"if the Australian animals didn't poison you or eat you, they might set fire to your whole family."
Last year, such a simple Twitter caused Internet users around the world to forward frantically.
Don't think it's a fictional joke, it really says a new scientific discovery:
Wild birds living in Australia are evil arsonists.
Unlike other animal arson cases, their arson is most likely premeditated and organized.
In 1980, a mine in northern Australia suddenly caught fire.
Fireman Dick Uson and his buddies rushed to the scene to put out the fire.
They have long been surprised by the situation.
Because Australia, with its vast forests, is too prone to fire.
According to statistics, Australia's 1.89 million square kilometers of grassland, nearly 18% are burned each year.
In a sense, however, jungle fires are an important part of Australia's ecology.
The fire can crack the seeds of the plant, so that it can take root and sprout.
It can be said that the local flora can rely on it for reproduction.
For thousands of years, the fires have opened up new lands for indigenous people living there.
Only with the increase in population, the expansion of human places of residence, the fire is also increasing.
The jungle fire, once a natural phenomenon, has an increasingly serious impact on human life.
Therefore, Australia's government more attention to and prevention of the phenomenon of jungle fires.
And in the face of sudden wildfires, the most effective way is:
First, clean the surrounding combustibles, open a strip of isolation, and wait for the flame to go out naturally.
The job was a bit of a ride for Dick Yucson.
The work of this fire, however, has an unexpected condition.
When they opened up the isolation belt, they left Dick waiting for the fire to go out.
In theory, when all the combustible material is exhausted and extinguished, it is done.
Never thought, not so long apart, there was a new point of fire looming in the place not far from each other.
Dick quickly picked up the binoculars in his hand and then carefully identified the situation.
As a result, his attention was sucked away by a screeching kite 20 meters away in the air.
He saw clearly that the Raptor's claws were grabbing a smoky branch.
Then, as soon as it skillfully dropped the branch, it spread its wings and flew high.
Where there had been no fire, a new fire began to light up.
Dick immediately called in his companion and began to repeat the action of putting out the fire.
Later, according to Dick's recollection, that day the roaring chestnut kite lit a total of seven fires.
By September 2012, Dick had witnessed another similar incident.
This time, however, the arsonist was a black kite, the eagle we used to call it.
Both kites and black kites belong to medium Raptors and are often distributed in Australia.
Arson-like arson also occurs in the peregrine falcon.
So is there a last resort to arson by these raptors?
In fact, animal arson is not uncommon in nature.
We know that moth fire fighting is an objective entomological phenomenon.
Although the probability is low, but its instinct is also one of the causes of the fire.
The burning state of moths after flaming is like a source of ignition.
Fire can be triggered by exposure to certain flammable substances within a short period of time.
Another example is a fire at a power station northeast of Cape Town, South Africa.
The reason is that an old baboon touched the electricity as he climbed the wire.
It then caught fire and fell into the jungle, triggering a mountain fire.
It did so for a heartbreaking reason to rescue the baboons trapped in the power station.
Other things like pets, poultry biting wires, or turning over candles, heating lamps, etc., can cause fires.
From this we can see that the vast majority of animal arson behavior is unintentional.
However, ornithologist Bob Gosford (Bob Gosford) found that the Australian raptor's arson was intentional.
From 2011 to 2017, he did six years of field interviews and ethnographic studies.
During this period, he recorded more than 20 reports of raptor arson sightings and concluded.
Its essay, published in the Journal of Ethnobiology (Journal of Ethnobiology), immediately caused a stir in the scientific community.
At least three species of common Australian raptors are arson: the black kite (Milvus migrans), the chestnut kite, the (Haliastur sphenurus), (Falco berigora)., the brown falcon.
Yeah, you heard me right. A lot of Australian birds do that.
Even more surprising, these raptors are not alone, but in groups.
And the reason they do this is probably just for food.
It is well known that all kinds of animals live in Australia's vast jungle.
When the forest fires started, many locusts, frogs, mice and lizards fled in haste.
However, they often end up facing a "barbecue".
But the birds who live here are much more fortunate, and as soon as there is a fire, they fly to the sky to save themselves.
After the fire, the raptors smelled the smell of barbecue.
Take the black kite, for example, when the dispersed smell of meat attracted the hawks of Shili Baxiang.
They chirped over the fire, perhaps arguing about how to split the roast meat.
There are more and more birds to eat, and hawks, who don't catch fire in their own territory, fly to the open-air barbecue party.
After all, no one will miss the opportunity to eat a free meal.
With a wingspan of nearly 1.5 meters and a weight of 1: 2 jin, it is difficult to catch too much prey.
If it's just hunting small animals, or grabbing a burning branch, it's completely within reach.
Maybe it was an occasional day, and the little animals that were cooked under their eyes were not enough to split up.
A brave eagle moved and grabbed a burning branch and flew away.
The eagle flew over the forest beside it and loosened its grip on the branch.
Mars ignited a small, equally dry grass, and the fire was imminent.
In this way, the other jungle caught fire, the greater the fire, the more food they received from the fire.
One might question that such a situation might have been speculated by researchers.
They learned with local firefighters, the aborigines, that many of them had seen it.
In the local indigenous communities, they call these birds as "Fire Hawk".
And a sacred ritual, called the Yabadurrwa, process, imitates these "fire eagles," where one moves a burning branch to another.
The native Australians once believed that humans learned to use fire from the Hawk of Fire.
In the past, the raptor's behavior has been interpreted by scientists as panicking:
They were frightened by the fire, or grabbed the wrong thing and threw it away quickly.
But Gosford thinks this is definitely a deliberate arson.
Because they usually don't hit fire until it encounters obstacles that can't be crossed.
It's like they don't want the flame to go out and try to spread it.
For example, an aboriginal once saw a fire on the edge of a stream, which would have become a natural fire line.
But one peregrine falcon first collected the fire on the burning shore and then threw it on the other side of the stream, causing the flame to burn more land.
Eyewitness reports say: these "fire hawks" will not only take the burning branches, but will also bring their own branches into the fire, and wait for the fire to pick up;
They even steal fire from human cooking fires.
One of the aborigines interviewed said angrily, "when you make a fire, the fire hawk comes out of nowhere!"
Of course, many people are skeptical of the study.
Steve Debbs (Steve Debus) says the current evidence suggests that raptors do set fire, but it's not enough to prove "deliberate."
Interestingly, arson seems to be the sole secret of Australia's raptors.
In addition to Australia, researchers also collected information on fires in West Africa, Papua New Guinea, Brazil and the southern United States.
It turns out that no raptor has mastered this skill in these places.
And this research, also conducive to Australia's fire management plan.
This may help reduce some loss of life and property.
As we all know, drilling wood for fire is an important milestone in human progress.
These birds can't make their own fire, but how smart it would be to use it for a good meal.
Perhaps never underestimate what you think you know.