Famous Frogs That Escaped California Fire Threatened by Mudslides, Red Tape
In the hills outside of Los Angeles, a fire burned for five weeks last fall, killing two firefighters, destroying 89 homes, and leaving an area about a quarter the size of Rhode Island scorched and smelling of ash. Yet there are survivors in this charred wasteland — ground squirrels, crows, and to the great surprise of biologists who found them nestled in one rocky creek just outside the burn area, a population of frogs thought to be nearly extinct in Southern California They’re members of a species known as the California red-legged frog. About the size of a child’s baseball glove, with powerful crimson-dappled legs and bulging black-and-yellow eyes, they are the largest frog species west of the Mississippi. But having narrowly escaped the flames, as well as human development and a disease that has pushed them to the very brink of existence, this endangered frog lies in the path of yet another life-threatening hazard — the coming rains. The post-fire, poorly vegetated landscape is prone to flooding, which could signal the end for the lonely red-legged frog. Life wasn’t always so precarious. The pools and creeks in these parts once teemed with red-legged frogs; during California’s gold rush, they were a staple of the gold miner’s diet: frog leg stew, grilled frog legs, frog leg fricassee. They even starred in Mark Twain’s short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." But unfortunately for the frogs, the foothills and canyons of coastal California are where people want to live, too. As development boomed during the second part of the 20th century, the red-legged frog population dropped by 90 percent. By 2003, scientists knew of only about 40 left in the entire southern part of their range, which stretches from Los Angeles County south to Baja. Biologists have been looking for other populations in this region for the past 10 years but have come up empty handed — until what’s known as the Station Fire subsided in early September. Soon after it burned out, a team from the U.S. Geological Survey went in to assess the ecological damage. While following the course of a small creek, the biologists stumbled on a series of small pools in the Angeles National Forest teeming with red-legged frogs. "It is really exciting," says Adam Backlin, a USGS biologist who has been monitoring the newfound population, which could number as many as 300. "This population may have a lot of genetic diversity that has been lost elsewhere." The discovery represents a rare piece of good news for amphibians as a whole. "Pretty much anywhere there are frogs, we’ve been documenting the decline and disappearance of species," says Dr. Vance Vredenburg, an assistant professor of biology at the University of California San Francisco. So Vredenburg is rooting for these survivors. "A lot of projects have shown that if we give them the opportunity, they will come back. And these frogs are hanging on in that area. That gives me some hope that they can expand from this spot." Although the fires are behind them for this season, heavy rains pose another challenge. Rain falling on a scorched landscape gathers dirt, rocks and debris from the naked hillsides and mixes them into a cement-like slurry that can cover several football fields. These mudslides race down canyons and basins at up to 35 miles per hour, leveling everything in their path. The Angeles Forest frogs wouldn’t stand a chance. So Backlin, the USGS biologist, and several state and federal wildlife agencies have been looking into potential rescue operations. "We would normally not advocate removing animals from the wild," Backlin says. "But they’re so rare, so fragmented, and the populations are so small. If we want them to persist, they need to be managed a little more aggressively." Officials considered temporarily relocating the frogs to zoos in Los Angeles or San Diego. Unfortunately, neither zoo can spare the extra money or staff to care for them. What’s more, some of the frogs have tested positive for a fungus called chytrid that is killing off amphibians around the world. Even though many frogs survive the disease and others seem resistant to infection, the stress of captivity can leave frogs more vulnerable to the effects of the fungus. Zoo officials fear that adopting the Angeles Forest frogs could introduce chytrid into their healthy populations. Another option would be moving the frogs into similar habitat nearby that hasn’t burned. But there aren’t many suitable locations, and because the red-legged frog is listed as "threatened" under wildlife regulations, a litany of requirements must be satisfied before the survivors could be relocated — even if that move is necessary to get them out of harm’s way. "Fortunately, we haven’t gotten a big rain out there yet," Backlin says, "but I don’t know if they’ll make it through the whole year." Meteorologists with the AccuWeather forecasting service predict an above-normal rainy season for southern California this winter, due to a strengthening El Nino. And forecasts call for heavy rains to drench much of the Angeles National Forest as early as Monday, with downpours much of the week. For the red-legged frog, that could be a forecast for extinction.
Read more:
Famous Frogs That Escaped California Fire Threatened by Mudslides, Red Tape
The Big Burn
To those of us who inhabit the western landscape, the Great Burn of 1910 is not history so much as it was the spark for a debate that continues to this day. Timothy Egan, a westerner himself, gets this, and his understanding greatly enlivens his new book, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America . He chronicles one of North America’s biggest wildfires ever, an epic burn that in just a couple of days swept through three million acres — an area larger than some eastern states — in northern Idaho and northwestern Montana. The central tension of the book divides East from West. The Harvard-educated Knickerbocker Theodore Roosevelt and his Yalie sidekick, Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, both loved the West and traveled extensively in it. That affection eventually led to their setting aside vast tracts of public lands. And yet they failed to comprehend that the forces that shaped, and still shape, these lands are untamable, unlike in the East. They especially failed to comprehend the restorative role of wildfires, which open new opportunities for plants and animals while limiting the destructiveness of fires to come. Pinchot himself felt that man at the dawn of the twentieth century was ready to command the evil of fire. He was wrong about both "command" and "evil," but still, an estimated 85 people — most of them firefighters — died senselessly in 1910 trying to prove the point. People still die for much the same reason. The riveting part of this telling is in the detail, which Egan attends to with artful reporterly chops. His command of detail allows the unimaginable sweep of this blaze to slowly sink in, just as we come to appreciate the unimaginable sweep of Roosevelt’s ideas and influence on the West. We also come to understand that the region was not a nice place. We learn, for instance, the ratio of whores to men (1:3) in the tiny town of Taft, Montana; the number of barrels of beer on hand in the Sunset Brewery in Wallace, Idaho; and the particular obstreperousness of two senators from the region, Idaho’s Weldon Heyburn and Montana’s ultra-corrupt William A. Clark. These characters harass, bait, castigate, sabotage, and, in the end, lean on the long arm of the federal government, much as similar characters do to this day in the welfare West. More important is Egan’s understanding that his story is not over. Fire still forms our landscape and our people. It is the best evidence we have that the landscape of the West resists domestication, despite all efforts. The vast scope of the 1910 fire shocked the nation, and the Forest Service embarked on a policy of putting out every fire. To a degree the plan worked, only to load our forests with too many trees, which our warming climate will be more than willing to burn. Repeating the horror of 1910 is not only possible but likely, some say inevitable, on those very acres, some of them visible from my office window in Missoula. Indeed, Egan seems too gentle on Pinchot for his role not only in fire policy but in much of what ails public lands policy today. His most egregious offense was a public, petty, and ego-poisoned campaign against the Department of the Interior during the New Deal. Egan also could have traced a line of thinking he initially follows, but subsequently drops, by describing the evolution of wilderness fire policy, which recognizes the restorative role of fire in western ecosystems and allows that force of nature to fulfill its promise. This is the best example of the Forest Service’s getting it right. Stephen Pyne’s 2008 book on the same subject, Year of the Fires , more thoroughly follows this lead. Nonetheless, The Big Burn is a story well told and a case well made. Pinchot and Roosevelt may have loved the West and may have meant well, but they were visitors who did not remain. It has taken more than 100 years of living with this landscape to begin finally to understand what Native Americans and some early European settlers to the West knew instinctively: fire belongs here.
Read the rest of the post here:
The Big Burn