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M/CLEAR Temp: 70 °F Wind: N at 4 mph Friday, August 2, 2002 SECTIONS Home Page Local News Sports Business Obituaries Life Opinion - Politics AP News Weather Classified Archives Site Map EXTRA Cyberchef E The People Golf Job Network Headbone Zone Wellness Connection Movie Times Newspaper in Education Oregon CarZone Outdoor Journal Personals Prime Times Real Estate Tempo A & E TV Times W3 Magazine CLASSIFIEDS Find a Car Find a Home Find a Job Find Everything E SOUTHERN OREGON Destinations Automotive Communities Employment Entertainment Publications Real Estate Recreation Shopping Calendar ABOUT US FAQ What's New Advertise Home Delivery Classified Ad Contact Us Media Kit Jobs @ Mail Tribune Email Story to a Friend August 1, 2002 Wildlife has little problem escaping fires By MARK FREEMAN Mail Tribune As flames dash through the forest, herds of panicked black-tailed deer dart confusingly amid the thick smoke in search of a route to freedom, while nearby birds singe as flames rush up their nest trees. Mice and salamanders almost vaporize as a wall of fire blazes through yet another ravine, where the short-legged skunks and porcupines can’t out-run the advancing flames. That’s what happens when fire roars through a forest in a famous cartoon movie. But art doesn’t imitate life in the woods during events such as Trail’s Timbered Rock fire, according to animal experts who say the region’s wildlife are well-equipped escape artists when it comes to confronting wildfire. "It’s a legacy of ‘Bambi,’" says Pepper Trail, an ornithologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory in Ashland. "We think of animals losing their heads and running around crazy and everything, but I don’t think that’s the case. "You don’t see animals exhibiting panic very often, really," he says. "If it’s something they can anticipate, like a fire coming over a landscape, my experience is that they’re pretty good at orientating to that threat and getting away from it." While humans seem hell-bent on fighting advancing blazes such as the 17,000-acre Timbered Rock fire now burning in Jackson County’s Elk Creek drainage, wildlife are quick to flee — and quite good at it. Whether by winds or hoofs, by digging or climbing, the majority of wildlife find little trouble escaping wildfire and appear to sense the pending danger. Birds regularly fly in and out of a fire zone, with some hawks even patrolling the fire for exposed prey. Most big-game animals easily scatter across the landscape or take refuge in the unburned oases within the fire zone. Others will drop into creeks and riparian areas that are sometimes side-stepped by flames, while wood rats will dive into burrows and salamanders will dig into downed logs until the encroaching fire passes by. "When a fire comes through, it’s not a massacre of wildlife by any stretch of the imagination," says Tim Burnett, a wildlife biologist for Boise Corp., which owns large tracts of the Timbered Rock fire area. "People assume animals don’t know anything, but animals are more in tune to their environment than we are," he says. "In fact, if we were stuck in the woods with the wildlife, we’d probably be the ones who would sit there and croak." A particular fire’s behavior — whether it burns hot and intense, or simply creeps through the forest floor — usually dictates which or how many animals die, says Jim Harper, a Bureau of Land Management biologist working on the Timbered Rock fire. The Timbered Rock fire likely has caused more problems for wildlife than normal because the fire at times has leap-frogged a mile or so and probably caught wildlife within, Harper says. "But it’s not like you can hold your breath, dash in and look around to see what the wildlife are doing," Harper says. "You can only guess." Similar circumstances occurred in last year’s Quartz fire, where a female cougar and a young kitten were found burned to death, and in 1994’s Hull fire, where a young spotted owl suffered respiratory distress from smoke and later died. Harper, who studies the northern spotted owls in the Elk Creek area, says there are 10 banded pairs of spotted owls within the Timbered Rock fire zone, and he expects at least some of the adults and some of their young fledglings to perish. "The young ones are pretty vulnerable," Harper says. "They probably don’t have the savvy to escape the fire." While Harper expects to track how many of the threatened owls survive the fire, biologists likely will do no massive wildlife inventory. "If we find something big like a cougar or an elk, people will make a note of it," Harper says. "But we won’t go out and do a count. The presumption is, most have been able to get out of the fire’s way." Yet visions of smokey bears and flaming fawns are as indelible and powerful to some people as they are predictable and troublesome to others, like Sam Lindblom of the Nature Conservancy headquarters in Florida. "It’s a pretty volatile subject," Lindblom says. "It taps into people’s feelings about what happens in the wilderness. People get upset when they hear and think about wildlife suffering." But wildlife aren’t necessarily suffering in a fire. They’re not necessarily stressed and scared. Nobody knows what these animals are thinking, Lindblom says, and it’s not right for people to project their feelings about encroaching fire onto wild animals. "It’s very easy for people to cast human emotion onto wildlife," Lindblom says. "You can’t assume they’re terrified. We don’t have any idea what concepts of fear and terror animals associate with fire." A moment in the woods Friday showed Burnett just how animals look at wildfire differently than humans. While in thick timber less than a mile from encroaching Timbered Rock flames and cloaked in thick smoke, Burnett captured and banded two adult spotted owls and their two fledglings during a routine study. The owls acted accordingly. "They weren’t any more scared than every other owl," Burnett says. "They just acted like this was business as usual." Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail [email protected] Printer Friendly Version Email Story to a Friend Subscribe Archive: Click to Search M Mail Tribune Home Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life Opinion - Politics | AP News | Archives | Site Map E Southern Oregon | Classified Copyright 1997-2002 Mail Tribune. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy web master feedback A D V E R T I S E R S