Spring is in the process of springing: the magpies are engaging in aerial flirtations, the grey fantails are displaying, and today I snapped a new bird for my list, the tiny Spotted Pardalote, busily engaged in collecting nesting material.
But with these hopeful signs, it seems the local raptors’ habits are changing. This isn’t based on much research — it’s just that both the black-shouldered kite and the brown falcon seem not to be as easy to find as they were a few weeks ago. Maybe they’ve moved on — or I could just be wrong.
Anyway, the thought that they may be headed off somewhere else to breed is a spur to your author getting on with this series. And fortunately, our previous Raptorwatch gives us the perfect segue into some ramblings about the Brown Falcon (Falco berigora). To whit, the lore attached to these birds — particularly by the first inhabitants of this land, the Aboriginal people.
It seems that ancient legend reports the Brown Falcon as one of three species of ‘firehawks’ — hunters that allegedly pluck burning twigs from bushfires and drop them into likely patches of scrub with the intention of starting a new fire and scaring likely prey out into the open.
The other two species are the black kite (Milvus migrans) and the whistling kite (Haliastur sphenurus). This this ‘fire-foraging’ behaviour has been observed for millennia, mainly in the north of Australia. Now globally, kites are known to congregate at firefronts to prey on fleeing animals, sometimes in large numbers, but picking up burning twigs to deliberately ignite fresh fires seems to be an Australian phenomenon.
The interesting part here is that this idea was long believed to be a myth rooted in Aboriginal folklore, but more recently, Western-style scientific observation seems to be confirming the firehawks’ canny use of fire. Which really bolsters that local lore based on thousands of years of scrutiny. In fact, speculation is that prehistoric people may have learned how to make and keep fire from watching the firehawks at work — initially for the same reason, to scare up panicky fauna to be scooped up for the pot; later, to manage the balance of the land they lived with.
Still, given the massive and ongoing impacts of the 2019 wildfires in this region, this comes as slightly ambivalent news. Any factor that might help spread the next big fire can hardly be welcomed. And it’s not really the thought of birds gathering in gangs and using tools in a strategic manner that’s a bit sobering in a Hitchcockian way.
It’s more that this has been going on for countless millennia and that the birds got to harness fire before us — which is supposed to be one of those factors, like language and opposable thumbs, that define us as human.
Aboriginal wisdom has been increasingly sought when policymakers tackle land management issues — including managing fire through controlled burns. Coincidentally, this morning a local retiree mentioned to me that brush is returning to the forest in Monga National Park in an unmanaged way. Last summer was cool and wet, a welcome break after the horrendous fire 2019/20 season — and the summer to come carries a 70% likelihood of another rainy one. All good, except that the fuel load is building up again, which everyone swore after the last fires can never happen again.
Seems to me we need to take a leaf out of our First Nations Peoples’ land management book — which they may have inherited from the firehawks — and plan some controlled burns before the next big dry. If we don’t, the Firehawks just might.