The black kite is one of the birds thought to spread fire in Australia.

Australia is no stranger to fire: The hardy landscape is adapted to blazes, enduring many thanks to humans and lightning. But Australia’s Aboriginal peoples have long identified a third cause: birds.

In interviews, observations, and ceremonies dating back more than a century, the indigenous peoples of Australia's Northern Territory maintain that a collective group of birds they call “firehawks” can control fire by carrying burning sticks to new locations in their beaks or talons.


















The idea is that these birds of prey use fires to help find food—making












The black kite is one of the birds thought to spread fire in Australia.




The anecdotes, compiled in a recent study published in the Journal of Ethnobiology, may lead some to rethink how fires spread through tropical savannas like those in northern Australia.

"We're not discovering anything," cautions co-author Mark Bonta, a National Geographic grantee and geographer at Penn State University. "Most of the data that we've worked with is collaborative with Aboriginal peoples... They've known this for probably 40,000 years or more."
Feeding Frenzy

For decades, people in northern Australia have considered firehawks—the black kite (Milvus migrans), whistling kite (Haliastur sphenurus), and the brown falcon (Falco berigora)—part of the natural order. (Learn more about National Geographic's Year of the Bird.)

According to co-author Bob Gosford, an Australian indigenous-rights lawyer and ornithologist, these birds of prey thrive in wildfires, soaring and perching near the fire fronts that rage in Australia’s tropical savannas.
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“Black kites and brown falcons come to these fronts because it is just literally a killing frenzy,” he said in a 2016 interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “It's a feeding frenzy, because out of these grasslands come small birds, lizards, insects, everything fleeing the front of the fire."

Each year, up to 75 percent of Earth’s tropical savannas burn—accounting for about half of the biomass that burns each year worldwide, according to one 2015 review.


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