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burnout Southern California wildfires likely outpace ability of wildlife to adapt Even species that evolved with wildfires, like mountain lions, are struggling. Liza Gross, Inside Climate News Jan 21, 2025 10:35 am | 3 A family of deer gather around burned trees from the Palisades Fire at Will Rogers State Park on Jan. 9 in Los Angeles. Credit: Apu Gomes/Getty Images A family of deer gather around burned trees from the Palisades Fire at Will Rogers State Park on Jan. 9 in Los Angeles. Credit: Apu Gomes/Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreAs fires spread with alarming speed through the Pacific Palisades region of Los Angeles Tuesday, Jan. 7, a local TV news crew recorded a mountain lion trailed by two young cubs running through a neighborhood north of the fire. The three lions were about three-quarters of a mile from the nearest open space. Another TV crew captured video of a disoriented, seemingly orphaned fawn trotting down the middle of a street near the Eaton Fire in Altadena, her fur appearing singed, her gait unsteady.Firefighters are still struggling to contain fires in Los Angeles County that have so far destroyed thousands of homes and other structures and left more than two dozen people dead. Fires and the notorious Santa Ana winds that fuel their spread are a natural part of this chaparral landscape.But a warming world is supercharging these fires, experts say. Climate change is causing rapid shifts between very wet years that accelerate the growth of scrubland grasses and brush, leading to whats known as excessive fuel loading, that hotter summers and drier falls and winters turn into easily ignited tinderbox conditions. The area where the fires are burning had the singularly driest October through early January period we have on record, said climate scientist Daniel Swain during an online briefing last week.Its too soon to know the toll these fires have taken on wildlife, particularly wide-ranging carnivores like mountain lions. But biologists worry that the growing severity and frequency of fires is outpacing wildlifes ability to adapt.State wildlife officials dont want people to provide food or water for wild animals, because it can alter their behavior, spread disease, and cause other unintended effects. What wildlife need right now, they say, is to reach safe habitat as fast as they can.Wildlife living at the interface of urban development already face many challenges, and now these fires have deprived them of critical resources, said Beth Pratt, California National Wildlife Federation regional executive director. Animals that escaped the flames have lost shelter, water, and food sources, all the things they need to survive, she said. The fires are even wiping out many of the plants butterflies and other pollinators need to feed and reproduce, she noted.Connecting isolated patches of habitat with interventions like wildlife crossings is critical not only for building fire resilience, Pratt said, but also for protecting biodiversity long term.Mountain lions and other wildlife adapted to the wildfires that shaped the Southern California landscape over thousands of years.Many animals respond to cues that act as early warning signs of fire, using different strategies to avoid flames after seeing or smelling smoke plumes or hearing tree limbs crackle as they burn. Large animals, like mountain lions and deer, tend to run away from advancing flames while smaller species may try to take cover.But now, with major fires happening every year around highly urbanized areas like LA, they cant simply move to a nearby open space.Daniel Blumstein, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and others have exposed animals to fire-related sensory cues in experiments to study their responses.A variety of different species, including lizards, hear or smell these cues and modify their behavior and take defensive action to try to survive, said Blumstein.If youre a lizard or small mammal, he said, getting underground in something like a burrow probably protects you from fire burning above you.But the magnitude and rapidity of these sorts of fires, and the rapidity of these fires particularly, you cant do anything, said Blumstein. I expect lots of wildlife has been killed by this fire, because it just moved so fast.Helping wildlife during emergenciesWildlife experts urge California residents not to provide food or water for wildlife during emergencies like the LA fires. Attracting wildlife to urban areas by providing food and water can have several unintended negative consequences.Fire events often leave many concerned citizens wondering what they can do to help displaced or injured wildlife, said California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesperson Krysten Kellum. The agency appreciates people wanting to help wild animals in California, she said, offering the following recommendations to best help wildlife during emergencies:Please DO NOT provide food or water to wildlife. While this may seem well intentioned, the most critical need of wildlife during and after a wildfire is for them to find their way to safe habitat as quickly as possible. Stopping for food or water in