Australia's firebirds: The raptors that spread wildfires to hunt

For millennia, Aboriginal peoples of northern Australia preserved accounts of raptors manipulating fire. In 2017, formal research published in the Journal of Ethnobiology documented and confirmed what many considered a myth: several bird species deliberately spread wildfires.

The protagonists of this unusual behavior are known collectively as "firehawks": the black kite (Milvus migrans), the whistling kite (Haliastur sphenurus), and the brown falcon (Falco berigora). When a natural fire is halted by a firebreak or river, these birds pick up smoking sticks and burning embers with their beaks or talons, fly hundreds of meters toward unburned dry grasslands, and deliberately drop them to ignite new blazes.

The purpose of this pyromaniacal tactic is purely predatory: the sudden advance of the fire flushes out thousands of rodents, lizards, amphibians, and insects fleeing in panic from dense vegetation. At that moment, raptors gather by the dozens along the new fire front to easily catch their victims in the open.

This coordinated behavior challenges longstanding biological assumptions, showing that humans are not the only living beings on the planet capable of actively using and spreading fire as an ecological tool.