Sage grouse, pygmy rabbits among wildlife hardest hit by fires

Animals are coping with 2020’s unprecedented fires much as humans are—fleeing the flames then returning to their stricken homes

By Jordan Rane. October 15, 2020. Millions of scorched acres. Ruddied skies. Noxious air. Decimated towns. Destroyed homes. Evacuations. Lives lost and still more missing. This year’s wildfire season has been yet another record breaker, triggering a litany of grim observations.

“We do not have a context for this amount of fire on the landscape,” an Oregon Department of Forestry fire chief remarked in September.

Amidst a blaze of ominous forecasts that can barely keep up with the evolving crisis, the immediate concern is protecting people and property. Land and resources come next.

But what about the millions, even billions, of largely out-of-view residents? Countless creatures are still seeking cover in the vast, charred woodwork: bear, elk, deer, cougar, coyote. Raptors, owls, sparrows, all types of birds. Beaver, bull trout and Malone jumping slugs. Lizards, porcupines, salamanders, skunks, butterflies, insects of every kind …

How is the wildlife spread across multiple ground zeroes of burning Columbia River Basin wildlands handling all the year’s conflagrations?

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There’s no way to accurately count wildlife casualties due to fire. Birds fly away. Other creatures burrow. Some flee only to later return to their charred habitats.

“Animals die in these fires, especially in the incredibly intense, fast-moving ones we’re seeing across broad fronts, and it’s generally very hard to determine those estimates—but it’s typically not as catastrophic as people might think,” says Jason Fidorra, a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife district wildlife biologist. “The majority of wildlife populations will likely escape and survive the initial event.”

The greater concern for wildlife, says Fidorra, is the aftermath of fires.

Grassland species suffer

“The real wildlife impacts of these fires are going to be felt this winter, a time that’s typically hardest on a lot of resident species,” says the Eastern Washington-based Fidorra, who oversees a fragile, fire-altered shrub-steppe ecosystem, parts of which now resemble a blackened moonscape.

Spread throughout the mid-Columbia River Basin and beyond, North America’s largest natural grassland is home to numerous threatened species.

Among them are critical casualties from recent fires, including the tiny, endangered pygmy rabbit, which has had at least one of its captive breeding populations in Central Washington destroyed.

According to the New York Times, September fires in the sagebrush steppe country of Central Washington “killed about half of the state’s endangered population of pygmy rabbits, leaving only about 50 of the palm-sized rabbits in the wild there.”

 

Fires have also devastated Washington’s sage grouse habitat. According to estimates in the Seattle Times, Douglas County’s Pearl Hill Fire alone has wiped out 30-70% of the population of the ground-dwelling birds there.

“Sage grouse is one of the keystone species of the shrub-steppe of Eastern Washington,” says Fidorra. “Because of this recent fire complex up in Douglas County, the new recommendation from our state agency is to uplist it to endangered.

“Sage grouse require sagebrush to survive, they consume it. And like a lot of our species here, we’ll be seeing several longer-term impacts from wildfire and altered habitat—which in the case of shrub-steppe, unlike forests, can take up to 50 years to regenerate.”

Predators take advantage

In forested ecosystems, periodic natural wildfires can spur a more efficient cycle of habitat renewal hastened by nature’s most violent reset button. Creatures great and small have been dealing with and adapting to fires since the invention of lightning.

“Large mammals will often graze calmly while fires burn only a few hundred yards away,” according to Oregon Explorer. “As a result of their acclimation to these conditions, direct fire-caused mortality among animals is generally low.”

According to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, there are no documented cases of forest fires in the Pacific Northwest that have wiped out an entire species or animal population. The main threat of wildfire on wildlife is habitat change and what the agency euphemistically calls “a reorganization of animal communities.”

In the throes of a massive forest fire, how do animals begin to reorganize? Mainly how you’d guess.

Birds fly away. Rodents and amphibians often burrow underground or in rocks to evade flames. Ungulates, bears, cats and other mammals either seek new territory or find safe harbor in rivers, lakes and other fire-resistant refuges.

It’s the old, the young, the sick and the more confined smaller-sized species that are most at risk from fast-moving flames, smoke and heat that can climb above 1,200-degrees Fahrenheit at ground level.

Some predators take advantage of the situation. Raptors, bears and raccoons have been known to hover on the fire line to pick off meals from the exodus of prey making an exposed exit through suddenly reduced coverage. Woodpeckers are quick to feast on a buffet of bark beetles in blackened trees.

“In those short-term situations, there’s always winners and losers,” sums up a recent National Geographic study on the complexities of animal behavior in a forest fire. 

Returning to stricken homes

Though depicted in plenty of animated films, one dramatic scene you likely won’t see is masses of panicked fauna communally fleeing the flames in unison. 

“It’s not the stampede people might imagine, but you’ll definitely see them moving out of those areas individually, instinctively, and largely effectively depending on the fire’s intensity and speed,” says Katie Santini, a U.S. Forest Service biological science technician based in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. “With wildfire, it’s important for us to think about how wildlife doesn’t see or experience boundaries the way we do.

“A lot of times during these burns you’ll get a mosaic with pockets—such as riparian areas—that often don’t burn as heavily. That’s where you’ll often find wildlife seeking refuge until the main threat has passed.”

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Within a fire-stricken area, animals also tend to know when it’s safe to return to the places they’ve vacated.

“When we’ve done prescribed burns it’s always revealing to see how animals have responded even just within a day when we return to check the fire line,” says Santini.

“We’ll find grazing deer and wild turkey technically in the burn area. Animals do get displaced, but that displacement may not last as long as one might expect.”

Life cycles disrupted

Fleeing from larger, more uncontrolled wildfires, displaced animals forced into new territory can face myriad challenges.

“Sudden movement of this kind is a dangerous activity for virtually any species,” says Fidorra. “They’re traveling through unknown territory with predators, roads and all sorts of other risks. Then animals arrive in a foreign habitat that’s already occupied and there’s a severe home-court advantage for the resident populations, which are often territorial.

“Newcomers might not be killed, but they may be unable to breed, reproduce or simply find suitable space.”

Wildfire-induced wildlife movement can also lead to other risks. Pockets of over-concentration can become a hotbed for disease transmission. Browsing deer on neighboring commercial croplands can stoke human-animal conflict—already strained across evolving Columbia River Basin landscapes.

“Our wildlife are being hit by a lot of things these days—new roads and developments infringing on old habitats, tremendous increases in human recreation on public land adding additional stress,” says Santini. “Throwing this level of wildfire into the mix just makes it that much harder for them to be resilient when a big event like this happens. In a sense, it wears them down.”

Can nature and its inhabitants maintain any semblance of a natural cycle in the wake of unprecedented wildfire?

“I wish I had the answer to that,” says Fidorra. “You just have to remain hopeful that the importance that people place on these ecosystems remains high enough that we’re able to work together to resolve these issues over the long term for all of these impacted species.

“Thankfully, fire is a hot topic—no matter what side of politics you’re on,” he adds. “Which helps.”

Jordan Rane is an award-winning travel writer whose work has appeared in CNN.com, Outside, Men’s Journal and the Los Angeles Times.