Bushfires have been burning out of control on Kangaroo Island, off the southern coast of Australia, not far from the city of Adelaide. The island is known for its wildlife in particular its very large population of koalas.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image on December 12, 2007. Red outlines mark areas where the satellite sensor detected scorching conditions associated with wildfires.
The bushfires in Flinders Chase National Park had burnt 11,000 hectares (about 27,000 acres) on December 12, and fires the previous week more than 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) of the island.
So, how many koalas have been burnt so far?
The image and information on the fires was sourced from the NASA Earth Observatory newsletter: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17860
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
“So, how many koalas have been burnt so far?”
What a horrible thought!
koalas are a bit like pandas, due to their low energy diet they spend a lot of time eating and digesting, thinking is not high on the agenda. When a fire comes along they tend to climb up a tree to avoid the flames which is OK if the fire is not very hot.
“A wildlife sanctuary on Kangaroo Island, near Flinders Chase national park, says it has taken in thousands of native birds and animals escaping the island’s bushfires”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/12/11/2115769.htm
Once again, we have the environmental outcomes that the green movement deserves. They have exercised monopoly control of public sector forests for more than a decade and the incidence of such events was entirely foreseeable.
More importantly, the reasonable and practical steps that are known to reduce the scale and intensity of environmental harm have not only been ignored but actively discouraged.
So much for both environmental and professional duty of care.
But is it the environment the wildlife deserve?
So-called environmentalists have opposed controlled burning of the underbrush in U.S. forests for years, which ultimately results in more and larger uncontrolled forest fires and deaths of humans and animals. The same bunch of protesters also oppose thinning of the deer population by hunters, so the animals starve or get run over. With friends like the environmentalists, nature doesn’t need any enemies.
If koalas get cooked in the fires, how do they taste?
With friends like the environmentalists, nature doesn’t need any enemies.
If koalas get cooked in the fires, how do they taste? – Woody
What an interesting couple of sentences.
Hi Jennifer
I’m know as ‘Jennifer’ at this blog, can you call yourself Jennifer B or something like that?
Woody,
I don’t know which part of the US you inhabit, but you have some excellent fire scientists, historians, and ecologists. People like Professor Steve Pyne, Prof Richard Minnich, and Dr Gerry Williams. The Tall Timbers conferences have been held at Tallahassee for donkey’s years. My understanding is that some environmentalists (perhaps Sierra Club?) favour a return to ‘pre-Columbian’ burning, i.e. mild, fine scale mosaics, due to frequent ignitions. Is this so?
Unfortunately many of our Australian urban and academic ‘environmentalists’ live in a dream world, possibly inspired by Walt Disney’s ‘Bambi’. They deny the presence of lightning and Aborigines. So, as Ian Mott says, many animals are being killed by unnecessary fierce fires, due to over zealous whitefella attempts at fire prevention and suppression.
However, I do sense a shift of opinion in Australian ‘environmentalist’ screeds. Some now talk about mosaic burning as if they had invented it. They have started using eco-drivel terms like ‘edaphic burning’. I think the sequence is:
1. Mosaic burning is nonsense.
2. Well, there might be some truth in it …
3. It is true, but we will call it ‘edaphic burning’.
4. We thought of it.
Sorry, I ignored Rog’s contribution.
Koalas are not native to Kangaroo Island. They were introduced in the 1920s, and over the decades have become severely overpopulated, causing damage to the forests there.
Maybe their natural absence from the island was a sign of the effects of earlier fires.
Good point Braddles. Some islands were under a regime of only occasional, fierce fires. Perhaps the current fire is correct for Kangaroo Island. Any idea on how the plant and animal species richness there compares with the adjacent mainland?
Another problem for public sector forest management is the fact that mosaic burns are best done in late afternoon and into the evening. And that means overtime and shift allowances and furthur pressure on budgets.
The irony is that yeaterday I was given a quote on ironbark posts (200mmx200mm boxed heart) that was just under $3,000m3. So any time our green forest ideological monopolists feel the need to reconcile their environmental obligations with their available resources they can always conduct a partial harvest, of trees that are about to decay anyway, and return to adequate funding.
And pigs might fly.
Make no mistake, things will need to get a whole lot worse before these people find that web site that downloads common sense.
