Everything is Burnabull

From what I understand, during the early part of the dry season the land management folks do a patchwork of controlled burning throughout the Top End, to clear out the dead grass and prevent larger, more devastating fires later on, when things get really dry. The Aborigines had been managing the land in this way for so many years that the flora and fauna have adapted to these little fires; some of them actually dependent now on the fires to propagate. We managed to time our visit so we were smack in the middle of all the burning, and ran across many fires every day. The entire first two weeks of the trip smelled of smoke.

There were several other fire warning signs with catchy phrases like the one above; "We like our lizards frilled, not grilled" was one (occasionally edited to say "fried, not grilled"), and "Don't burn your bird" was another.




I thought I had better photos, you know, something actually showing flames, but after going through all of them it seems I must have shot the good stuff on video, so these will have to do. There were times when fires were raging right along side the road, with impressive flames.




This fire was close enough to where we were hiking that we could hear it roaring and crackling.




The dark spots in the sky you see here are mostly bugs splatted on the windshield, but some of them are Black Kites, which would soar over the fires in large numbers to catch all the critters fleeing the flames... we sometimes saw flocks of 100 or more. This was phenomenal to me, since we are not used to seeing raptors in such concentrations where we live. Our guide on the Yellow Waters Cruise in Kakadu told us that Black Kites will purposefully start new fires by dropping burning sticks. This strikes me as perhaps apocryphal, but I am charmed by the idea.