Rain, hail or shine: right way fire with Birriliburu

Although things don't always go to plan on country, desert mob always find a way to make it work. With plans to do some aerial burning out at Katjarra, Birriliburu Rangers were met with a curveball: two days of steady rain, soaking the landscape. The team cancelled the helicopter, predicting that the rain wouldn't allow for the landscape scale mosaic burns they had in mind.

Pushing the trip back by two days to allow the roads to dry out, the crew set out on the journey from Wiluna to Katjarra. At camp, the rangers had a look at maps of the area, using the recent rain and damp conditions as an opportunity to look for places that might need some more precise, small-scale burns. Sites like rock holes, sacred sites, and Tjakura burrows need to be protected with firebreaks, so they aren't damaged by big fires.

The rangers did a test burn to see how the fire would behave. As they thought, the fire struggled to carry in such a green landscape, with minimal wind to push it along. They decided it was a good time to burn around some Tjakura burrow sites, using matches to burn spinifex hummocks one-by-one to prevent fires going straight over the burrows.

Using drip torches, the rangers created a fire break further away from the burrows. Although the burn didn’t quite take as much as they had hoped, the low-risk environment was a great opportunity for some of the rangers to gain confidence with the drip torches.