fire zones and residential areas poses risks to them and you. Finding food and water in a specific location even one time can permanently alter an animals behavior. Wildlife quickly learns that the reward of receiving handouts from humans outweighs their fears of being around people. This often leads to a cycle of human-wildlife conflicts, which can easily be avoided.CDFW also advises leaving wild animal rescue to trained professionals. If you find an orphaned, sick, or injured wild animal after a fire event, report the sighting to local CDFW staff by emailing details to R5WildlifeReport@wildlife.ca.gov. You can also contact a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. For a list of licensed rehabilitators, visit the CDFW website.Just as human defenses didnt work against flames fanned by winds moving 100 miles an hour, he said, things animals might do might not be effective for something traveling so fast.Tuesday night, Jan. 7, Blumstein saw the Eaton Fire burning in the mountains around Altadena, about 30 miles northeast of his home in the Santa Monica Mountains. When he woke up later in the night, he saw that the whole mountain was on fire.You cant run away from that, he said.An evolutionary mismatchThe Los Angeles region is the biggest metropolitan area in North America inhabited by mountain lions. City living has not been kind to the big cats.If they dont die from eating prey loaded with rat poison, lions must navigate a landscape so fragmented by development they often try to cross some of the busiest freeways in the world, just to find food or a mate or to avoid a fight with resident males.Its a lethal choice. About 70 mountain lions are killed on California roads every year, according to the UC Davis Road Ecology Center. The Los Angeles region is a hotspot for such deaths.Roads are the highest source of mortality in our study area, said Jeff Sikich, a wildlife biologist with the National Park Service who has been studying the impacts of urbanization and habitat fragmentation on mountain lions in and around the Santa Monica Mountains for more than two decades.Sikich and his team track adults and kittens that they implant with tiny transmitters. In 2023, one of those transmitters told him a three-month-old kitten had been killed on a road that cuts through the Santa Monica Mountains.The kittens caught on video following their mom near the Palisades Fire are probably about the same age.Lions living in the Santa Monica Mountains are so isolated from potential mates by roads and development, Sikich and other researchers reported in 2022, they face a high risk of extinction from extremely low levels of genetic diversity.We dont have many lions radio collared now, but there is one adult male that uses the eastern Santa Monica Mountains, where the Palisades Fire is, Sikich said. I located him on Monday outside the burn area, so hes good.Most of the animals dont have radio collars, though, so Sikich cant say how theyre doing. But if they respond to these fires like they did to previous conflagrations, theyre likely to take risks searching for food and shelter that increase their chances of fatal encounters andif these types of fires persistextinction.We learned a lot after the Woolsey Fire that happened in 2018 and burned nearly half of the Santa Monica Mountains and three-quarters of the Simi Hills, said Sikich.Sikich and his team had 11 lions collared at the time and lost two in the Woolsey Fire. One of the cats just couldnt escape the flames, Sikich said. A second casualty, tracked as P-64 (P is for puma), was a remarkably resourceful male nicknamed the culvert cat because hed managed to safely navigate deadly roadways to connect three different mountain ranges within his home range. P-64, an adult male mountain lion, travels through a tunnel under Highway 101, heading south toward the Santa Monica Mountains in 2018. Credit: National Parks Service P-64, an adult male mountain lion, travels through a tunnel under Highway 101, heading south toward the Santa Monica Mountains in 2018. Credit: National Parks Service The cat traversed a long, dark tunnel under Highway 101, used by more than 350,000 cars a day, to reach a small patch of habitat north of the Santa Monica Mountains. Then he used another tunnel, made for hikers and equestrians, to reach a much larger open space to the north. But when the fire broke out, he didnt have time to reach these escape routes.Sikich could see from P-64s GPS collar that he was in the Simi Hills when the fire started. He began heading south, but ran smack into a developed area, which adult males do their best to avoid, even without the chaos of evacuations and fire engines.So he had two options, Sikich said. He could have entered the urban area or turned around and go back onto the burnt landscape, which he did.A few weeks later, Sikich got a mortality signal from P-64s radio collar. We didnt know at the time, of course, but when we found him, he had burnt paws, he said. So he died from the effects of the fire.The cat was emaciated, with smoke-damaged lungs. His burnt paws hindered his ability to hunt. He likely starved to death.When the team compared collared cats 15 months before and after the fire, they saw that the