Category Archives: fire

Bats and Wildfire

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gray bat 2After the Wallow Fire, Arizona’s largest wildfire, burned 538,000 acres, a half-dozen biologists lead by Northern Arizona University researchers came in to study bats’ reaction to the changed ecosystem, an article in Bats Magazine, the magazine of Bat Conservation International, says.

It was no surprise that the team found that bats prefer unburned habitat to burned habitat. It was a little surprising that while bats generally avoided burned over areas, they would roost in burned snags. How burned a particular tree is compared to the other trees in the area seems to play a role in which burned snags are chosen as roosts.

The study will continue this summer.

Read more about the study and the bats’ roost selection criteria in the article in Bats Magazine article “Bats in the Burns,” here.

Photo: Photoshopped bat art, from  US Fish and Wildlife Service photo of a gray bat

 

Kirtland’s Warbler Numbers Up in Michigan

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This year, researchers and volunteers in Michigan observed 2,063 singing Kirtland’s warbler males, up from 1,805 last year and the biggest single-year increase in the birds since 2007, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources reports.

These are the highest numbers ever for Kirtland’s warbler, a federally endangered bird, the release states. The warbler is endangered by habitat loss. It nests only in young jack pines, a habitat that only naturally occurs after periodic wild fires. Today the habitat is created through both prescribed burns and timber harvests with seeding. The birds range has expanded from Michigan’s lower peninsula, to its upper peninsula and into Wisconsin and Canada.

“We are witnessing a conservation success story,” said Michigan DNR endangered species coordinator Dan Kennedy in the release.

Read the Michigan DNR press release here.
Read more info on the species from the US Fish and Wildlife Service here.

In other songbird news:

While bark beetle outbreaks have been bad news for many throughout the West, they have been good news for mountain chickadees, at least at a local level for short periods around the time of the outbreak, says an article in the journal Ibis.

Because the birds are secondary cavity nesters, the study notes, the number of mountain chickadees in a location in a particular year ties most closely to the number of downy woodpeckers and red-breasted nuthatches the previous year.

You’ll need to pay or subscribe to read the whole paper. Find it here.

Photo: Kirtland’s warbler, courtesy Michigan Department of Natural Resources

Fire and Wildlife, 2012

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Many ecosystems depend on fire. While wildfires devastate the human landscape, usually wildlife doesn’t fare too badly. If a species is rare because of habitat loss, it may suffer when a wildfire changes that habitat, but mostly, on the population level and in the long term, wildlife does OK.

That’s more or less the point of this Denver Post article on the impact of the Colorado wildfires on wildlife. It mentions that wildfires are bad for fish, but earlier this year we we posted about a study that says that long term, fisheries also benefit from wildfires.

You just have to love this quote, though, from Randy Hampton, spokesman for Colorado Parks and Wildlife on the impact of fire-snuffing slurry:

“Iced tea is perfectly safe, but if I drop 40,000 gallons of it in the creek, it’s going to kill fish.”

It should be standard issue for all stuff-in-the-water incidents.

Read the entire Denver Post article, here.

Possibly because the loss of life and houses, wildfires are getting a lot of media coverage this summer. However, the NOAA wildfire report for May says that the wildfire activity was below average. Read it here. The June report should be out soon.

Photo: prescribed fire at an unknown location, courtesy US Forest Service

Fire and Wildlife, 2012

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Many ecosystems depend on fire. While wildfires devastate the human landscape, usually wildlife doesn’t fare too badly. If a species is rare because of habitat loss, it may suffer when a wildfire changes that habitat, but mostly, on the population level and in the long term, wildlife does OK.

That’s more or less the point of this Denver Post article on the impact of the Colorado wildfires on wildlife. It mentions that wildfires are bad for fish, but earlier this year we we posted about a study that says that long term, fisheries also benefit from wildfires.

You just have to love this quote, though, from Randy Hampton, spokesman for Colorado Parks and Wildlife on the impact of fire-snuffing slurry:

“Iced tea is perfectly safe, but if I drop 40,000 gallons of it in the creek, it’s going to kill fish.”

It should be standard issue for all stuff-in-the-water incidents.

Read the entire Denver Post article, here.

Possibly because the loss of life and houses, wildfires are getting a lot of media coverage this summer. However, the NOAA wildfire report for May says that the wildfire activity was below average. Read it here. The June report should be out soon.

