Miroslava Munguia Ramos turned onto the road that leads into Sullivan Canyon and tried to summon the memory of what it looked like just three months earlier, in late January. It should have been months into the wet season, but the rains hadn’t come. Instead, the Palisades Fire — an unseasonable monster fanned by Santa Ana winds that whipped hot desert air through the dried-out canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains — swept through, torching 24,000 acres and destroying nearly 7,000 buildings. Munguia Ramos, stuck in her office outside the evacuation zone, started receiving texts from acquaintances working on fire crews. Their photos showed a world transformed. Ash was everywhere, turning everything that wasn’t a charred black into a featureless gray. To Munguia Ramos, the whole world seemed to have been drained of color.
“It was barren,” she said. “It was nothing.”
Now it was the beginning of May, and Munguia Ramos, a wildlife technician for the Santa Monica Mountains Fund, was heading into the burn site to try to find out what happened to the animals that made the canyon their home. I squeezed into her S.U.V. with a volunteer and three scientists who study the complex interactions between wildlife and fire.
We passed through the edge of the fire’s boundary, conversation giving way to silence as we surveyed the cars and houses reduced to twisted metal and piles of rubble. The road turned to gravel, winding inland toward the homes of some of the region’s nonhuman residents. Luke Kelly, an ecologist on sabbatical from his work at the University of Melbourne, where he studies the massive wildfires of southern Australia, shook his head at a stand of ghostly, charred oak trees. “That was a hot fire,” he murmured.
The road was cracked and pitted, and we crawled forward until it finally dead-ended where there had been a landslide, another sign of how extreme the fire was. Severe fires destroy the vegetation that stabilizes slopes and holds on to water; they sometimes burn even the organic material held in the soil, volatilizing it into a gas that condenses into a waxy, water-repellent layer. When rain finally does fall on the fire scar, it skates across this surface and can turn into flash floods and debris flows instead of hydrating the land.
“Well, we know where we’re going to park,” deadpanned Morgan Tingley, an ornithologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose lab focuses on birds and global change. Accompanying Tingley was Kendall Calhoun, a postdoctoral researcher, who began rummaging in the trunk for the audio recorders he was using to study bird behavior in the wake of fire.
We began the hike into the canyon. The black, barren world that Munguia Ramos had described was easy to picture; large slopes were still ashy, and most of the trees that remained looked, at first glance, to be dead. But it was soon evident that the landscape had already begun to undergo a transformation. Here and there, green, leafy shoots emerged from the blackened trunks and even the high branches of heavily burned eucalyptus trees, sycamores and oaks. This process, known as epicormic resprouting, allows trees to send out new shoots from dormant buds beneath their bark, speeding the return of forest canopy after a fire. Laurel sumac shrubs that had been reduced to nothing but broken fingers of charcoal above ground (the scientific term, which feels existentially weighted, is “top-killed”) were bushing out enthusiastically from their bases. Native flowering perennials, adapted to act fast when a path to sunlight is suddenly opened, were shooting upward. Munguia Ramos celebrated each new species she saw: “Ooh! Lupine, yay! Ooh, another type of phacelia! Oooh, Pacific peas!”
It wasn’t surprising to the researchers that the forest was beginning to rebuild itself after the fire. That’s exactly what fire-adapted ecosystems, like those of the Santa Monica mountains, evolved to do. There, fire has historically been not a calamity but a regular visitor: a source of disruption but also of growth and renewal. The open question, as climate change makes fires hotter, bigger and more frequent, is whether that will continue to be true.
On the moist floor of the canyon, where the trees were merely scorched instead of immolated, every sign of returning life was a cause for celebration. We spotted prints in the mud: some from a pair of mule deer, a smudged set that might have been left by a fox. Tingley identified the calls of a western flycatcher — it was a bit of a mystery, he said, why a migrating species would choose such a devastated landscape for a stopover — and an acorn woodpecker. “They survived!” he exulted. But his tone turned sober as he considered the birds’ uncertain future. “I doubt these oaks are going to produce acorns this year,” he said. Kelly caught a Pacific chorus frog, which led to a debate about how it might have lived through the fire. Buried down deep in a mud pocket of the ephemeral stream? Hidden away in an unburned tree somewhere?
