Bay Area study finds some bird populations benefited from California wildfires

PETALUMA, Calif. (KGO) — When wildfires sweep through California, we often think of the impacts in human terms. But now researchers with the Petaluma-based Institute for Bird Populations are examining the aftermath with a bird’s eye view.

“Fires are happening more often, and they’re bigger and more severe than they have been in the past. And so we went in to understand how fire severity and time since fire affect these birds and these national parks,” says research scientist Chris Ray Ph.D.

Ray and her colleagues used records of bird populations at Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks. Then, they compared those population trends to the multiple fires that had burned through the same parks over several decades. Of the 42 bird species they examined, 28 recorded a higher population density in areas that had previously burned. A bump that sometimes lasted for decades.

“So not only did we look at the effect of burn severity and time since burn, but we accounted for other differences in the habitat at each point, like its elevation and the amount of forest cover and the height of those trees,” Ray explains.

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They believe that detailed data could give the Forest Service and others new insight into the value of management techniques like prescribed burns. That’s the strategy of setting controlled fires in specific areas to help lessen the danger of a major blaze raging out of control during fire season.

“And so with prescribed fire, we have the option of controlling the parameters on that fire, of making sure the fire happens under weather conditions, for example, that aren’t going to lead to a huge conflagration. They can control, where the fire starts and when the fire starts and generally leads to much better outcomes than wildfires that might start in the worst possible conditions on a 110 degree day with 30 mile an hour winds, says executive director Rodney Siegel, Ph.D.

Siegel says some of the bird species they looked at didn’t just survive, but actually benefited from lower-impact or mixed-impact fires. In part, because they can essentially island hop between habitats that haven’t completely burned. He says the real threat could come in the future, from a newer fire pattern that’s emerged in recent decades. The combination of hyper-intense wildfires that also burn over massive areas, leaving bird populations little room to maneuver.

“And high severity fire isn’t necessarily your problem either. It’s when you get the two of them together, when you have large areas that are that are homogeneously high severity, then I think we start to see some other effects, some other more deleterious effects on birds and other wildlife that weren’t so apparent in our study, because during that the, the during the the 21 years that we surveyed birds, those birds hadn’t really been affected by super large, super high severity homogeneous fires,” Siegel explains.

Now, they’re hoping to potentially expand the study in the future. Perhaps mapping even more precise borders be between fires that allow wildlife populations to recover quickly, and those that deliver long-term destruction. Researchers do say the study focused on common bird species, and the results could differ for rarer, or harder to count varieties.