In a sunburnt country, Australian birds have always known the menace of fire and over the eons have devised strategies to deal with conflagration.
This fire season, however, they have been overwhelmed. More than a million birds are estimated to have died in the infernos spreading through Australia’s southern and south-eastern states since early spring. At least 60 species have been seriously affected by the fires, some of the rarer ones being pushed towards extinction.
Endangered birds include the regent honeyeater of Victoria and New South Wales, eastern bristlebirds of south-east Queensland and northern NSW, glossy black cockatoos on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island and the western ground parrot of Western Australia.
Understandably, early news coverage of the fires concentrated on the human toll and property lost, and then livestock and wild animals.
Only recently has the focus turned to birds. Our feathered friends have been ignored in part because of the belief, partly true, that highly mobile birds with the power of flight can escape fires.
Although birds can usually cope with fire, in past times they were only at risk if bushfires struck in the breeding season when young were in the nest. Even then, after the fire had passed, birds could start a delayed breeding attempt.
The scale of this spring and summer’s fires have made this largely impossible. Vast areas of both forest and farmland have been burned out and with it the food resources that dislocated birds need to survive.
As the impact of the fires becomes known, Birdlife Australia is calling for donations from its 10,000-strong member base to draw up a Fire Emergency Action Plan to survey bird populations in fire-ravaged areas. This will not only assess numbers of birds that have survived but set out new ways to protect birds from future fire events.
One option is to create bird-friendly habitat by planting native vegetation which would keep moisture in the soil and make land less fire prone. Another is to conduct bird-safe burns. Birdlife Australia plans to work with landowners and councils to reduce fuel loads, while keeping birds and their food sources safe at the same time.
The strategy also calls for a fire emergency team: this would check for birds as soon as it was safe to enter devasted areas after a fire.
Although Tasmania has largely escaped the fires, bird-watchers in the state are watching for a build-up of numbers of duck species which in recent years have flown south to escape not so much fires, but drought.
The fire season might not have impacted my turf in Tasmania as it has other parts of the country – at least, not yet – but in spring I was given a taste of what was to come. I was on the Sunshine Coast when the early bushfires struck there and a bird-watching holiday had to be cut short because I couldn’t reach areas where I wanted to track down tropical wet-forest species, the mysterious eastern whipbird among them.