Photo: prescribed fire at an unknown location, courtesy US Forest Service

Building in the “Fire Plain”

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Rivers have floodplains. We are starting to learn that the floodplain needs to do its thing — flood — for the surrounding natural systems to work. With all the attention that this year’s wildfires are getting, there is a little more attention being paid to not building where fire needs to do its thing.

Here’s an very brief opinion piece in the Helena Independent Record calling for blocking development in the “fire plain.”

Given that there are entire ecosystems that are fire-dependent, is it possible to designate a “fire plain”? Three years ago, Texas Forest Service GIS Specialist Karen Ridenour won a Firewise Leadership Award for investigating just that question. Here’s the press release on her award, with links to follow for more info.

Photo of prescribed burn in the Black Hills of South Dakota by Terry Tompkins, courtesy of US Forest Service

Fish + Fire = Comeback

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We won’t blame you if you think that the combination of fish plus fire equals dinner. But a recent study in the Intermountain West confirms earlier findings that native fish, particularly native salmonids, thrive in the decades after a forest fire.

The study was published in the Transactions of the American Fisheries Society. To read the paper, go to this US Forest Service summary page, then click on the PDF link.

A US Forest Service fisheries biologists has continued the study, and is giving talks on the results. Read the article about his talks in the Ravalli Republic.

As for fish and fire: sure, the first few years after a forest fire are tough for the fish. But the introduction of trees into the stream is such a habitat boost that after a few years, native fish populations start to grow. Shrubs and other low plants growing streamside also provide food and shelter for native fish.

This Bitterroot Mountain study confirms the findings of studies done after the 1988 Yellowstone fires, that also found that native fish populations rebounded after the fire.

You can read an article on the talk, here.

Photo: Brook trout, like this one, don’t fare well after fires in the Intermountain West, because they are not native and therefore not adapted to the region’s fire-fueled ecology. Photo by , courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife ServiceEric Engbretson

Toad in the Hole

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There is a lot of media coverage out there about the dire situation of the endangered Houston toad since a wildfire swept through its last stronghold, Bastrop State Park, 30 miles southeast of Austin, Texas. However, an article in the San Antonio News-Express points out that in the heat of the summer the toads burrow a foot or more underground to escape the heat. There is a chance that the toads were far enough underground when the fire swept through that they were insulated from the heat of the fire.

The article explains that it’s not the fire as much as the fragmented landscape that may seal the toad’s doom. The Houston toad is listed as endangered both federally and in Texas.

Read the San Antonio News-Express article here.

Read info on the Houston toad from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department here.

(Yes, that’s two toad stories in a row. Sometimes it works out that way.)

Photo courtesy of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Fire, Water, and Wildlife

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There is fire in the West, while flooding continues everywhere else.

Two of Arizona’s four packs of endangered Mexican wolves are in the immediate area of the Wallow Fire in eastern Arizona. An interagency team is monitoring the effects of the fire on the endangered wolves.

Read more in this press release from the Arizona Game and Fish Department. Or this very brief article from KPHO.

When flooding first struck the Mississippi River, there was also flooding in South Dakota and Vermont. The flooding continues there as well, prompting these two stories about flooding and wildlife.

The first, from the Greenfield (S.D.) Daily Reporter says that wildlife officials are asking the public not to rescue wildlife displaced by the flooding. They particularly ask people to leave fawns alone, since does can leave fawns for what seems to humans like a long time. Not sure how that relates to the floods. Wildlife officials all over the country are asking the public to do the same thing. Read more.

In Vermont, high water on Lake Champlain means that black terns — a state-threatened bird — probably won’t raise broods in the state this year. It is expected to be a rough nesting year for aquatic birds, and even ground-nesting birds may be effected by the flooding that hit the state last week. Beavers and muskrats are also dealing with the high water, and are seeking high ground, which is forcing them on to roadways more than usual.

The article ran in the Sunday Rutland Herald and Barre Montpelier Times-Argus, but is behind a paywall.

Update: Arizona Game and Fish has a Web page with information about the state’s fires and wildlife, including its impact on hunting and fishing in the area. It plans to update the site as needed:
http://www.azgfd.gov/w_c/fire_impacts_on_wildlife.shtml


Photo: a Mexican wolf in Arizona on a much cooler day. Photo courtesy of the Arizona Game and Fish Department.