On fire, feathers and rainforest: more on Queensland's bushfire emergency

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