In the recent southland wildfires, one of the vast landscapes that was blackened was Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, the 24,600-acre site of an important UC Davis wildlife study.
For three years, there in San Diego County's extended back yard, UC Davis biologists had been documenting interactions among mountain lions, deer and people. The study, a collaboration of California State Parks, the Department of Fish and Game and the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center, had promised valuable insights about conservation at the urban-wildland interface.
Thus, on Monday, Oct. 28, Wildlife Health Center scientists spent the day in their usual pursuits: tracking movements of radio-collared animals, recording data and finishing a full year's work on a park fire-management plan.
On Oct. 29 came the wall of fire. A Novato firefighter was killed just north of the park; the park's historic headquarters and children's-camp lodges were destroyed. The inferno burned more than 95 percent of the park, consuming mountain meadows, oak woods, coniferous forests and brushy, incendiary chaparral.
The next day, research biologist Jim Bauer eased his pickup truck over the smoking ground. Where 4-foot-thick, 200-foot-tall trees had stood there was only ash and huge, smoldering holes: The trees had burned to their very roots. "I wouldn't have guessed that any (animals) survived," he would later tell the Los Angeles Times.
But he flipped on his tracking receiver and amazingly, there came the familiar beeps, issuing from animals somewhere in the haze, invisible but alive. Eventually, Bauer was able to pick up signals from nine of the study's 11 deer and five of its six mountain lions. The sixth lion, a 3-year-old female, was found dead on Tuesday. She had been badly burned and apparently starved, Wildlife Health Center co-director Walter Boyce said. The fire threatened none of the study's 40-plus bighorn sheep.
Last week, after visiting the study site, Boyce said, "It's definitely a moonscape in places. But in others there is reason to be hopeful."
For starters, with the winter rains, seeds banked in the soil soon will sprout up and will be super-enriched by the fiery release of nutrients. If the deer have abundant food, so will the mountain lions that eat the deer.
However, Boyce noted, "We know from our study that the lions feed at dusk and dawn and hide by day in thick vegetation. That landscape is all exposed now. Will the lions use the park as they did before?" Also, the few woody places that give the deer refuge could end up being attractive to people, too, when park visitors return. That could lead to a rise in human encounters with mountain lions.
And then there is the possibility that the lions will find deer so abundant and accessible in newly burned areas that they will kill fewer of the endangered bighorn sheep in nearby Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.
Overall, the potential for scientific discovery is enormous. "It's incredible the number of things that come to mind," Boyce said.
"The tragedy here is really on the human side," he concluded. "The loss of lives, homes and park cultural resources was tremendous. However, from a biological perspective, what happened wasn't a tragedy. Yes, there may be some species that disappear from the park, either for the short or the long term. However, fire, like a flood, simply reshapes and reorganizes the landscape.
"Some people call what happens after a wildfire a 'recovery.' To me, it is a rebirth -- the rebirth of a landscape born by fire again and again over nature's time scale."