How wildlife survives after wildfires

The biggest danger for wildlife is the aftermath. But many species have evolved to rely on the opportunities created by others.

Stark images from the Californian wildfires have accompanied the headlines over the past few weeks. Alongside burned-out houses and belongings, footage emerged of a baby deer searching for safety amid the smoke, while one photo by Reuters captured a desert tortoise roaming the streets among evacuees. 

But though just like humans, wildlife is susceptible to the immediate dangers of fire, from smoke inhalation to heat stress, research has found that there are often surprisingly few animal fatalities as a direct result of fire. Instead, wildlife tends to be most vulnerable in the immediate aftermath, when shelter and food are scarce. How do different species eke out a living among the devastation? And in a world with increasingly large fires, exacerbated by global climate change, is there any way humans can help them?

Fire is a serious problem for humans, particularly when they build in fire-prone areas, and the losses of life, property and economies can be immense. The Los Angeles wildfires that occurred in January 2025 are predicted to have cost in excess of $135bn (£109.7bn).

However, it is not intrinsically a problem for wildlife. One study, which looked at the results of 31 research papers from 1984 to 2020, found that 65% of studies did not report any animal fatalities as a direct result of fires. Many species have a strategy for evading the fire itself, ranging from simply running away to hiding in burrows underground or sheltering in the treetops. 

Morgan Tingley, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), stresses that fire is a natural part of many ecosystems. California alone experiences it in a number of different ways: the chaparral habitat of dense, shrubby vegetation, where some of the LA blazes in January 2025 seem to have been sparked, is distinguished by mild wet winters and hot dry summers with occasional, very intense fires; while forests in the north of California are accustomed to more regular low-level burns.

Fire releases nutrients into the soil and creates variation in vegetation patterns across large areas, says Gavin Jones, research ecologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, and animals and plants have evolved to live with it around the world. In Australia, for example, echidnas go into a hibernation-like state called "torpor" during bush fires until the danger has passed. 

It is not just about survival; many species need fire for reproduction, food and resources. "If we did not have fire in our system,” says Tingley, "we would lose biodiversity."

Researchers at the Pacific Southwest Research Station found pollinators do well after moderate fires in upland forests. Insects fly away or bury themselves underground, and the opening up of gaps in the tree canopy provides a greater variety of flowers for them to feed on and places in which to nest.

Trees such as the giant sequoia rely to such an extent on intense heat to release seeds from their cones and reproduce that their numbers appear to have been dropping in part because of human efforts to suppress fires.

A number of species thrive under the conditions created after a wildfire, and the black-backed woodpecker is an archetypal example. "It is the most characteristic post-fire bird in western North America," says Tingley. The bird takes advantage of the huge buffet of insects that can be found inside dead and dying trees after a fire has passed through, Tingley explains.

The woodpecker then excavates hollows in damaged trees where it lays eggs, relying on a patchwork of burned land alongside still-green forest for its young to hide from predators. This complex interaction between fire patterns and wildlife is called pyrodiversity, and provides a range of habitats for different species to live in and to go through different parts of their lifecycle.

The cavities that the black-backed woodpecker and related species build to breed in also help repopulate burned forests. The hollows they excavate in trees provide a vital habitat for many other species which are important for regenerating burned areas after wildfires. These include seed-dispersing birds and mammals, insectivorous birds that keep a lid on pests and allow vegetation to recover more rapidly, and small predators. This makes the woodpecker an important "ecological engineer" in fire-prone habitats, just like beavers which help keep fires under control by building dams that spread water through parched landscapes.  

The woodpecker is not the only species to thrive in fire-ravaged landscapes. The gopher tortoise digs long burrows that it uses to escape from wildfires in Florida as well as the intense sun; these in turn are used for shelter or food by more than 350 other species. 

This is just one of many ways that animals interact with wildfire, according to a paper led by Claire Foster, research fellow at the Australian National University – a relationship that can be subtle but substantial.

Some ecosystem engineers change the amount, structure or condition of available fuel for a fire; grazing herbivores gobble up dry flammable vegetation, while others dig the ground which helps to break down leaf litter.

And animals do not always act in ways that humans might deem beneficial. In Australia, scientific research has confirmed long-told Indigenous stories of kites spreading fires by dropping burning sticks into unburned areas to flush out prey.

But wildfires are becoming more common, fiercer and larger due to the changing climate as well as changes in land use and management practices. And that makes it harder even for well-adapted wildlife to cope and to perform their ecosystem roles. 

Though research suggests overall mortality during the active phase of a wildfire is relatively low, increasingly ferocious and large-scale wildfires can affect wildlife in a number of ways. While the blaze is ongoing, it burns plants, injures and kills some animals directly, and displaces species that can move fast. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), a US non-profit, is supporting on-the-ground rehabilitation projects in California to protect individual pets and wild creatures. They provide food, immediate medical care and arrange longer term support if needed. 

As with smaller wildfires, the biggest impacts occur after the fire has burned out, due to the loss of food, water and shelter. As well as a lack of these essential resources, animals can be pushed out of wild areas and towards urban ones, says Kelly Johnston, senior programme officer for disaster response at IFAW, increasing the risk of conflict with humans.

One study by Jones and colleague Jessalyn Ayars found that Californian megafires in 2020 and 2021 affected the habitat of more than 500 species of vertebrates.

The long-toed salamander had the worst of it, with high-severity fire across 14% of its range. Strikingly, other research has found that though it might survive the initial fire, this species tends to struggle in the post-fire environment, and decline in the two decades that follow.

It is not just vertebrates that are affected. Pollinators in upland forests do not appear to tolerate severe fires nearly as well as they do moderate ones.

