Thanks for this link John, and thanks to Bob Gosford indirectly for
leading me to another media story about fire, birds and conservation:
Bob's blog on Greg Combet's interest in birds holds a link to this 7.30
Report story
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2004/s1229316.htm
Here's an interesting quotation from the programme transcript that touches
on matters to do with fires and birds:
"MURRAY MCLAUGHLIN: Scientists are realising that large-scale hot burning
for grass renewal in the Top End may benefit pastoralists, but it
debilitates the habitats of native fauna.
To preserve the Gouldian finch and its habitat, Parks and Wildlife are
trying to mimic the old practices of indigenous land use.
JOHN WOINARSKI: Aboriginal people burnt small patches, very small-scale
fires, and the Gouldian finches - obviously that was a regime which was
pretty good for them, it gave them a year-to-year supply of food."
I recommend anyone interested having a read of Bob's blog too btw:
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2008/10/11/a-birder-in-the-gilded-cage-of-politics/
cheers
Craig Williams
> There was a thread recently on fire in the Australian landscape.
>
> Here's an interesting paper on Aboriginal use of fire in the Western
> Desert
>
> http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/09/19/0804757105.full.pdf+html
>
> Abstract:
>
> Aboriginal burning in Australia has long been assumed to be a
> "resource management" strategy, but no quantitative tests of this
> hypothesis have ever been conducted. We combine ethnographic
> observations of contemporary Aboriginal hunting and burning with
> satellite image analysis of anthropogenic and natural landscape
> structure to demonstrate the processes through which Aboriginal
> burning shapes arid-zone vegetational diversity. Anthropogenic
> landscapes contain a greater diversity of successional stages than
> landscapes under a lightning fire regime, and differences are of
> scale, not of kind. Landscape scale is directly linked to foraging for
> small, burrowed prey (monitor lizards), which is a specialty of
> Aboriginal women. The maintenance of small-scale habitat mosaics
> increases small-animal hunting productivity. These results have
> implications for understanding the unique biodiversity of the
> Australian continent, through time and space. In particular,
> anthropogenic influences on the habitat structure of paleolandscapes
> are likely to be spatially localized and linked to less mobile,
> "broad-spectrum" foraging economies.
>
>
> --
> John Leonard
> Canberra
> Australia
> www.jleonard.net
> ===============================
> www.birding-aus.org
> birding-aus.blogspot.com
>
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