Colleagues,

I am a member of a small group working on particular behaviours of fire-spreading and fire-following birds, particularly in the savanna biomes (and including the central and southern American campo and cerrado and the South African bushveld) and, while our work to date has concentrated on the north Australian savanna woodlands, we are very interested in reports of similar behaviour from other parts of the world.

You can read the abstract of our paper, Intentional Fire-Spreading by “Firehawk” Raptors in Northern Australia that was published in the Journal of Ethnobiology in December 2017 here. I can send a full copy of the paper if you send me an email to the address below.

Thus far we have reports of fire-foraging (which we consider closely related to fire-spreading) from West Africa, East Africa, Papua New Guinea, Florida, Oklahoma and Texas, USA, Panama, and Brazil. 

Most recently we have located a report from Zimbabwe of a Fork-tailed Drongo exhibiting similar behaviour to that we report from northern Australia - the Drongo "picked up a burning twig and dropped it further afield where there was no fire" and subsequently feasted on the insects fleeing the second fire.

We are looking to spread our research efforts in 2019 to other savanna and savanna-like biomes across the world and would be most grateful of any direct observations - or links to other fire-following or fire-spreading reports - of this behaviour.

I can be contacted by reply post here or by email at birdknowledge@gmail.com, at Twitter at @bgosford or by snail-mail at my address below.

Thanks in advance for any information passed on.

Kind regards and good birding!!

Bob Gosford

Post Office Box 494

Alice Springs,

Northern Territory 0870

Australia

E: birdknowledge@gmail.com