Holy crap. Firebirds as in, birds carrying and using fire.
This is fairly incredible, but I’m guessing that it’s true. I’m trying to wrap my head around it now. I’m not sure the implications have fully sunk in for anyone yet.
Australian raptors start fires to flush out prey
The gist of the article is that they claim to have confirmed something fairly common in Aboriginal lore, that some “birds of prey” in Australia take burning twigs from an active fire to another site, attempting and sometimes succeeding in spreading the fire to a new location in order to flush out rodents and other prey. In that regard at least the title is misleading, they don’t so much “start” fires as spread them to areas they would not otherwise have reached.
So, no, the bids have not learned how to create fire. This is still pretty incredible, though. It raises a whole slew of questions.
Assuming this is true (and that fire-breathing dragons are not), this is the first instance known of any animal other than man using fire. They are using fire as a tool.
Honestly, I would have guessed that this is about as likely as starfish making musical fiddles out of shells to serenade each other under the water.
This is at least pretty impressively complex behavior, and seems to imply some sort of understanding, on some level, of a rather long chain of cause-and-effect.
The similarity to our current understanding of how our own species learned to control and create fire should not be missed. We know that Chimpanzees in the wild exploit fire in much the same way as these birds do, and that’s likely an indicator as to the progression of the use of fire by our own prehistoric ancestors, first exploiting the effects of naturally-occurring fires, then slowly learning to transport it relatively short distances, then sustain it, and eventually learning to create it on demand… but chimpanzees do not transport fire, and our best current current guesses are that our ancestors didn’t achieve this level of control of fire until maybe two million years ago at the earliest, and possibly much, much later. There is much uncertainty about the timing because the general feeling is that soils are capable of eliminating the remains of small fires entirely over the course of a few hundred thousand, or a million years or so. That theory is, obviously, difficult to test.
Point is, these birds have achieved a level of control of fire that our own line didn’t until we’d been walking upright and using stone tools for a very long time.
The first question that springs to mind (in no order that I’m consciously aware of) is, is this limited to Australia? How sure are we? How sure can we be? Is there a possibility that we’ve just uncovered one possible mechanism for the weird, unpredictable and almost malevolent behavior that has long been reported by some of those who’s job it is to fight wildfires, “smoke jumpers” and the like, behavior that often costs their lives? Consider for a moment, how do you approach such a fire? From upwind, of course, with some assurance that there’s no mechanism for the fire to travel upwind.
What if, as now seems suddenly possible, the wildlife itself is carrying the fire further upwind than your own position? Are we just beginning to appreciate how dangerous the job can be?
If, on the other hand, this is limited to Australia, why is it? Is there something very special about these Australian black kites (it seems as though the other birds may be imitating the kites) that lets them know how to control fire, something never witnessed before in the entire animal kingdom? Or, if the other birds are not just imitating the Black Kites, does that mean that there’s something special about the place that lets birds evolve knowing how to do this?
Second, how do these birds know to do this at all? It’s a fairly long chain of cause-and-effect, “if this then that” that they are exploiting. The article seems to imply that that each generation discovers it anew, but that also raises more questions. That seems unlikely, but it’s also a stretch to believe that one generation of birds is teaching another. If it’s not either of those, then it must be “instinct”, but that’s just a label, not an explanation. We really know of no explanation for instinct, since everything we understand about genetics so far relates to physical characteristics, not things learned from the environment. Still, such a mechanism must exist, because instincts exist, species-wide complex environment-specific behaviors exist, and if this information, this learning is not passed along in the genes, then where is it? If genes cannot be modified by experience, as science keeps insisting, then what that can be passed to subsequent generations is?
If this phenomenon is true, then I think what we have here is the tip of an iceberg of things we know very little about. I certainly hope that civilization doesn’t decide to just ignore it, as it often seems to do with information that doesn’t fit accepted theory.
Is it possible that birds manipulating fire might even be behind the Phoenix legend, which seems to have been almost universal, spanning many cultures at some time in the distant past?
If this is verified, it should just be the start. There is much to know.
– Robert the Wombat