Electrocuted birds are sparking wildfires
By Richard Kemeny, Science Magazine.
Excerpt: In 2014, a wildfire ripped through central Chile, destroying 2500 homes and killing at least 13 people. A year later, a blaze in Idaho burned more than 4000 hectares, an area nearly 12 times the size of New York City’s Central Park. Both conflagrations had one thing in common: Experts believe they were started by birds. Our feathered friends love to perch on power lines, .... But if a bird touches the wrong wires together, or somehow forms an electrical pathway to the ground, it can get fried. Falling to the floor like winged Molotov cocktails, birds can spark an inferno if they hit an especially dry, tindered patch of earth. More than three dozen fires started this way in the United States from 2014 to 2018, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of such blazes. ...Humans are responsible for the vast majority of wildfires in the United States. ...The researchers found 44 reports of avian-induced wildfires, they report this month in the Wildlife Society Bulletin. Twelve (the densest cluster of fires) occurred in an ecological region that stretches from southern Oregon through California to northern Mexico, bounded by the Pacific Ocean and the Sierra Nevada mountains. This area...has a warm Mediterranean-style climate...with mild, wet winters fed by the ocean, followed by hot, dry summers. It is also prone to severe droughts. This combination creates large amounts of vegetation in the winter that quickly dries out to become potential fuel. “That’s why we see a lot of fires going to the catastrophic level,” Barnes says. The region is also densely populated, which may make unwanted urban-wildlife interactions, such as electrocuted large raptors (hawks, eagles, and owls) more likely. ...The wildfires reported in the study were generally small: Most of them burned about 1.2 hectares, a touch over two U.S. football fields. Yet there is a clear potential for large-scale devastation, as the Idaho and Chile fires show.…