Sydney  - Police on Monday lowered the death toll from last month's forest fires north of Melbourne from 210 to 173.  The February 7 blazes were Australia's biggest natural disaster, destroying over 1,800 houses, leaving 7,500 people homeless and blackening 450,000 hectares of forest.

   Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Kieran Walshe said the tally had always been provisional and that the downward revision was a "good news story" because fewer people were now believed to have died.

   He said the toll could still rise or fall, but police were "relatively confident" 173 people had died.

   He said some remains had turned out to belong to animals and that what was at first thought to be the remains of several people had turned out to be the remains of one.

   "In some cases you can have three or four sets of remains that have been recovered, and when those remains have been examined at the Coroner's Court they belong to the one body," he said.

"Others, of course, you have to understand that some of the remains that were recovered were very, very minimal ... and it's not until those remains can actually undergo some scientific examination that the scientists can determine that it's not human."