by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
In 2017, the Arizona Game and Fish Department estimated that there were only 252 Mount Graham red squirrels left. They only inhabited a few hundred acres in the 10,000-foot Pinaleño Mountains, not equipped to survive the heat of the surrounding deserts. Then, a lightning strike started a 48,000-acre fire in that section of the Coronado National Forest, incinerating all but 35 of the Mount Graham squirrels in existence. Federal and state wildlife officials thought the species faced likely extinction.
It is a more common story than you might think. The Journal Science published a study in 2020 called “Fire and biodiversity in the Anthropocene,” analyzing the danger of wildfires to threatened and endangered species. Across nine taxonomic groups, the study found that “at least 1,071 species are categorized as threatened by an increase in fire frequency or intensity…” That included 16% of all endangered mammals, nearly 20% of listed birds and almost a third of non-flowering plants such as evergreen trees.
Recent wildfires in California reportedly pushed dozens of species to the brink of extinction, utterly devastating miles of habitat that will take decades to recover. Less widely reported was how many endangered birds and animals were burned in those fires (nobody really wants to see that on TV), but as the study euphemistically concluded, “wildlife often cannot adapt quickly enough to escape rapid changes in fire patterns.”
In Colorado, we know the extreme fire seasons of 2002 and 2020 destroyed much of the habitat for the Mexican spotted owl, and the Hayman Fire alone destroyed over half the known habitat of a rare yellow butterfly called the Pawnee montane skipper. In California, the same is now said of the mountain yellow-legged frog and the Amargosa vole, both of which are now nearing extinction. Burning most of them alive certainly didn’t help.