After some searching, Munguia Ramos found the reason for her visit, a camera trap bolted to a metal stake. It was almost entirely covered in sticks and mud dragged in by the post-fire runoff. The camera was one of dozens that a graduate student named Chloe Nouzille deployed in the aftermath of a 2018 fire, the Woolsey, to study how animals would fare in its wake. But because the Santa Monica Mountains, like so much of California, are at an ever-increasing risk of fire as the climate warms, she and other scientists decided to keep the cameras running for long-term monitoring. Sure enough, a number of the trapping sites were soon reburned, not just by the Palisades fire but also by the Franklin fire, which preceded it by a month. As the fires raged, at least one camera was doused in fire retardant, another was buried by a bulldozer cutting a firebreak and several melted. On one camera, whose memory card survived, the last photos showed a rabbit with flames close behind.
Calhoun and Tingley began looking for a tree still sturdy enough to mount an acoustic recorder, while Munguia Ramos and David Pineda, the volunteer, worked on digging out the camera. In the month before the fire arrived, it recorded a mountain lion passing through the now-charred valley. Kelly turned in a circle, taking in the transformed canyon: how much had burned, how few places remained to offer refuge to survivors or shelter the seeds of regrowth. “For a single fire, maybe that wouldn’t matter so much,” he mused. “But it’s not about the most recent fire, one event. If the fires keep repeating, that’s different. Then the capacity is tested.”
The public tends to think of all wildfires as the same, Kelly explained as we began to hike out of the canyon, and of all wildfires as disasters. But neither is true. It’s easy to forget, when flames are racing though the mansions of Malibu, that fire is an ancient and integral part of the ecology of California, just as it is of ecosystems around the world.
Take Melanophila acuminata, a beetle found not just in California but across the Northern Hemisphere. It is so fond of using freshly burned coniferous forests, where predators, along with the chemical defenses usually mounted by trees, have been neutralized, as a home for its offspring that beetles of both sexes often arrive in torched forests, on the hunt for a mate, while the trees are still smoldering. To find their beloved burns, and to navigate them without injury, the beetles have developed specialized sensors on their thoraxes that absorb infrared radiation at the wavelengths emitted by wildfires. In the modern era, these sensors, which are capable of detecting fire from as far as 80 miles away, can occasionally lead the beetles astray. They have been known to swarm oil-tank fires, the huge, hot vats at sugar refineries and even a smelter located 50 miles from the nearest coniferous forest. In 1943, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, speculated that the large numbers of the beetles known for annoying spectators at the university’s football games were “attracted by the smoke from some 20,000 (more or less) cigarettes which on still days sometimes hangs like a haze over the stadium.”
In North America, one of Melanophila acuminata’s predators is the black-backed woodpecker, a bird that gets its name from the dark feathers that help it blend in among the charred trees that are its preferred habitat. The trees provide an abundance of fatty, protein-rich beetle larvae on which to feast as well as softened wood in which to excavate cavities for nesting. The woodpeckers move in, sometimes within a few weeks of a fire, and generally stay for years, until the grub boom ends and it’s time for another generation to find a new burn.
Other birds prefer burn scars because the landscape has been opened for easier hunting: fewer places for prey to hide, fewer branches to veer around. Some, colloquially known as firehawks, even hunt while a fire is still active, taking advantage of the smorgasbord of fleeing rodents and reptiles that concentrate on a fire’s edge. They are apparently so partial to this hunting strategy that they help create the conditions for it: The birds have been observed picking up burning branches with their beaks and carrying them into unburned areas.
From California to Chile to Kamchatka, evolutionary adaptations that don’t just make use of fire but require its regular presence are remarkably common. Giant sequoia seeds need fire to clear away the undergrowth so they can reach bare soil and germinate. Manzanitas produce seeds with hard coatings that sprout when they’re exposed to high heat. Many trees, from America’s lodgepole pines to Australia’s eucalyptus, have evolved a trait called serotiny: Seeds are locked away in pods for years or even decades, waiting for the heat of fire to melt them open amid newly optimal growing conditions, including suddenly plentiful sunlight and soil enriched by ash, a natural fertilizer. In the boreal forest, the black spruce has taken this approach to the point of self-sacrifice. Adult trees become living torches, their resin-rich branches perfectly angled to provide a ladder that fire can climb from the flammable duff of the forest floor toward the cache of sealed seed cones at the trees’ crowns.
