City of Sierra Vista: Birding in Burns – Meeting the Fire Birds!

How do birds handle wildfires?

Birds reveal flexible comeback strategies to wildfire, contingent on burn severity and considering their ontological survival approach. Most often, beetle-foraging and cavity-nesting birds profit from high-severity fires that generate snags. In comparison, birds configured for insect foraging in foliage are likely to ramp down after a wildfire. The adverse impacts of wildfires on numerous bird populations seem to be temporally limited to the year of the burn. While researchers discovered that populations bounced back to pre-burn levels following the burn year; populations in a few cases substantially decreased the subsequent year. We will examine how snags of all sizes function as critical habitat factors for cavity-nesting birds among other wildlife that exploit tree cavities. Grasp how the “fire birds” survive a conflagration.