I made my annual summer migration from southeastern Arizona to northern Nevada a few weeks ago, stopping to record along the way. My first stop was in the Blue Range of east-central Arizona, a land of conifers and beautiful grassy meadows. Much of this area was impacted by the 2011 Wallow Fire, and the hillsides are still covered with the skeletons of aspen, fir, and pine killed by the fire. Climbing any ridge or hilltop in the area reveals the extent of the fire – dead trees as far as you can see in any direction. I hate to use the word “devastation,” as fire is a rejuvenating force and integral to the ecology of these mountains, but it is still painful on some level to see hundreds of thousands of acres of forest reduced to skeletons.
Patches of forest remain among the skeletons, though. I set up camp in one of those patches – a small grove of ponderosa pine, aspen, and Douglas-fir near some good-sized meadows. The meadows had small streams running through them, and after this springs unusual rains, everything was incredibly green and lush.
We – the dog and I – spent a couple of days at this spot, wandering around the meadows, photographing wildflowers and butterflies, listening to the sounds of forest wildlife. We watched the elk wander into the meadows at dusk, and were thrilled (I was, anyway), to hear frogs calling from one of the meadows as darkness settled in. They were a bit distant, but I tried to record them anyway:
The frogs called for much of the night with their lovely, sleep-inducing repetitious calls. My sleep was interrupted though by the frequent crash-thud of ponderosa pine cones falling from the trees and hitting the ground, and the occasional squawk of some juvenile Great Horned Owls. As dawn approached, the soundscape completely changed, as the birds and squirrels greeted the rising sun:
The drumming is from Three-toed Woodpeckers, which are one of several species drawn to burned areas in search of the beetles that devour dead trees. We spent the day poking around the meadow and walking up some of the nearby dirt roads. By late afternoon, a thin cloud of smoke started covering the sky to the south – a wildfire, most likely started by recent thunderstorms. The smoke was to become a theme of the trip, as blazes throughout the west left much of the area blanketed with smoke.
On the second evening, I thought I’d set up my parabolic dish and try to get a better frog recording. As I slowly wandered away from camp trying to find some calling frogs, a pair of coyotes started barking and yipping from the other side of the meadow. In the dim light they were difficult to see, but I finally spotted them pacing back and forth over a section of the meadow that Shadow and I had walked through earlier in the day. Perhaps we got too close to a den.
They yipped and barked from that area for about 20 minutes. Unfortunately, the frogs were quiet that night, so I was stuck with the poor recording from the previous night. I left the area in awe, once again, at how resilient nature is, even after (or perhaps because of) a massive wildfire.
For more about the Wallow fire, see After the Wallow Fire.
Very nice! You say it’s poor quality, but the recording of the frogs sounds great to me through my headphones. I love the multiple layers of sound present in the recording – lots of texture in there.
I’ll be heading back to the White Mountains sometime this summer to see how the aspen regeneration is faring on Escudilla mountain and elsewhere. Some of the largest aspen stands in the state were on Escudilla (from a big fire there back in the 1950s) and it’ll be interesting to see if they’ve expanded. I was on east Escudilla in the spring of 2012 and the aspen cotton had drifted a foot deep in places from the surviving trees seeding back into the burned areas. After their fire in 2012 the upper Mogollons in the Gila Wilderness made a total phase shift from mixed conifer to almost pure aspen in just two years. I’m hoping to see something similar occurring on Escudilla and the other places where the successional aspen had begun to fade.
That’s fascinating, Del. A foot of aspen cotton! Thanks for sharing these observations.
Thanks, Del. I was on Escudilla in the fall of 2012 (one of my fist blog posts describes it). Inside the living stands, the aspen were already basal sprouting. I look forward to hearing your observations from this summer. I’ve seen some of the dense tree stands (pines) in the Gila that burned twice in the last couple of decades start resprouting with oak. I think the habitat changes we are seeing related to drought and wildfire are fascinating, although complicated by cattle grazing, wildlife management, and logging.
Yep, the changes we are seeing are dramatic and fascinating, for sure. Of course, much of what they (the fires) are doing is perfectly natural and has been going on for eons here in the West. It is our reaction to them that is not natural. We’re such a short-lived species and we are so stubbornly resistant to change – to a fault – that we are often blind to what is going on around us. Even the lens of science isn’t of much help when people refuse to look through it, or interpret what they see through it incorrectly or impose their own desires upon it.
I recently read a great book by William Baker called “Fire Ecology in Rocky Mountain Landscapes.” It was mostly a textbook of the latest available fire science from the “red pill” side of the wildfire debate. It’s focused on the Rockies but much of what it has to say applies to ponderosa and forested landscapes anywhere. He was extremely careful not to step into the territory of the Covington/ERI folks in the Mogollon Rim area (which was interesting in its own right.) Buried in this thick book and its chapters and subchapters and tabular figures was perhaps one of the clearest pictures I’ve yet seen of the wild Other at work in nature – at least in western North America. After reading that book I started to see the workings of these wildfires a little differently.
Exactly! Thanks for the reference – I’ll look it up.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for sharing these; nice to wander the meadow “with” you! As always, such a rich variety of voices in this one place.
Thanks, Jim!