After the fire comes life

Wildfires have shaped our forests for millions of years.

There is not just one fire story; every fire has a different theme depending on the habitat, the fire's intensity, frequency and size. Wildfire does destroy countless numbers of trees which, from the perspective of some people, should have been cut for lumber before they burned.

The Forest Service does all it can with what money they can scrape up to stop wildfire from causing catastrophic damage to our forests and destroying valuable "timber" and homes. Controlled burns, harvest and thinning are the favored tools used to prevent catastrophic wildfires. However, even those efforts cannot stop a wildfire when the weather and forest establish explosive conditions.

If the forest has been mismanaged - as many of ours have since the glory days of logging - then critical fuels are abundant.

We can spend a lot of time shaking a finger at people, conditions and economics that have left us with the fire-prone forests we have around us today. However, once we know the cause, it is better to fix the problem than go on blaming this or that reason.

One of the most exciting things that happens after a wildfire is rebirth. Plants and animals that depend on fire receive a new lease on life. Giganticism in plants, caused by the release of nutrients by fire, is common. One of the first to respond to this condition is the ever present fire weed.

A beautiful buprestid beetle, the Juniper Fire Beetle, cannot exist without fire. The adults wait in the ground for fire and emerge as smoke drifts into their hidyholes. Within days adult males, antenna twitching as they pick up the female's pheromones, emerge and mate, and then females fly from burned tree to burned tree, laying eggs that will hatch and burrow into the dying tree.

It's about the same in a pine forest but with a larger beetle. Gigantic long-horned, pine-boring female beetles lay eggs under the bark of burned ponderosa pine.

If you're out camping at night in summer, you may hear a sudden plop! against your tent and then a weird "rasping" sound as the object slides down the canvas. If you grab your flashlight and take a look, you will find a beetle as big as your thumb with antenna three inches long wobbling around on the ground.

In many parts of the world, people cook and eat the larva of these huge beetles. I tried to while living with a wonderful Aborigine family in Australia but failed miserably, much to the delight of the children.

Woodpeckers follow the beetles, and it is because of fire that these magnificent birds get a new lease on life. You will see woodpeckers by the hundreds invade the burned trees of the GW Fire in the years to come.

Woodpeckers and every other cavity-nester that follows them will occupy rotting trees that remain standing through the years. Chickadees, nuthatches, flycatchers (well, one species anyway) and small owls will use the abandoned cavities as a home to shelter their babies.

If you're hiking in a burned forest in summer, you may suddenly be scared out of your boots by a Townsend solitaire suddenly flying from her invisible nest next to a burned log or stump, and if you look for the nestling you will not see it until it opens its eyes.

The hoary bat, a forest dweller, sleeps away the day under bark of trees and in old nest cavities in a burned forest. Many a moth and beetle never have the opportunity to lay eggs, thanks to myriad bat species that inhabit a burned forest.

Burned, standing trees are not only wonderful wildlife hotels, but they also hold soil in place that has been exposed to the elements. Rain that would crash into the charcoal, carbon and exposed soils will strike the burned trees and stubby limbs first, breaking into a mist instead of slamming into the soil as solid ball of water. Life-giving minerals are then released slowly and not washed away in torrents of flooding water.

As your nose burns from the smoke when you look at burned forests, think of all the life forms that are dependent on that new habitat and tell Smokey: "Fire ain't so bad after all."

That is, if your home is still standing.