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So: Many experts now agree ... some birds use fire as a weapon.

Who gives FF about footage except you. Get over it.
You make categorical pronouncements and you have ZERO evidence the eye witnesses are mistaken.
You simply don't have the experience, knowledge or competence to be a knowledgeable skeptic on this topic.

And yet you're the only one on this thread making unevidenced assertions.
 
Just needling Dann on his distain for observation as a key aspect of science. So is speculation based on sound biological principals ....it took a long time for a verified existence of Darwin's Moth to surface....not a video yet invented and photography in infancy.
Let's see

Scientific observation is a lot more than a mere claim having seen something.
 
And yet you're the only one on this thread making unevidenced assertions.


The irony is that I am far from the only one "who gives FF about footage." One of the main proponents of the idea that birds spread bushfires, Bob Gosford, actually gives FF about footage. Macdoc and smartcooky are the only ones who don't:

But let's congratulate Bonta, Gosford & Co:
That's the spirit!
'We didn't get the the footage to prove that raptors spread fire, so now we pretend that it's not a problem that we didn't, and that the only problem is that we didn't prove intentionality! And so we can get on with our lives, and the rest is up to you, dear reader: Please help us prove we're right!'
If you have a report, footage or pictures of birds spreading fire Bob Gosford and his colleagues would love to hear from you. He can be contacted by email at birdknowledge@gmail.com.


Yes, I don't doubt that Bob and his colleagues would love for you to do that! :dl:
 
I hate the many YouTube videos ascribing human motivation to animals.
These are two of the dumbest video texts I've seen, and they're obviously false advertising:
Bee Stings Human and then Apologizes (Your Daily Dose Of Internet on YouTube, Sep 9, 2022 - 2:32 min.)
Octopus Thanks The People Who Saved His Life (The Dodo on YouTube, July 28, 2019 - 3:08 min.)
It is clearly not what the actual footage shows!


Another one of those videos:
In a gesture of gratitude, Lucy turned to the people on the shore with a look of thanks.
People found a stranded orca, and then the whale did something incredible (Story Whispers on YouTube, Aug 16, 2024 - 5:00 min.)

The complexity of emotions that a killer whale can express with nothing but its dorsal fin! Incredible, indeed! It's just gotta be intelligent! :(
 
New video shows dog setting fire to Brook Park family’s home
(19News on YouTube, Aug 23, 2024 - 1:48 min.)
 
Close, but still not there:
The Birds That Eat Fire (SciShow on YouTube, Dec 10, 2024 - 10:54 min.)
Plenty of animals do things that seem risky, but they clearly have a good reason for doing it. After all, they've made it this far by taking chances. But these birds really take the cake when it comes to daredevil stunts, all in the name of food, love, or just for fun. From method-acting killdeer to long-distance fliers, to. the birds that eat fire, here are a few birds that will risk life or wing to get what they want.
Begins at 8:48.
I hope the fire-spreading-birds fans have their video cameras ready this season.
 
I wonder what the world did before video cams were invented......:sneaky:
oh wait.....observers. Including Darwin on the Beagle or Wallace establishing the Wallace line....observers that wrote about what they saw....fancy that :coffee:

only took 150 years to get this one sorted.
 
I wonder what the world did before video cams were invented......:sneaky:
oh wait.....observers. Including Darwin on the Beagle or Wallace establishing the Wallace line....observers that wrote about what they saw....fancy that :coffee:

only took 150 years to get this one sorted.

As the piece makes clear, Darwin did not observe the particular moth but predicted it based on the long nectary of the orchid. Also, it is a bad analogy because Darwin suggested that an insect like this particular moth MUST exist according to natural selection. If the insect did not exist the length of the nectary would be inexplicable. This is NOT the same as fire-starter birds. I don’t think anyone here has made a case that the birds have an evolutionary requirement to start fires. In fact, it has even been asserted by some proponents here that they probably hardly ever do it which conveniently explains why nobody gets video of it. But that is untrue of these moths which must do it every year.

Finally, not only did Darwin not observe it, nobody claims to have observed it until about thirty years ago when, unlike with the birds, they did manage to get stills and video….

It wasn't until 1992, nearly a century later, that observations were made of the moth feeding on the flower and transferring pollen from plant to plant with both videos and stills being taken. This was observed in the wild and confirmed further with studies in captivity.

Thus more than 130 years after Darwin first suggested that a large moth pollinated an African orchid, his hypothesis was confirmed. It took quite some time, but quite clearly Darwin's prediction, based on extremely limited evidence but bolstered by his understanding of his own new theory of natural selection, was correct.
 
You miss the point. I'll just leave it at that. :rolleyes:
The Beagle also didn't go to Madagascar.

Anyway, my point is that it is all well and good to say that there are some things that may happen that we have never caught on film. This is certainly true.

BUT...

The Darwin analogy is a poor one because Darwin made a prediction based on the theory of evolution.

So I think it is fair to ask if you are asserting that the birds have developed the ability to start fires because it gives them an evolutionary advantage. I understand that there could be other explanations too. We might think of their ability to light fires, if it is true, as stemming from a general intelligence that is higher than we might otherwise think, such as with octopuses climbing out of their tanks to raid other tanks, etc...

That said, I don't see why anyone should be compelled to believe in it unless there has been some form of reliable verification such as a video recording. Why is it so hard to come up with this evidence?
 
Arrogance writ large ....grow up.
Once more you deny what you clearly do not understand, have very limited real world experience and no respect for those in field who do.
 
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