I’m in the wonderful city of Charlotte in North Carolina, and later today I’ll present my paper updating our research into fire-spreading raptors in the Top End of the Northern Territory in Australia at the 2024 Raptor Research Foundation conference. Following are some of the highlights of my presentation.

I last presented at the RRF conference in Sacramento, California in 2015 and I was last in North Carolina to present at the Society of Ethnobiology meeting held at Cherokee, NC in 2014.

Introduction

Thank you for the invitation to attend and present at this conference of the RRF.

In 2015 I presented at the Sacramento RRF meeting. My paper was titled “Ornithogenic Fire: Raptors as Propagators of Fire in the Australian Savanna.”

In 2017 we documented preliminary research—building on earlier research—and findings on intentional fire-spreading behaviour by several Australian raptors.

Earlier research

That paper, “Intentional Fire-spreading by ‘Fire Hawk’ Raptors in Northern Australia” was published in the December 2017 edition of the Journal of Ethnobiology.

In that paper we briefly noted the centrality of Australian Aboriginal knowledge of this fire-spreading behaviour and identified that knowledge as a future research priority.

Our paper generated a lot of media attention and online discussion, including among avian behavioural specialists, evolutionary biologists and fire ecologists and received a stack of online hits and new subscriptions for the Journal of Ethnobiology.

One colleague at the Society of Ethnobiology told me in an email: “You have shaken the fire ecology and other disciplinary worlds with your unexpected findings about a remarkable phenomenon.”

And yes, we did have a quiet drink or three …

Current research

Following on from that work, we have concentrated on two primary research tasks:

  • reviewing interviews conducted between 2009 and 2017, and conducting further interviews with Aboriginal landowners, knowledge holders and land managers to date;
  • examining the important roles that Garrkan—the Brown Falcon, Falco berigora ­– plays as a landscape-scale land manager through the manipulation of wildfires;
  • Garrkan as a cultural actor in traditional ceremonies and in Australian Aboriginal cultural practices and beliefs and;
  • perhaps most importantly in a practical sense, as a ‘troublemaker for fire’.

We will also examine:

  • the relevance of ethnogeography and our collaborators – who they are and where they live in the Top End of the NT;
  • fire & landscape histories of the NT’s savannah woodlands;
  • the history of human settlement – non-Aboriginal from around the 1870s and Aboriginal +/- 60k years; and
  • anthropological, linguistic and other research relevant to this project.

Garrkan in ceremony, culture and tradition

  • Classification of information as ‘outside’ (public, secular) and ‘inside’ (secret/sacred/restricted); and
  • Earlier research on Lorrkon, Yabadurrwa and the Gunapipi ceremonies.

Anthropologist and linguist Murray Garde has – among many other matters – done extensive work on the Lorrkon ceremony (third stage burial ceremony) each language group that performs the Lorrkon ceremony in Arnhem Land has its own key emblems/motifs that feature in the song series and sometimes in the paintings on the coffin hollow-log itself;

The most spectacular part of the Lorrkon ceremony relates to the segment that celebrates karrkanj, the fire hawk. This ritual is performed on the last night that the Lorrkon remains in the public camp. The performing fire hawk men take the hollow log away, together with the soul of the deceased and carry it off to the men’s secret camp where the ceremony continues out of the view of women and children.

Karrkanj, “the brown falcon,” is a special bird in the Top End and when in human form in the period of creation, he was skilled at burning the country.

Bininj (the self-descriptor of Aboriginal people in western Arnhem land country) say that Karrkanj will not only find food amongst the fleeing insects and small animals flushed out by a fire, but that bird will also grab burning embers from the ground and fly away with them to other areas of unburnt bush where they are dropped into the grass in order to spread the fire.

This characteristic of Brown Falcons in celebrated in the Lorrkon ceremony.

From: Memories of a Lorrkon Ceremony at Maningrida, by Murray Garde, a chapter in the exhibition catalogue “The Inside World: Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Memorial Poles”. Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV (2019).

Mechanics of Fire-spreading

  • before (conditions of landscape, birds, fauna);
  • during – pyric-carnivory and fire-spreading – also fire-following bird guilds;
  • after – what happens at the fireground short-and long-term – the temporal manifestations of changes in the fire-ground;
  • Indigenous knowledge and law are always front and centre;
  • Other issues: Motives – why does Garrkan do this? Altruism? Functions: the possible role of Garrkan as a landscape-scale fire manager of country.

Conclusion & what’s next …

  • Contextualising this behaviour may – but as yet undocumented – occur with similar spp. in savanna and similar landscapes across the globe.
  • The relevance/impacts of this behaviour to ornithological research and conservation and land management.
  • Plenty of further options for research

Further reading

“Intentional Fire-spreading by ‘Fire Hawk’ Raptors in Northern Australia” Journal of Ethnobiology, 37(4):700-718 (2017). https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-37.4.700
“Memories of a Lorrkon Ceremony at Maningrida,” by Murray Garde, a chapter in the exhibition catalogue “The Inside World: Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Memorial Poles”. Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV (2019)
Look for the “ethnoornithology” tag here at The Northern Myth for further reading on this and related topics.
You can find out more about the wonderful work that the Raptor Research Foundation does at their website here and the Journal of Raptor Research here.