Timothy Birdnow

Firebombing is nothing new.

Some raptors have learned to weaponize fire, stealing burning sticks from forest or even camp fires and dropping them on habitats to flush out prey.

According to Live Science: " Grassland fires that are deadly and devastating events for many kinds of wildlife are a boon to certain types of birds known as fire foragers. These opportunists prey on animals fleeing from a blaze, or scavenge the remains of creatures that succumbed to the flames and the smoke.

But in Australia, some fire-foraging birds are also fire starters.

Three species of raptors — predatory birds with sharp beaks and talons, and keen eyesight — are widely known not only for lurking on the fringes of fires but also for snatching up smoldering grasses or branches and using them to kindle fresh flames, to smoke out mammal and insect prey"

[...]

" "When a fire burns into a creek line and burns out, brown falcons have also been observed collecting fire brands and dropping them on the other unburnt side of the creek in order to continue the fire," according to a collection of Aboriginal accounts published in 2009, the study authors wrote.
Jump into the fire

The researchers also conducted interviews with non-Aboriginal sources and scoured prior studies for stories of the fire-seeking birds. Two of the researchers also contributed their own observations gleaned from decades of fieldwork and encounters with bushfires in the Australian grasslands.

From their reports, a behavioral pattern emerged: Firehawks (also described as kitehawks, chickenhawks and, on several occasions by non-Aboriginals, s---hawks) purposely swiped burning sticks or grasses from smoldering vegetation — or even from human cooking fires — and then made off with the brands and dropped them into unburned areas to set them alight, presumably to drive out more prey."

End excerpt.

Soooo.

Animals, unlike the Disney vision of the environmentalists, do in fact make war on other animals, and cause environmental destruction in the process. How many careless campers have been billed millions of dollars for starting wild fires in national parks? Quite a few, and yet were they really to blame? At least in Australia it appears not necessarily.

I wonder if this happens in other places.

One of the primary arguments made by the environmentalists is that Man is somehow "unnatural" and therefore evil. They argue that no species make war save us, that no species fundamentally alter their environments save us, that no species hurts the Earth save Man. It's all hogwash; we simply utilize what God has given us to better our conditions, just as most animals do. The difference is that we are much, much more clever than even the brightest animals, and so are more effective at changing conditions in our favor. But we still have an animal nature, and the warfare and environmental desecration are simply an expression of what animals do all the time. We are just better at it.

And how can one dispute the word of australian Aborigines? They are simple folk, at one with the Earth, after all!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:14 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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