Australia’s Firehawks 🔥, The Birds That Spread Wildfire on Purpose

There’s a fire moving across the savanna in northern Australia. Dry grass, a lot of smoke, the whole thing crackling and loud. And a hawk flies straight toward it. Not away, toward.

It dips down near the flames, grabs a burning stick in its feet, and carries it off.

Flies it over the firebreak, the strip of cleared land that’s supposed to stop the fire, and drops it in the dry grass on the other side. 🔥

The grass catches. And the bird just waits.

We know how that sounds. But it’s real, and it’s not even that rare. Aboriginal people in Australia have a name for these birds. They call them firehawks, and they’ve known about them for a very long time.

Three Birds

It’s three species, mostly: the black kite, the whistling kite, and the brown falcon.

All three already do the normal thing that birds do around fire. A fire pushes grasshoppers and lizards and little mammals out into the open, and a bird sitting at the edge gets an easy meal. Nothing strange about that. Hawks everywhere do it.

But these ones seem to go a step further. Instead of just waiting for the fire, they help it along! They pick up a stick that’s still burning, in their feet or their beak, fly it a short way, and drop it somewhere that hasn’t caught yet. Sometimes one bird does it alone. Sometimes a few of them work at it together, dropping stick after stick until the grass finally lights.

If that’s really what’s happening, it’s a big deal. An animal using fire on purpose. We used to think that was the one thing only people did.

People Already Knew

But here’s the part that gets us.

When a couple of researchers, Mark Bonta and Robert Gosford wrote this up in a science journal back in 2017, they weren’t really discovering anything. They were just writing down what people had been saying all along.

Aboriginal Australians have known about the firehawks for thousands of years. The birds show up in their stories and their ceremonies. In some of those stories, it was a firehawk that brought fire into the world in the first place. And in certain fire ceremonies, men carry flaming sticks from one spot to another, doing, basically, the same thing the birds do out on the grass.

So the knowledge was there the whole time. It lived in stories and ceremonies and in what people saw with their own eyes every year. It just took a while to end up in a journal. The 2017 paper also leaned on a pile of firsthand accounts from rangers and firefighters and people who work the land — people who’d watched a bird carry a burning stick right over a firebreak they’d cleared to stop the fire.

Not Everyone’s Sold

To be fair, not every scientist buys it.

Some say a bird might just grab a stick that happens to be on fire, or drop one by accident, and that you can’t really prove the bird meant to do it. And there’s a fair point in there, there isn’t much good video of it. It’s hard to film, and the bird does the whole thing in about two seconds, in the middle of a fire, with smoke everywhere.

But there are a lot of these accounts, and they line up with each other, and they come from people who know what they’re looking at. Plus a tradition going back thousands of years. And the people who actually fight these fires don’t really argue about it. They plan around it. When there are kites in the smoke, a firebreak isn’t a sure thing anymore. Whatever the scientists eventually decide, the firefighters already treat it as real.

Next time you see a hawk circling some far-off smoke, maybe it’s not only watching the fire.

Maybe it’s keeping it going.

The firehawk is on offense. For what animals do when they are the ones being hunted, from beetles that fire boiling chemicals to moths that jam bat sonar, see The Most Extraordinary Defense Mechanisms in the Animal Kingdom.

---

More of the world’s quiet impossibilities:
40 Hidden Wonders of the Natural World, the 1,000-kilometre cloud that pilots surf in Morning Glory, and Places That Only Exist at a Certain Time of Day.

By Moss & Fog Staff