surviving cats avoided the burned areas. Lions need cover to hunt but the area was just a moonscape, Sikich said. The loss of that habitat forced the cats to take greater risks, likely to find food.Mountain lions tend to be more active around dawn and dusk, but after the fire, collared cats were more active during the day. That meant they were more likely to run into people and cross roads and even busy freeways, Sikich and his team reported in a 2022 study. On Dec. 3, 2018, National Park Service researchers discovered the remains of P-64, who survived the flames of the Woolsey Fire but died a few weeks later. The lion was emaciated and likely starved to death, unable to hunt with burnt paws. Credit: National Park Service On Dec. 3, 2018, National Park Service researchers discovered the remains of P-64, who survived the flames of the Woolsey Fire but died a few weeks later. The lion was emaciated and likely starved to death, unable to hunt with burnt paws. Credit: National Park Service We expect animals, in the long run, to adapt to the environments in which they live, said Blumstein, who contributed to the study. In California, they adapted to coastal chaparral fires but not to fires in a fragmented habitat dominated by development. And when animals adapt to something, there can be mismatches between what they see as attractive and whats good for them, he explained.Historically, being attracted to dense vegetation might have been a good thing, but if the only dense vegetation left after a fire is around peoples houses, that may not be a good thing, he said.Two cats tracked after the fire died of rodenticide poisoning and another was killed by a vehicle.The cats also traveled greater distances, which put young males at greater risk of running into older males defending their territory. The cat who died on the road was the first to successfully cross the 405 interstate, the busiest in the nation, from the Santa Monica Mountains into the Hollywood Hills. Sikich knew from remote cameras that an adult male had lived there for years. Then after the fire, surveillance footage from a camera in a gated community caught that dominant male chasing the young intruder up a tree, then toward the freeway.He tried to head back west but wasnt lucky this time as he crossed the 405, Sikich said.Add climate change-fueled fires to the list of human activity thats threatening the survival of Southern Californias mountain lions.Counting on wildlife crossingsWhen the Woolsey Fire took out half of the open space in the Santa Monica Mountains, it placed considerable stress on animals from mountain lions to monarchs, said Pratt of the National Wildlife Federation. These massive fires underscore the urgent need to connect isolated patches of habitat to boost species ability to cope with other stressors, especially in an urban environment, she said.Studies by Sikich and others demonstrated the critical need for a wildlife crossing across Highway 101 to connect protected habitat in the Santa Monica Mountains with habitat in the Simi Hills in the north. It was at a tunnel underneath the 101 connecting those two regions that Sikich first saw the culvert cat, the lion with burnt paws who perished in the Woolsey Fire.More than 20 years of research highlights the importance of connectivity in these fire-prone areas, he said, so animals can safely get across the freeways around these urban areas.Pratt helped raise awareness about the need for a wildlife crossing through the #SaveLACougars campaign. She also helped raise tens of millions of dollars to build the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, aided by P-22, the mountain lion who became world-famous as the Hollywood cat. P-22 lived his life within an improbably small 8-square-mile home range in LAs Griffith Park, after crossing two of the nations busiest freeways.The crossing broke ground in 2022, the same year wildlife officials euthanized P-22, after they determined the 12-year-old cat was suffering from multiple serious injuries, likely from a vehicle strike, debilitating health problems, and rodenticide poisoning.Wildlife crossing and connectivity projects dont just address biodiversity collapse, they also boost fire and climate resilience, Pratt said, because they give animals options, whether to escape fire, drought, or roads.Thinking of fire as something to fight is a losing battle, she said. Its something we have to coexist with. And I think that we are making investments that are trying to take out a reliance on fossil fuels so that the conditions for these fires are not so severe, she said, referring to Californias targets to slash greenhouse gas emissions within the next 20 years.Even with the inbreeding and lethal threats from cars and rat poison, Sikich sees reason to be hopeful for the Santa Monica lion population.For one thing, he said, were seeing reproduction, pointing to the mom with kittens seen above the Palisades fire and new litters among the females his team is following. And the amount of natural habitat we do have is great, he said, with plenty of deer and cover for hunting. Thats why we still have lions.This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.Liza Gross, Inside Climate News 3 Comments
