Poor wet season rainfall has sparked an early start to the Top End prescribed burning season, with park rangers lighting up tinder-dry country almost two months ahead of schedule.
Nitmiluk National Park, 245 kilometres south-east of Darwin, has so far only received about 50 per cent of its 1,000-millimetre average wet season rainfall.
NT Parks and Wildlife chief district ranger, Phill Cowan, said early dry season burns around Katherine Gorge had been brought forward as a result of the deteriorating seasonal conditions.
"Its a good month to a month-and-a-half earlier than we would normally burn but, given the lack of rainfall, we just had to make that decision to start burning earlier than we otherwise would," he said.
"A lot of our dry season burning is about protecting the environment, protecting our park assets, so that's our visitor assets but also our biological assets, and we just want to avoid having those really late dry season fires.
"We were always going to burn early, but this has come a lot earlier given the lack of rainfall and it's very dry at the moment up on the escarpment country."
The iconic national park is usually characterised by lush green vegetation and swollen waterways at this time of the year.
But Mr Cowan said there was already a sense the wet season had come to an end.
"It really feels like the dry season with the smoke in the air, you can just smell it, and it just feels different," he said.
"I mean we still have some humidity out here but it's definitely drier as well."