It’s easy to forget that fire is an ancient and integral part of the ecology of California — just as it is of ecosystems around the world.
The Indigenous people who, for millenniums, used fire as a tool for managing the land did so with the understanding that, if kept in check, fire’s initial destructiveness could have long-term benefits for whole communities of species. (They also recognized that regular fire reduced the likelihood of catastrophic fires fed by too much fuel buildup.) Fire recycles key nutrients including nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, returning them to the soil for new generations of plants to use. It opens up sunlit spaces inside otherwise dark forests, creating a patchwork of different habitats, made up of a greater variety of plants of varying ages and structures — which means a greater variety of shelters and food sources to support a greater variety of animals. All of this lends more resilience to the overall ecosystem: If populations or species or relationships are lost, there are more potential replacements for the distinct ecological functions they once fulfilled — spreading seeds or pollen, serving as food, curbing populations of prey species and so on. Ecologists often refer to fire as a landscape-scale reset button, injecting diversity and dynamism into landscapes that may have trended toward sameness.
Different fires do this in different ways, burning with a wide array of frequencies, intensities, sizes, seasonalities and movement patterns. Scientists have hypothesized that this “pyrodiversity” contributes to and maintains biodiversity, because plants and animals thrive in complex ecosystems with lots of different microhabitats. This is true even for those fire-loving black-backed woodpeckers. It was once thought that all they needed was a nice, high-severity burn scar to be happy. But Tingley found that juvenile birds are more susceptible to predators inside severe burns; after fledging they leave for more intact forest, one reason the woodpeckers prefer to build nests close to the edges of fire scars.
High on a hill inside Cameron Nature Preserve, we entered an area that had burned not in the Palisades fire but in the smaller Franklin fire. Munguia Ramos described the area as she knew it at different stages. Once dense with shrubs, hard to even bushwhack through, it had turned black, sooty and open. After the fire, the post of a camera monitor, which had required a sweaty scavenger hunt to locate, became obvious. It was the only thing left standing.
Now the world had changed again. Wild mustard, a riot of bright yellow flowers, was eight feet tall in places, but there were also native Catalina mariposa lilies coming up, along with paintbrush, lots of lupines, gumweed and pearly everlasting. Tingley called it a “post-fire megabloom.” As we began our hike, a mountain biker in a red jersey appeared over a hill and stopped to ask what we were up to. When he heard that the scientists were there to study a recent fire, he kept repeating: “This was burned? This?”
Most shrubs were gone, but sage and laurel sumac were resprouting lushly from underneath the skeletons of their old branches. Calhoun was shocked to see a ceanothus, a wild California lilac, in full bloom and covered in bumblebees. Surely this hadn’t been torched just a few months before? “The best way I could describe it is the Deadlands from ‘The Lion King,’” said Munguia Ramos, pulling out her phone to show him pictures of the lilac when it looked like a pile of bare, black sticks.
“That’s crazy!” Calhoun said. “How did it do that?”
“I’m telling you, it’s magic,” Munguia Ramos said.
The photos on the camera trap showed mule deer, gray foxes, lots of skunks, a coyote and a white-crowned sparrow. Around our feet there were spiders and solitary bees and darkling beetles. In the air, Tingley identified a lazuli bunting, a seed- and insect-eater known for moving into the boom of blooms that follows a burn. Here, “you wouldn’t see a lazuli bunting without fire,” he said. “When you have a fire, you clearly lose something, but you gain something as well.”
In the branches of a nearby bush, Tingley heard the bouncing call of a wrentit, a small, round bird that, he informed us, is neither a wren nor a tit. It was a good indicator of the fire’s lower intensity, he said, because there was no way it could have repopulated the area afterward: Wrentits are famous homebodies, generally traveling no more than a quarter mile from their birthplace during their entire lives. (The Cornell Lab of Ornithology says they “may be the most sedentary bird species in North America.”) With everything that had happened — the scorching fire and the long, barren char — this lazy little bird had managed to live right through the middle of it.