Smoke from wildfires is another worrying issue, says Tingley, although its full impact on wildlife is still poorly understood. The community science study Project Phoenix is currently attempting to figure out how it affects birds in California, Oregon and Washington.

While plants and animals can recover from shocks, that becomes harder as fires grow and the interval between them shortens. And climate change is supercharging these kinds of extreme events. In in the wake of the 2025 Californian wildfires, researchers at UCLA wrote a quick response paper. Though it has not yet been peer reviewed, it suggests that climate change may have contributed to a quarter of the "extreme fuel moisture deficit" when the fires began. This meant vegetation was drier and more prone to burning. The World Weather Attribution group, which analyses weather observations and climate models to estimate the influence climate change is having on extreme weather, also concluded that global warming made the hot, dry weather conditions responsible for the LA wildfires about 35% more likely.

A warming planet is just one of many interconnected factors that lie behind changes in wildfire patterns. Other stressors, such as the movement of invasive species, limit how resilient forests are to these kinds of disturbances. However, the spread of invasives in turn is exacerbated by climate change.

Invasive grasses in particular are making fires more common and destructive, says Tingley. He notes that the 2020 Bighorn Fire in Arizona spread into the low Sonoran desert due to the ubiquity of invasive buffelgrass. "This resulted in a catastrophic loss of mature saguaro cactus which normally do not experience severe fire," says Tingley.

Another key factor is forest management practices.

Industrial-scale commercial forests result in evenly spaced trees of similar ages and species that makes it easier for fire to spread, while natural forests are more resilient. 

Fire has also been suppressed in many parts of the US to protect human homes and infrastructure, and Indigenous prescribed fire practices have been relinquished, leading to a build-up of flammable material. "Fires have been intentionally removed from the system, and that has created a really changed template for what happens when a fire ignites," says Jones. "It's more extreme than it might have been historically."

There is still a lot more to learn about the complex interplay between animals and fire. But the decline in biodiversity in California – and even more so worldwide – may be a further factor exacerbating wildfires if key species are lost.

While some species might adapt to the changing nature of fire, experts acknowledge that we do not yet know the full long-term impacts of recent conflagrations on wildlife. But we do know that it takes ecosystems longer to recover from severe fires, particularly in a changing climate.

Shifting fire patterns during prehistoric periods of global warming and drying are likely to have driven animals to extinction. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has already listed a small otter-like mammal called the Southern Sierra Nevada fisher and the Sierra Nevada red fox as endangered species in part because of the threat of high-severity wildfires which destroy their habitat and dismantle wildlife corridors through which they can safely move.

Tingley says climate change is rapidly changing the nature of fire even in ecosystems that have evolved with it. The "post-fire specialist" that is the black-backed woodpecker, for example, is finding it difficult to breed successfully because large-scale fires do not leave it with the ideal mosaic of burned land alongside unburned green woods, he says. 

That's not just bad for the black-backed woodpecker, but for all the species that depend on it.

There is even a risk of fundamental changes to an ecosystem from forest to shrubland or grassland. This may already be happening to chaparral in southern California, with potentially "far-reaching impacts" on biodiversity and on ecological services critical to human health and society such as water provision, erosion control and carbon sequestration. Such a significant change in vegetation could, in turn, increase the flammability of the landscape.

One approach to humans having to co-exist with fire in a changing climate is therefore to try to maintain healthy, diverse ecosystems. But how that should be done depends on the specific habitat and the part of the world it is in.

In some places that might mean rewilding by reintroducing large herbivores, which one study says "offers a powerful tool for managing the risks of wildfire and its impacts on natural and human values". Targeted grazing is already being tried on grassland in Oregon with some success.

Another paper suggests that the reintroduction of ecosystem engineers such as the numbat and bridled nail tail wallaby in Australia helped diminish the size and spread of fires. "This result has major implications for fire behaviour and management globally," the paper concludes, showing the "need to restore the full suite of biodiversity".

In Australia, several studies have examined the potential of artificial wildlife refuges to deal with a specific threat; invasive mammalian predators like feral cats and European red foxes that prey on native creatures in the aftermath of a fire.

To test their idea, a team of Australian researchers built the artificial "bunkers" in three different habitats – temperate, arid and Mediterranean – located in Otway Ranges and Kangaroo Island in the southeast of the country, and Simpson Desert in central Australia. The shelters were made of wire mesh and covered with cloth, and included remote-sensing camera traps inside and outside. They were placed after a series of wildfires between 2015 and 2020. 

While the refuges were used by small birds and reptiles, they do not seem to have helped the overall abundance or diversity of small animals. 

Darcy Watchorn, visiting scholar at Deakin University's School of Life and Environmental Science in Australia and threatened species biologist for Zoos Victoria who led on this research, is still interested in this approach. But he warns that artificial interventions can turn into an "ecological trap", potentially luring in animals to be burned and risking prioritising some species over others.

Furthermore, there is an "opportunity cost of putting time and resources into strategies that are promising but do not yet have enough evidence yet," says Watchorn. 

Foster says it is "highly improbable" that ecosystem engineers are going to be a silver bullet for fire management. "I would caution, particularly given the horrendous losses so recently experienced in California… that the role of animals in managing fuel and landscape flammability is quite nuanced, and research is lacking as to the magnitude of effects in most systems." 

For Tingley, the best current solution to combat the impact of wildfires in the western US is to vastly increase the scale of prescribed burning, rekindling a closer relationship with the land that Indigenous peoples have had for thousands of years. 

"A major problem right now is that many of our forests have not been burned for 100 years or more. When combined with even-aged forest management, biodiversity loss and climate change, the result is the type of fire catastrophe that led to the razing of Paradise [in 2018]," says Tingley. "If we bring fire back to these landscapes in controlled and managed ways, then biodiversity will be restored." 

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