Life after the fire

Listen, you can hear them! They're singing, cheering, and grinning from ear-to-ear: "There's been a fire!" they're all shouting, "Let's go!"

A little anthropomorphic perhaps, but beetles and every other creature that depends on fire living in the forest around Sisters may, in their way, be cheering.

Without a fire that kills and maims millions of trees and shrubs, long-horned wood-boring beetles (not really "horns" but antennae) in the family Cerambycidae and their close cousins, the beautiful metallic wood-boring Buprestid beetles and a host of other organisms would have a tough time of it.

Adult long-horned beetles vary greatly in shape, size and color. In general they are cylindrical and long-bodied and are dull brown or black, while others have bright colors or intricate patterns on their wing covers, such as the juniper fire beetle.

Females lay eggs in bark crevices or in soil near roots, and newly hatched larvae immediately begin to excavate into the burned tree. Cells within the tree are still holding water, and are ideal for beetle larva to ingest and for organisms in their gut to digest so the grubs can grow. They're pale colored, often creamy white, and caterpillar-like, and large species can grow to several inches in length and are not bad eating - if you're hungry.

A tree left standing after a fire is one grand apartment house for a wide variety of things that go "click click click," "buuuurrrr" and "zizzzzz-aahh" in the night.

I don't know for sure, but I have a hunch adult beetles smell the smoke from a burning tree and zero in on it immediately, waiting in anticipation for it to cool so they can lay their eggs in the loose and charred bark. They need the burned trees; most healthy trees will "pitch them out."

Some beetles only take a year to go from egg to grub to adult, but others, such as the long-horned wood-boring beetle will take two to four years to reach their adult stage in life. Mature larvae of a few species can remain inactive in wood for many years; there are records of long-horned beetles emerging from wood beams and furniture after remaining dormant for more than two decades.

It ain't all fun and games though; as it is in Nature, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Ichneumon wasps are right behind the beetles, waving their long antenna listening (or perhaps sniffing) for the telltale crunching of larva chewing their way into their new home.

With unerring accuracy, the female ichneumon wasp drills a hole into the wood with her long ovipositor and lays her eggs smack-dab on the back of the larva - then the eggs hatch and slowly devour the larvae after which it will pupate and develop into another ichneumon wasp.

On the top of the forest insect food chain are the woodpeckers, thousands of them. This is their time of The Great Feast. The trees, loaded with every kind of wood-boring creature you can think of, become a woodpecker's all-you-can-eat buffet.

Chickadees, nuthatches, creepers and warblers will join the woodpeckers in the quest for those delicious beetles and other insect larva and move into the nesting cavities after the woodpeckers leave.

Even fish prosper from a fire; ash, loaded with nutrients, will settle into the creeks and lakes, bringing new life to aquatic vegetation which will in turn bring on a blush of invertebrates, ultimately making happy trout and young salmon.

Next summer, Townsend's solitaire, our beautiful feathered vocalist that sings to us all winter from the junipers, will be in the burned forest as well. One of the favored places for a solitaire nest is inside a burned out stump, or right alongside a downed tree. When the babies hatch they look so much like a burned piece of wood you could almost step on them before you see them.

But life isn't all peaches and cream for ground-nesting birds; a variety of weasels and the pine marten are specialists at locating and dining upon them.

Ferns and mushrooms of all kinds will sprout from the nutrient-loaded soil, and if you see a large splash of yellow, orange or white foamy goo at the base of a burned out tree, it is probably a mass of slime mold.

And the most extraordinary thing of all will occur when the fireweed, grasses and other plants begin to grow again: Gigantisim. Nutrients released when all that vegetation burned will provide extra energy to the pioneering plants which will boost their size and volume.

For a young student looking for a science project a burned forest is a wonderful laboratory. After a fire, everything in the forest from college students to insects to mammals and plants is singing, "Happy Days are Here Again!"