On the second day, we headed deeper into the fire scar, passing through a checkpoint operated by National Guard members kitted out with guns and camo, into an area still closed to the public. On the other side, we encountered an uncanny mix of worlds. Many of the former houses were just as charred and twisted and rubbly as the day they burned, while on some lots, all evidence of disaster had already been scraped away to create a fresh start for new builds. On still others, intact mansions stood next to their still-blooming flower gardens as if no disaster had occurred.
It was a shock, Munguia Ramos said, to drive the coastal highway through Malibu for the first time after the fire and realize how much water you could see, now that so many houses were suddenly gone. “I forgot how much ocean we had,” she said. Over and over, orphaned stilts left standing in the sand were the only sign that an empty beach was once full of houses. I watched a shiny car, like a visitor from some other planet, neatly parallel park between the rusted hulks of cars that clearly hadn’t moved since the fire vaporized their tires.
In the car, conversation turned to the uncertain futures of the city’s destroyed neighborhoods. California was already facing a major insurance crisis, and no wonder: In 2018, the state set a record for the most acres burned, and it more than doubled that record just two years later. Thirteen of California’s 20 largest fires took place within the last decade, according to Cal Fire, and major insurers were turning away from doing business in the state. Insurance programs are designed to manage a small amount of risk — the minor likelihood that any given home will have a claim each year — by spreading it out over a large number of policyholders. When the risk is large, repeated and expensive, the system begins to break down.
This system is not, it turns out, all that different from the way natural systems evolved to handle fire or the ways in which scientists fear that they, too, will begin to break. Under historical environmental conditions, when a fire comes, there’s still plenty of risk: Plants will burn. Animals will die. All sorts of forest structure and complexity, built up over many years, will be lost. But there will also be lightly damaged or undamaged areas, which serve as refuges for fleeing animals; afterward, they provide temporary shelter and food sources and fonts of new genetic material — seeds, pollen, animals looking for new territory — that can help repopulate the burned places as they recover. The ecosystem will have prepared its own form of emergency savings, stockpiled during the good times, that can be drawn on for rebuilding. This includes lignotubers, swollen, woody structures, often partly buried in the soil under the trees and shrubs that grow them, that contain an emergency kit of starch, nutrients and dormant buds, which trees can use to regenerate. Similar resources are found in the bud banks that trees build up in their branches and the seed banks that accumulate in soils. There, seeds wait, sometimes for decades, for the right conditions to begin a new life. Fire gives them what they are waiting for.
Places that are used to fire, to relying and thriving on it, are now encountering fire regimes that are staggeringly different from those with which they evolved.
But when fires grow more extreme and less diverse, things begin to change, researchers say. A low-severity fire that burns through the understory while leaving the canopy intact is a very different event from a high-severity fire that kills trees, just as a large fire that causes widespread tree death over a significant area is different from a few small fires, where burns are buttressed by intact forest. A very hot fire that incinerates even the microbes in the soil will have very different long-term effects from one that doesn’t. A fire in Southern California in an unseasonably dry winter, when the strong Santa Ana winds are blowing in from the desert, will behave differently from one that burns during the traditional fire season of May to October, when westerly winds are moister and calmer. A fire that returns to a burned area after 10 years has a different impact from one that returns after two.
Fire scientists think in terms of what they call fire regimes: not just the characteristics of individual fires but their patterns — the frequency, intensity and size of fires in a particular area over time. Much as political regimes do, these govern what is possible in the land where they operate.
Today global warming is changing fire regimes in a number of ways. More erratic rainfall means deeper droughts and longer fire seasons. Higher temperatures mean dryer, more easily combustible fuel. Changing weather patterns mean stronger and more unpredictable winds. And so on, and on and on, with ever-increasing complexity as the various feedback loops prompted by the changing climate feed into one another. Consider, for example, that climate change causes more stress in trees, leaving them more susceptible to pests and disease (and therefore to fire), while simultaneously speeding the advance of invasive species, like bark beetles that turn trees into kindling and quick-growing grasses that create more fuel for fire. Or that, because warmer air can hold more water vapor, the storms that do come are more likely to be deluges whose moisture arrives too rapidly to nourish the landscape. These storms are also more likely to start fresh fires: As thunderstorms grow more intense, lightning strikes are predicted to increase by 50 percent in the United States by the end of the century.
