Fire and Australia have an intimate relationship. Aborigines and later Australians have been setting fire to this country for centuries to manage agriculture and wild game. Many animals depend on fire to set free the seeds of certain Eucalypts and certain ecosystems also depend on the fire-regrowth cycle. This study adds to the mystique of fire in Australia.
For those who have never visited, if you spend a little time in outback Austrlalia, there is something undefinable here that will burn into your soul.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson