When wildfires destroy their homes, where do the wild things go?

Starvation and sudden loss of protective shelter is one of the more pronounced effects of wildlife deaths following forest fires.

MONTREAL—The black bear was an uncommon sighting in increasingly common circumstances.

Quebec television reporter Marie-Michelle Lauzon was near the front lines of a forest fire that was bearing down Wednesday on the Quebec town of Normétal.

She and her colleagues had pulled over on the side of the road when, she recounted on Twitter, a black bear emerged into the road several metres behind them.

It didn’t attack — likely because it was too busy defending itself.

Who has time to chase pesky journalists, when wild Canadian animals are fleeing the flames of potentially life-changing disasters?

“They’re being forced into areas they wouldn’t normally go, being forced into areas more inhabited by humans,” said Sheryl Fink, the director of wildlife campaigns for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

“They’re displaced from their habitat. They’re looking for food. They’re looking for shelter and I think we’ll see a lot more of them.”

Wildfire is a naturally occurring, seasonal phenomenon. It has, historically, acted as a sort of cleansing ritual for forests and their ecosystems.

“A lot of species were adapted to it. For many plant species, fire is a part of their life cycle,” said Gráinne Michelle McCabe, chief conservation officer with Calgary’s Wilder Institute.

The problem now, scientists say, is that forest fires are occurring more regularly and growing more intense.

“So, a fire that you would have seen every hundred years you’re now seeing much, much more frequently,” McCabe said.

Many of the studies looking into the effects of forest fires on wildlife conclude that what’s needed more than anything is more study. Even the experts admit there are large gaps in the research waiting to be filled in.

The rough cause-and-effect contours of wildfires on wildlife, however, are known.

Whether caused by humans or nature, fire poses the biggest threat to those animals that are slowest and least able to react.

Larger, faster animals, like deer, wolves, rabbits, birds and Lauzon’s black bear can usually find their way to immediate safety.

Smaller, sneakier animals, like mice and squirrels can burrow their way to safety under the ground.

The very young and very old are most at risk. Fish, meanwhile, can often ride out the heat and contamination in the deepest parts of lakes, although drastic changes to water temperature and composition can be deadly.

After that, though, the impacts of a forest fire get hazy.

Researchers gauging the effects of Australia’s so-called megafires, which burned 12.6-million hectares of land (an area the size of England) between August 2019 and March 2020, said animals who are able to survive the flames nevertheless emerged to new and lethal risks. They compared the fire-ravaged habitat to a bare and burnt “moonscape environment.”

Starvation and sudden loss of protective shelter is one of the more pronounced causes of wildlife deaths following forest fires.

But environmental scientists in the U.S. have also hypothesized that animals, like humans, are at risk of smoke inhalation, lung damage and respiratory diseases from the hazardous air quality levels caused by wildfires.

If you’re worried about the asthmatics and the elderly in Toronto, Ottawa or Manhattan, in other words, think of the choking tortoise, owl or moose in Sioux Lookout or Mistissini or Slave Lake.

And like their two-legged counterparts, animals that are forced to contend with tree-fueled, out-of-control blazes experience that most natural of feelings: stress.

“Generalized ‘stress’ is often theorized to decrease immune resistance and although this effect is not always observed, it is possible that stressed animals in the wake of fire will be in worse condition and have weaker immunity,” wrote the American authors of a 2021 study published in the journal Fire Ecology.

Lower immunity means an elevated risk of infection both from fire-related injuries and burns as well as from harmful parasites able to survive the flames, to grow and spread unchecked.

Historically, the reaction when wildlife are at risk from forest fires has been to let nature run its amoral course — to spare or kill based on the whims of the wind.

But McCabe said that wildlife conservation groups like the Wilder Institute are increasingly thinking about how to help some fire-threatened species as they stare down extinction.

It’s the kind of intervention that captured the world’s imagination when officials stepped in to save Australia’s koala bears, 60,000 of which were killed, injured or otherwise impacted by the 2019-20 fires.

In 2018, there were estimated to be between 46,000 and 82,000 koalas in the country. In 2021, the population had declined 30 per cent to between 32,000 and 56,000, according to the Australian Koala Foundation.

The Wilder Institute has taken similar efforts with animals and vegetation.

Among them are the burrowing owl, an endangered bird found in the Prairies with an estimated population of about 300 pairs, McCabe said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service noted that a burrowing owl had survived the destruction of a 2017 wildfire in California’s San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Reserve by digging an underground refuge, true to the rare bird’s name.

The majestic white whooping crane is another endangered bird whose Canadian nesting areas, in Alberta’s Wood Buffalo National Park, are also prone to forest fires.

The whooping crane population was down to “the tens of birds,” said McCabe, but has grown to about 200 with the help of the federally protected status and the assistance of conservationists.

“With each one of these species, in particular because their numbers are so low, any catastrophic event could devastate the whole species,” she said.

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