Birds discover fire · 10:21pm Mar 8th, 2018
This post has nothing to do with ponies, unless the birds in question are phoenixes. I just thought it was cool. (Also, further evidence that everything in Australia is dangerous.)
Raptors, including the whistling kite, are intentionally spreading grass fires in northern Australia, a research paper argues.
Dick Eussen thought he had the fire beat. It was stuck on one side of a highway deep in the Australian outback. But it didn’t look set to jump. And then, suddenly, without warning or obvious cause, it did.
Eussen, a veteran firefighter in the Northern Territory, set off after the new flames. He found them, put them out, then looked up into the sky.
What he saw sounds now like something out of a fairy tale or dark myth. A whistling kite, wings spread, held a burning twig in its talons. It flew about 20 metres ahead of Eussen and dropped the ember into the brittle grass.
And the fire kicked off once again.
All told that day, Eussen put out seven new flare-ups, according toa research paperpublished recently in the Journal of Ethnobiology. All of them, he claims, were caused by the birds and their burning sticks.
What’s more, the paper argues, the birds might well have been doing it on purpose.
...
The concept of fire-foraging birds is well established. Raptors on at least four continents have been observed for decades on the edge of big flames, waiting out scurrying rodents and reptiles or picking through their barbecued remains.
What’s new, at least in the academic literature, is the idea that birds might be intentionally spreading fires themselves. If true, the finding suggests that birds, like humans, have learned to use fire as a tool and as a weapon.
Well..... fuck....
And here we all are worrying about Skynet scenarios when the real threat is already out there in the wild.
I never knew Philomena was an Aussie.
Nice, after the knife handling crow from vancouver here’s the pyromaniac raptors. Do we need more proof that birds are psychopaths?
We need to take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Sorry Australians. It's best this way. _Kindest._
And look on the bright side! We'll finally get rid of the cane toad for you.
4812772
The real threat is when nanobots augment the birds. If you thought quadcopter drones were bad...
What did you expect? Its australia.
Everything there is out to kill humans.
Yikes!
There's still some debate over whether that is actually happening, but the reports are consistent enough to warrant serious research.
Australia, where even the sheep are trying to kill you.
I knew this day would come, but I always figured it would be the dolphins coming for us. In retrospect, not suspecting the descendants of dinosaurs was a dumb move.
Damn, 4812815 got there first. It's the revenge of the dinosaurs! Think you drove us into extinction? Think again, mammals!
At least it's contained in Australia.
For now... <.<
4812824 If the new Jurassic Park movie doesn't have pterodactyls trying to light Chris Pratt on fire, I will be deeply disappointed.
So, I love you all but you're missing the big part of this paper: What’s new, at least in the academic literature,
People in Oz have known for a dog's age that birds do this. There are specific birds that are called firebirds because they do this. The only part of this that is new is that the academic community is discovering they can get papers out of this fact.
Makes me wonder whether this behavior is instinctive or learned.
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Too late - the birds are already more dangerous than the drones,
hunting down the intruders in their domain.
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Super interesting; It's been known and reported among the aboriginal communities for hundreds of years, it's just been largely disregarded because... well. Nobody listens to our aboriginal communities. But there are some tribes that included it into their own hunting practices and planned around it. The information itself isn't new to anyone, it's "just that white people believe it now", in the words of a friend of mine.
So like, yeah, there's some academic dispute on it, but it's only in academic circles. There's plenty of photos of predatory birds flying flaming sticks for miles away from their nests.
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It's apparently learned, which is my favourite part to come out about this; They're finding that the birds figure out to do it for themselves, even when having no exposure to any of the other birds that have figured this out, but that it's not an instinctual thing that the birds will just know to do. Different species have also been seen to be doing it.
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How do they establish that? Wouldn't they have to raise a bird in captivity to know it didn't see another bird do the same thing? In which case it would have no opportunity to spread fire.
That's a very good question! But it's something I've learned from conversation rather than from an article, and I didn't think to ask myself, so I don't actually know. At a guess, I'm going to say that if it happens rarely enough, you're going to find
A) Lots of birds not doing it, which would rule out just instinct and
B) The birds that do do it having lifespans shorter than there being a fire in their area. And a lot of the birds that we've observed doing it aren't social birds, like ravens and crows and parrots, that are known for communicating complex information.
Well, that's coolio.
It's time the local authorities start arresting birds for arson. If they wanna move up the evolutionary ladder then they have to be subject to the same rules. It's only fair.
I don't buy the explanation yet, aware of the limits on Nothing Exists Until Science Officially Discovers It (which often means Nothing Exists Until Science Gives You The Money To Officially Discover It, And Good Luck If Science Doesn't Think It's Credible), but it's still really interesting. And kinda terrifying. I'd like not to live in a world where a bird can set fire to my house. Pooping on my head from above is bad enough.
Also, Prometheus got chained to a rock and had his innards pecked out by birds for giving fire to mankind. What does this bird get for the same crime, eh? Nothing? That's speciesist!