Apologies for the scrubbed message below, the list server is still playing up.
Here's the message Frank posted:
Laurie Knight wrote:
> If indigenous burning practices was detrimental to spinifex
dependent species
> such as grasswrens, those species would have gone extinct thousands
of years
> ago.
> Comparing indigenous burning with broad scale burning is like
comparing
> traditional slash and burn agriculture in PNG with clear felling.
Exactly. So what is happening is nothing to do with indigenous
burning practices. Kakadu is burnt year after year after year after
year .......... Much of the Kimberley and Mitchell Plateau is the
same. It is not patchwork. There are large areas that no
longer have any mature spinifex.
As the article highlighted by Stephen Ambrose says, burning old growth
mallee (especially that with spinifex) is disastrous. Old growth
mallee is old growth because it hasn't been burnt in a long time.
They are burning the habitat to protect the habitat, but they are
destroying what they are trying to protect. Or else they don't know
what they are doing .....
Areas such as the Gibson Desert are trying to be burnt in the traditional
way, but even there the areas of old growth spinifex are getting less and
less. Even the mulga in the area is suffering. Much of the
mulga in WA is old growth, probably dating back to the 1950s and
myxomatosis (spelling?). I seldom see new growth of mulga. If
the rabbits didn't destroy it, then the goats have. Then fire (not
controlled burns) wipes out the old growth, but fortunately much of the
mulga is sparse enough (and doesn't have a spinifex understorey) and so
fires don't seem to be extensive.
Broad scaled burning (thankfully they have dropped the pretence of the
totally inappropriate terminology of controlled burns) really gets me
angry. Most of it has nothing to do with saving lives. And in
fire storms such as Victoria, it makes little difference as the fire goes
through the tree tops and sparks start up a kilometre or more ahead of
the fire front.
I don't have a problem with small areas of patchwork burning to create a
genuine mosaic. It is just that I have seen very little evidence of
this in WA.
_________________________________________________________________
Frank
O'Connor
Birding WA http://birdingwa.iinet.net.au<br>
Phone : (08) 93865694
Email :
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Birding-Aus
> On Behalf Of
> Frank O'Connor
> Sent: Tuesday, 12 August 2014 11:42 PM
> To:
> Subject: [Birding-Aus] A study of the conservation benefits
> of indigenous Australian land management practices
>
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