The strategies that plants and animals have developed for surviving fire all have their limits. When fires return too often, seed and bud banks and lignotubers won’t have time to replenish in advance of the next one. Burrowing won’t save animals if the fire is so hot that the soil burns. Running away is of little use if the fire is so big that there’s nowhere safe to go. For animals that do survive, returning won’t be of much use if the plants and other animals they once relied on are gone. Even flying away isn’t a guarantee, especially because birds’ respiratory systems are extremely sensitive to smoke. One study found that a group of geese wearing GPS collars during their fall migration hit a wall of wildfire smoke and struggled to fly over or around it. They ended up taking long detours, using up precious energy and doubling their migration time.
Ecosystems are facing not just increases in extreme fire but also a host of other stressors that those fires worsen. In Australia, studies have shown that post-fire landscapes give invasive predators such as foxes and feral cats, which are already decimating populations of native animals, a hunting advantage. In the scar of the Palisades fire, the first plant to return was often the wild mustard we saw so often, an invasive plant that grows so quickly it impedes the return of native plants. In other places, the culprit is different — cheatgrass in the Great Basin, buffelgrass in Arizona, gamba grass in Australia — but the result is similar: a post-fire explosion of invasive vegetation that serves little ecological purpose other than to become kindling or a ladder for ground fires to climb.
Southern California’s mountain lions, already suffering, like so many animals, from limited habitat, often find themselves boxed in between fire and urban sprawl. An analysis of the data from their tracking collars found that in the aftermath of the Woolsey fire, they were forced to travel farther and into more human spaces, more frequently crossing roads and freeways, in search of food. One lion, known officially as P-64 and colloquially as “Culvert Cat,” because of his habit of crossing under the 101 Freeway inside a storm drain, entered the smoldering landscape, burned his paws and starved within weeks.
All of these factors, combined with a long history of fire suppression, which has allowed the buildup of fuels beyond what would naturally have been possible, mean fire regimes around the world are becoming much more extreme. Fire is now burning bigger areas, more often, in more places and at more times of year. Even ecosystems with little to no history of wildfires — the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, the tropical ones of Congo and the Amazon — are now facing huge conflagrations.
As fire regimes grow more extreme, there’s a risk that the complex ecologies that thrived alongside their milder predecessors will be pushed beyond the point of recovery.
And places that are used to fire, to relying and thriving on it, are now encountering fire regimes that are staggeringly different from those with which they evolved. In the hotter, dryer boreal forest, fires are now burning deep into peat soils. Though flames still release black spruce seeds, the soil into which they fall is so depleted that the trees are facing what scientists call an ever-growing incidence of “complete regeneration failure.” Since 2018, fires have tripled in much of the Arctic, where burning peatlands release huge quantities of planet-warming carbon dioxide. In Australia, the fires of 2019 to 2020, what’s now called Black Summer, killed at least 33 people and killed or displaced an estimated three billion animals (not counting arthropods, fish or turtles). In the aftermath, Kelly and his colleagues published a paper estimating that the changes in fire regimes have put more than 4,400 species at risk of extinction in the coming decades.
As fire regimes grow more extreme, there’s a risk that the complex ecologies that thrived alongside their milder predecessors will be pushed beyond the point of recovery. What may take their place, fire scientists warn, is simplification: the dominance of a few fast-growing, short-lived plants; the radical transformation of ecosystems, as forests and scrublands give way to grasslands and rainforests to savanna. Animals that depend on certain plants, or that need complex ecosystems to survive, will disappear completely. The result is the slow and steady erosion of all kinds of interconnected species whose very interconnection once served as a kind of insurance policy.
