chaparral. Now it is bare earth and rock and scattered skeletons of shrubs set against a backdrop of rugged hills, almost as barren as Death Valley. But here and there new growth emerges. Specks of green show.
The view is more or less the same on both sides of the road. The fire jumped the road.
Ignition was somewhere out in those hills. It started with a cookstove at a camp used by marijuana growers. Something like ninety thousand acres burned, an area a hundred times the size of Central Park, ten times the size of Santa Barbara’s Jesusita Fire. The response included 901 personnel on-site. Some would have been driving bulldozers. Others would have been swinging pulaskies. Still others would have been driving buses and filling out paperwork and operating radios and washing dishes.
In chaparral, plant resins leach into the soils. When fire heats the soils, the resins coat soil particles. After a fire, soils will be water resistant for a time, hydrophobic. After a fire like this, water runs off bare hillsides, picking up volume and momentum as it flows downhill, ripping out patches of ground as it goes. Mudslides follow chaparral fires. From where we stand, we can see two mudslides that, in populated areas, would have destroyed homes.
Certain insects come to fires. Most famous among these is the fire beetle, Melanophila acuminata, known for detecting fires from miles away, flying in, and laying eggs in the dead but still hot skeletons of trees. Dead, the trees are defenseless. Burned trees do not exude resin to stop the beetle larvae as they feast on the dead wood.
To find fires, the beetles use receptors hidden in pits along the sides of their bodies. The heat warms tiny sacs in these pits, and the warmed sacs press against neurons that are sensitive to pressure, sensitive to touch. The fire beetle feels the fire not as heat but as pressure, and it flies toward that pressure, looking for a mate, looking for a place to lay eggs. The fire beetle sometimes successfully finds barbecues and smokestacks and stadium lights. It sometimes lands on firefighters.
The mechanism used by the fire beetle is so sensitive that it has attracted the attention of the military. Duplicated electronically, the mechanism may offer a new approach to infrared scopes of the sort used to see at night, to see through smoke-filled rooms, to find hot spots when mopping up burned-out fires.
Before the fire, deer, coyote, black bear, and an occasional mountain lion roamed the La Brea hills. Mice, kangaroo rats, and shrews would have been here in the brush, along with chipmunks, raccoons, and skunks. There would have been bobcats. There would have been fence lizards, king snakes, and rattlesnakes. The larger mammals, to the extent they could, would have fled before the fire. Some of the smaller mammals would have been baked in trees. Others, along with the snakes and lizards, would have hunkered down in burrows or rock piles, surviving or roasting as a function of wind direction and fuel abundance and moisture and luck.
Birds, once out of the nest, have the advantage of flight. Firefighters sometimes see birds fleeing fires and, on occasion, claim to see them ignite in midair.
Unlike plants, unlike fire beetles, mammals and birds and reptiles do not have special adaptations for surviving chaparral fires. They do the best they can. Because chaparral burns irregularly, skipping patches here and there, survivors find a place to live while the land recovers. Or not. Some of them, having survived the flames, will starve to death for lack of forage.
A government report on chaparral wildlife offers the following words of comfort: “From an evolutionary point of view, however, these deaths are inconsequential.”
Burned chaparral, recovering, supports different species than mature chaparral. In the first few years after a fire, cactus mice and harvest mice might come and go. Brush mice may become abundant only in later years. Young chaparral supports more
The view is more or less the same on both sides of the road. The fire jumped the road.
Ignition was somewhere out in those hills. It started with a cookstove at a camp used by marijuana growers. Something like ninety thousand acres burned, an area a hundred times the size of Central Park, ten times the size of Santa Barbara’s Jesusita Fire. The response included 901 personnel on-site. Some would have been driving bulldozers. Others would have been swinging pulaskies. Still others would have been driving buses and filling out paperwork and operating radios and washing dishes.
In chaparral, plant resins leach into the soils. When fire heats the soils, the resins coat soil particles. After a fire, soils will be water resistant for a time, hydrophobic. After a fire like this, water runs off bare hillsides, picking up volume and momentum as it flows downhill, ripping out patches of ground as it goes. Mudslides follow chaparral fires. From where we stand, we can see two mudslides that, in populated areas, would have destroyed homes.
Certain insects come to fires. Most famous among these is the fire beetle, Melanophila acuminata, known for detecting fires from miles away, flying in, and laying eggs in the dead but still hot skeletons of trees. Dead, the trees are defenseless. Burned trees do not exude resin to stop the beetle larvae as they feast on the dead wood.
To find fires, the beetles use receptors hidden in pits along the sides of their bodies. The heat warms tiny sacs in these pits, and the warmed sacs press against neurons that are sensitive to pressure, sensitive to touch. The fire beetle feels the fire not as heat but as pressure, and it flies toward that pressure, looking for a mate, looking for a place to lay eggs. The fire beetle sometimes successfully finds barbecues and smokestacks and stadium lights. It sometimes lands on firefighters.
The mechanism used by the fire beetle is so sensitive that it has attracted the attention of the military. Duplicated electronically, the mechanism may offer a new approach to infrared scopes of the sort used to see at night, to see through smoke-filled rooms, to find hot spots when mopping up burned-out fires.
Before the fire, deer, coyote, black bear, and an occasional mountain lion roamed the La Brea hills. Mice, kangaroo rats, and shrews would have been here in the brush, along with chipmunks, raccoons, and skunks. There would have been bobcats. There would have been fence lizards, king snakes, and rattlesnakes. The larger mammals, to the extent they could, would have fled before the fire. Some of the smaller mammals would have been baked in trees. Others, along with the snakes and lizards, would have hunkered down in burrows or rock piles, surviving or roasting as a function of wind direction and fuel abundance and moisture and luck.
Birds, once out of the nest, have the advantage of flight. Firefighters sometimes see birds fleeing fires and, on occasion, claim to see them ignite in midair.
Unlike plants, unlike fire beetles, mammals and birds and reptiles do not have special adaptations for surviving chaparral fires. They do the best they can. Because chaparral burns irregularly, skipping patches here and there, survivors find a place to live while the land recovers. Or not. Some of them, having survived the flames, will starve to death for lack of forage.
A government report on chaparral wildlife offers the following words of comfort: “From an evolutionary point of view, however, these deaths are inconsequential.”
Burned chaparral, recovering, supports different species than mature chaparral. In the first few years after a fire, cactus mice and harvest mice might come and go. Brush mice may become abundant only in later years. Young chaparral supports more
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