Raptors hunt at fires around the world—in the grasslands and savannas of Australia, Ghana, Brazil, Panama, Honduras, and Papua New Guinea—feasting on the easy pickings of prey fleeing the conflagration. There’s even a word for it: pyric-carnivory. Fire acts as a beater, driving organisms out of the brush. In the savannas of southern Africa, kestrels and jackal buzzards wheel around wildfires and prey on small mammals and reptiles injured, exposed, or killed by flames. Migrating Mississippi kites have been seen feasting on clouds of insects boiling up from summer fires in the grasslands of
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