 |
| Rufous Whistler: victim of Bribie Island fire: Leisl Born |
Hundreds of birds dead; fire in rainforest at Iron Range; the fate
of the Sunshine Coast ground parrots; more debate about the Gold
Coast hinterland fires. Further information here about Queensland's
bushfire emergency following publication
of
my article last week pointing out how the media falsely reported
that the Gondwana rainforests of Lamington National Park were ablaze
during the September fires. That does not assume the unseasonally
widespread and intensive bushfires are not cause for concern; far from it.
Before last month's fires, extensive areas were scorched when control
burns being conducted by Queensland National Parks and Wildlife
Service and other state government personnel in late-August broke
containment lines. It was the end of a particularly warm and dry
winter and strong winds were blowing: not the most auspicious time, it's
fair to say, for control burns to be lit. All the more so considering
that's when the nesting season for many birds gets under way.
 |
| Kangaroo fire victims on Bribie Island |
On northern Bribie Island, 2,400ha burned. The Department of
Environment and Science says the cause of this fire is under
investigation but aerial images clearly show neat lines of fire
across the island, indicating control burns. The aftermath of the
fire gives a rare insight into the direct impact of an intense
bushfire on wildlife.
About 40 Eastern Grey Kangaroos were found dead along the beach
during and after the fire. It appears some attempted to flee into the
ocean and drowned; others may have died of shock. During a stroll
along Currimundi Beach, a few kilometres north of Bribie Island on
the Sunshine Coast, local resident Leisl Born found the bodies of 43
small birds killed in the fire along 200m of beach. They included
Grey Fantail, Willie Wagtail, Rufous Whistler and White-cheeked
Honeyeater.
 |
| White-cheeked Honeyeater and other Bribie Island fire victims: Leisl Born |
The birds were carried to Currimundi by currents from Bribie
Island. Others were found further north at Port Cartwright and
elsewhere. If so many birds were found over 200m, the death toll
presumably was many hundreds. Leisl reports the victims were in
various states: “Not all were burnt; some were completely crispy,
others were singed and others looked normal… I would have missed so
many.” It seems the birds attempted to escape the fire by heading
out to sea, or injured and dead birds were carried there by strong
winds.
The control burn lines were so extensive it is likely that
wildlife was unable to head south to escape the flames, leaving the
sea as the only potential escape route. In that respect, a control
burn could conceivably have more damaging consequences for wildlife
in some circumstances than a single out-of-control bushfire.
 |
| Control burn lines on Bribie Island |
Further north at the same time, 150ha burned in Noosa and Tewantin
national parks, again evidently as a result of uncontained control
burns. Fires came close to homes, causing alarm to residents. The
area was a refuge for a remnant population of the endangered Eastern
Ground Parrot and other scarce species such as Eastern Grass Owl and
King Quail. Again, the authorities might have considered that the
start of the Ground Parrot nesting season was not a good time for
control burns.
 |
| Eastern Ground Parrot |
Three weeks later, thousands of people were evacuated and one home
was destroyed at Peregian Beach when a huge bushfire – this one
deliberately lit by teenage vandals - tore through wallum heathland
in Noosa National Park. Much of the wallum had not burned for at
least 15 years. It was a tinderbox waiting to explode. There is
little habitat left in key sites frequented by the ground parrots and
the birds may well have perished. Perhaps control burns earlier in
winter could have been conducted in past years.
 |
| Fire at Peregian Beach |
While debate whirled around the fate of Lamington National Park,
fires penetrated rainforest in Iron Range (Kutini-Payamu) National
Park on Cape York, a reserve of great significance as a biodiversity
hotspot. As with the Gondwana rainforests, the Iron Range rainforest
would not normally be at risk from fire. However, Cyclone Trevor
earlier this year caused extensive damage, opening up the canopy and
allowing fire that would not usually extend beyond surrounding
savannah woodland to burn some of the depleted rainforest.
The Department of Environment and Science says 900ha of the
53,161ha national park burned, though how much of this was rainforest
is evidently unknown. A departmental spokesperson says: “The
rainforest within the park was severely impacted by cyclone activity
and as such there is a significant amount of debris that has now
carried the fire through rainforest.”
 |
| Cyclone-damaged rainforest at Iron Range |
Ecologist Gabrielle Davidson, who runs the Iron Range Research
Station, told the ABC: "I had always known that the season was
going to be a terrible one but I had no idea that it was going to be
this bad. One of the fires I was fighting [was a] thin trickle down
the forest edge in a green patch of grass. It [has] gotten into the
forest, taken off in the forest, jumped a firebreak, come back out,
spread through a lot more grass and then taken out quite a large
amount of forest.”
As with Bribie Island, Queensland Government control burns at Iron
Range before the September fires were controversial. The research
station's founder, Keith Cook, told The Cairns Post that control
burns in July penetrated the cyclone-damaged rainforest: “It's a
ticking time bomb up there. And then (Parks and Wildlife Service)
dropped incendiaries all around and it just burned… The problem was
it went straight into the rainforest.”
 |
| Burned rainforest at Iron Range: ABC |
Meanwhile, the ABC's 7.30 Report this week ran a story on whether
the Lamington National Park rainforests had burned to any significant
degree. The program was presumably prompted by my story a few days
earlier in The Weekend Australian and relied on the same satellite
data I had access to: Griffith University PhD student Patrick Norman
estimated from this data that 400ha of subtropical rainforest burned
on the fringes of the park.
Most of the burned rainforest was dry vine scrub, not the ancient
Gondwana rainforest that was claimed to have been lost when the
historic Binna Burra Lodge was reduced to cinders. Moreover,
according to Patrick, the extent to which the vine scrub was damaged
is not clear from the satellite images. The 7.30 Report footage of
the aftermath showed low level burns on the forest floor; the Rural
Fire Service describes that kind of fire as “walking through”
this type of rainforest and says it has occurred in past bushfires.
The damage to tree crowns appears to be limited. The ABC found a
moderately sized rainforest tree that was evidently felled by the
fire, but there was no visual evidence on the program demonstrating
widespread destruction of the vine scrub.
 |
| Fire damage to Lamington National Park vine scrub: Patrick Norman |