This shift won’t just affect plants and animals. When ecosystems simplify, the entire hydrological system they supported can be fundamentally altered: As rainfall patterns change, plants retain less water, runoff increases, groundwater recharge slows and whole landscapes become more arid. People in California think a lot about the impacts of fire on houses and insurance and forests, Calhoun said, but less about how farms and wineries and orchards would function if their water sources, or the homes of the natural predators that protect them from agricultural pests, were to disappear.
In Southern California, fire season now lasts essentially year round. Even the enormous granite crest of the Sierra Nevada is no longer an impenetrable firebreak, and the millenniums-old giant trees of the misty coast, once known as “asbestos forests” for their resilience, are no longer immune from burning to death. There are now fire tornadoes — a phenomenon first scientifically documented in 2003 — whipped up by fires so intense that they create their own weather. It’s not uncommon for wildfires to leave behind large expanses of land where not only is the canopy destroyed but trees are also fully killed.
When I first spoke with Tingley, he tried to imagine a bird hunting along the edge of a fire as hot and tall and fast as the one that destroyed the Palisades. “Any bird that tried to go forage in that,” he said, “would be incinerated or asphyxiated.”
By the end of the second day, we had hiked to eight monitoring sites, from ridgetops to ravine bottoms to the sides of busy roads. At one site, the camera was inside the dense bushes of an intact chaparral scrubland — but only because emergency crews had stopped the fire by bulldozing a fire line nearby. At another, on Palisades Drive, Munguia Ramos shivered as she remembered what the road looked like after the fire: crowded with cars abandoned after a hasty evacuation caused a traffic jam, forcing people to flee on foot. To let emergency vehicles through, the cars had been shoved to the sides by bulldozers. Several cameras had to be dug out of debris piles left by flooding. At each site, Calhoun hung his recording devices, Munguia Ramos and Pineda replaced memory cards and Tingley pulled out his binoculars to track which birds were managing to live in this new landscape.
I kept thinking of Kelly’s admonition that we need to get beyond thinking of fire as a uniform disaster. Inside the fire scar, where each site burned in its own distinct way, it was clear that fire was a world within a world, one rich in complexity and built around cycles of destruction and resilience. Studies have found that fire adaptations can differ even among populations of the same plant species: Those populations that are rarely exposed to fire may not have developed the thick bark or the serotinous cones that their counterparts in fire-prone places have. Life isn’t static, and fire is still, as it has always been, a fuel for evolution. Ecosystems are finding new ways to adapt to it, even now.
Even as fire regimes intensify, Kelly emphasized, people still have points of leverage over fire. We can reduce ignitions in places, including Southern California, where most fires are started, often accidentally, by humans. We can reduce the buildup of fuel for wildfire with prescribed and cultural burns (the burns performed by Indigenous people to manage ecosystems in various ways). Kelly considers local communities’ increased use and acceptance of these measures the most hopeful recent development in fire ecology. We can stop pushing our urban sprawl into the wildlands that are most vulnerable to fire. We can get serious about stopping the burning that has made all the other burns so much worse: our relentless combustion of fossil fuels.
We, too, have to learn to live within the fire regimes in which we find ourselves — that we have, in fact, created for ourselves. Like it or not, we have to become fire-adapted.
There was time for one last monitoring site, on the floor of another canyon. Driving in, we passed a holding area for the burned husks of cars that hadn’t yet been claimed as well as a grove of huge old oaks, their branches spread so low and wide that they were resting on logs as supports. The dry logs had burned, but the living branches survived.
Finally, a short way up an east-facing hillside, we found the camera that Munguia Ramos replaced just after the Palisades fire — the old one had partly melted — and began swiping through the photos it took. Soon, a bobcat showed up. And then it kept showing up, over days and many dozens of photos. It wasn’t clear whether it was returning to a transformed home, whether it had made the fresh burn its new territory or whether it was always the same animal. In photo after photo, we watched a bobcat come and go and sometimes just sit, right in front of the camera, triggering the motion sensor over and over as it surveyed the scarred land before it.
Eventually, though, the post-fire vegetation began to grow tall enough to trigger the camera. Image after image showed only stems, moving in the wind. The bobcat disappeared from view, hidden, for now, by a fresh, green world.
Brooke Jarvis is a contributing writer for the magazine. She last wrote about how climate anxiety is changing psychotherapy.
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