In the mean time it is Kentucky Fried Koala.
Two comments:
1. A similar disaster occurred last summer in the Poroongoup National Park in WA. This is (or was) a notable outlier of karri forest, and once a scenic gem. No fuel reduction burning had been carried out in the area for decades, so that when it burnt, the fire was burning in massive fuels (>50 tonnes per ha of combustable material)and suppression was impossible. Today this once-beautiful forest is a mass of dead trees. Some of it may regenerate, depending upon whether seed was available, but if not the Department will need to undertake a massive replanting operation, or lose this karri forest. I have not heard that this is going to be done. I regard the devastation of the Porongorups karri forest as a tragic example of failed land management, for which (to the best of my knowledge) no-one has been held accountable.
2. I was on Kangaroo Island two years ago. I saw extremely heavy fuels wherever I went in the National Park and on private property. When I asked a landowner why he did not do some fuel reduction burning, he replied that under South Australian legislation, prescribed burning was classified as “clearing” and could only be conducted with a permit from the Parks and Wildlife agency, and these permits were almost impossible to obtain on KI because of the abundance of possums, wallabies and koalas, which the officers considered would be threatened by prescribed burning. I was not able to verify this, but if it is true, then the SA government must surely be considered to be fully accountable for the wildlife losses associated with the recent high intensity fires.
The other tragic sight on KI were the roads, especially those within the National Park at the western end of the island. These were littered with the corpses of possums and wallabies, mown down in their prime by park visitors, a rate of annual attrition likely to greatly exceed that from mild patchy burning every 5-7 years.
Roger Underwood
The current level of habitat destruction by Green envirocide has never been matched in character, scale or intensity by any of the agricultural clearing that took place over the previous two centuries. That clearing was limited to small patches each year on each property and dispersed over many landholdings. It gave wildlife a chance to relocate and adapt. And it was also associated with replacement by crops and orchards which maintained food sources for many displaced species.
This green envirocide takes place in a fraction of the time, in an intense concentration but involves a very large area. And more importantly, now involves repeat destruction as subsequent unmanaged regeneration goes up in a few years hence.
The poverty of green environmental output is commensurate with the poverty of their intellectual inputs. They are lowest green denominator ecology. And exactly what they deserve.
Roger,
About ten years ago (1990s) I visited the Porongorups NP, and found it difficult to walk in some places, due to knee high sticks, leaves, bark etc. Few wildflowers were visible. I mentioned this to the ranger. He agreed that burning was needed, but said he was unaware of any plans to do so.
I have not been there since the fire. If the damage is as severe as you say, then surely there should be a public inquiry? One witness might be the Director of National Parks. Others might be some CALM/DEC scientists, who may have advised against prescribed burning. How do we initiate such an inquiry? Letter to the Minister for Environment? Isn’t the Attorney General, Mr Jim McGinty, currently interested in making the law clearer on the destruction of native vegetation by fire? How about destruction by attempted long fire exclusion?
Don’t hold your breath for that one to get up at an exclusively Labor COAG.
The easiest way to get rid of a forest the community doesn’t deserve is to resign from the Bushfire Brigade, take holidays in mid-summer, keep your fire pump in 8 pieces (with one missing), spend the money that was for maintaining the fire breaks on a widescreen TV, don’t thin your forest, don’t control your weeds and get rid of the cattle. In short, all the things that the green voting “prickle farmers” do right now.
Their preferences changed the government, they must be right, mustn’t they?
I know. How about a noisy demonstration in the Porongorups, with placards, drums, and megaphones. Old foresters could chain themselves to dead karri trees, and we could set old cars in concrete along the tracks. “Waddawewan – prescribed burning – wennawewannit – neeow.” Invite a few doctors and dressmakers. I’ll bring my bong. Make the old foresters nude, with green hair – that will achieve ‘media breakthrough’. Where the media go, politicians will follow.
Green Davey Gam Esq – there are a couple of clues as to ‘the natural absence of Koalas on Kangaroo ISLAND’ Koalas have been known to swim very short distances if absolutely necessary but as a rule do not swim and Kangaroo ISLAND is a 45 minute ferry ride from the mainland – about 18 kms at a guess!