How about the important issue that pre 1788 there was vast areas of natural habitat types, e.g. mallee. Patch burning would impact small areas and most animals had plenty of suitable habitat to move to for a while and many successional stages could exist. Now natural habitat types are often isolated patches, segregated by farmland, timber harvesting, urbanisation, etc. Thus patch burning now has a totally different meaning from pre 1788, because a patch can be most of an isolated remnant. Philip —–Original Message—–From: birding-aus-bounces@lists.vicnet.net.au [mailto:birding-aus-bounces@lists.vicnet.net.au] On Behalf Of John Leonard Sent: Friday, 6 September 2013 8:00 AM To: Birding-aus Subject: Re: [Birding-Aus] the fire hazard reduction program I think the basic problem is that you had a large workforce of people on land managing it the whole time by mosaic burning. Since then the workforce on the land has dwindled to such an extent that such a burning regime is now impossible and all that can be achieved are very small scale conservation burns, when funding, and wisdom, is available, and cosmetic and destructive ‘hazard reduction burns’ which are haphazard. John Leonard =============================== To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message: unsubscribe (in the body of the message, with no Subject line) to: birding-aus-request@vicnet.net.au http://birding-aus.org ===============================