What happened to the birds after the Strawberry Creek fire

The Strawberry Creek Fire burned through Great Basin National Park in 2016. Breeding bird surveys there had been running since 2005, which meant eleven years of before and, by 2023, seven years of after — the kind of accident no one can design for.

A green-tailed towhee. Common both before and after the fire. John Dickson.

The two habitats, and how much of each burned

Montane riparian — the corridor itself: water birch, willow, aspen, Woods rose, with pinyon pine and Utah juniper around it. All ten survey sites had burned ground.

Mountain shrub — sagebrush, flowers and grasses, with white fir and mahogany nearby. About five sites burned; the upper half was outside the fire.

How a survey is done

Every June, ten locations at least 250 m apart. At each one, every bird seen or heard in ten minutes is recorded, following Great Basin Bird Observatory protocol. Start at sunrise, finish by 10 a.m.

Montane riparian in solid blue, mountain shrub hatched grey. The fire falls in 2016, roughly halfway through the record.

More birds, not fewer

The riparian count went up by a quarter. The shrub count barely moved.

Which birds, which is the more interesting question

Montane riparian

• Steady: yellow-rumped warbler, yellow warbler
• Down: mountain chickadee, ruby-crowned kinglet, warbling vireo — all birds of the upper canopy, which is the part a fire takes
• Up: American robin, broad-tailed hummingbird, hairy woodpecker, house wren, lazuli bunting, violet-green swallow, western wood-pewee

Mountain shrub

• Steady: American robin, chipping sparrow, green-tailed towhee, ruby-crowned kinglet, vesper sparrow, warbling vireo
• Down: Brewer's sparrow, sage sparrow
• Up: hermit thrush, northern flicker, western meadowlark

What it adds up to so far

A shift in composition rather than a loss — and a larger shift in the riparian habitat, which is also the one that burned completely. The canopy species left and the species that use open ground, dead wood and shrub moved in.

This is preliminary. The surveys are still running and the analysis continues.

Sources

Gretchen Baker, ecologist, writing in The Midden — Great Basin National Park, vol. 24 no. 2, Winter 2024. A work of the United States government in the public domain.