LIKE A PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES
Published in the Nov 29, 2025 issue.
A fire might be a bad thing for everyone who lives nearby, but it’s not a bad thing for everything that lives nearby.
Take the dark-eyed Junco, for example. It’s a ground-dwelling bird with a rounded head, a short, stout bill, and a long, flicking tail. It hops along the forest floor of Yosemite, and new research suggests it actually thrives in the wake of fire.
A two-decade study of Sierra Nevada national parks found that Junco population densities more than doubled after a fire, and that high population takes decades to return to pre-burn levels.
It’s not just the Junco. Nearly three-quarters of the 42 bird species scientists examined showed increased population density in the first year after a fire.
“The birds are looking for something they get from fire in these landscapes,” said lead researcher Dr. Chris Ray of The Institute for Bird Populations. “They’re going [to places where the forest has burned], and they’re doing it for a reason. Wild animals only do anything for a reason.”
The study took place in Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks, where post-fire management, such as salvage logging, is minimal. That distinction matters, Ray said, because it allowed the team to see how birds respond to fire in a more natural, less managed setting than other studies conducted on U.S. Forest Service (USFS) land.
The researchers analyzed bird responses to wildfires that occurred between 1984 and 2019, using long-term data to track changes in population density from the first year after a fire to decades later. Measuring density (the number of birds per area) offered a clearer picture of ecosystem health than simply noting whether a species was present or absent.
In many cases, the study found that fires that burned in one year were followed by breeding bird counts in the following spring, and every spring thereafter. About half of the study’s bird counts occurred in areas that never burned, allowing the researchers to compare bird responses to burns of all types, including no burn.
The most surprising result, Ray said, was how long the effects lasted. Population density often stayed higher for at least 20 years after a fire, and for over a quarter of the species, density remained high for more than 35 years.
Birds appear to benefit from a variety of changes that follow fire, from immediate boosts in food and nesting opportunities to long-term shifts in habitat structure. Fires can open up the forest, stimulate new plant growth, and create cavities in trees, all of which support a wider range of bird species.
Although most fires in the study were relatively mild, researchers found a consistent pattern: bird populations tended to increase more after moderate-severity burns, and those effects grew stronger over time.
The effects of burn severity and time since fire were strong even when the researchers accounted for other habitat characteristics, such as tree height and canopy cover.
However, Ray cautioned against applying these results to today’s extreme “megafire” conditions, which are large, high-intensity blazes that burn tens of thousands of acres.
The national parks in the study experienced very few fires of truly high severity that burned over large areas before 2019, when the study ended.
Today’s “megafires” are not as likely to be suitable for so many species, at least not in the short term, Ray said. And this makes sense, because it’s not what the birds evolved with.
Historically, Sierra Nevada forests burned frequently at low to moderate intensity, often through Indigenous cultural burning practices that maintained open understories and large, resilient trees.
After the 1870s, settlers suppressed both cultural and natural fires. Combined with a warming climate, increased drought, and a buildup of fuel, this has led to the modern trend of high-severity “megafires.”
Today, forest managers are working to reverse that trend through prescribed burns and other fuel-reduction techniques.
Long story short: it’s not “normal” for the forest to never burn, and it’s not “normal” for it to burn all at once.
Instead, the study suggests that managing forests to create a mosaic of low- and moderate-intensity burns, at varying intervals and severities, would benefit most of the birds that live there.
After all, that’s what these birds are built for. They don’t just survive the burn; they count on it.
