Hidden Riches

The Bountiful Comeback of Life After Wildfire

This year I am celebrating my sixth year of installing remote cameras in the wild after wildfire - finding rare wildlife in forests that recently experienced wildfire. Initially, the forests may look slightly bleak, a reason for mourning, a reason to reject the blackened skeletal land without so much as a second look. 2013 Rim Fire, Stanislaus, 2017 Sonoma Complex Fire, 2020 August Complex Fire, Mendocino, 2021 Dixie Fire, Lassen…the list goes on. But the wild is always mysterious, and the comeback is more bountiful than expected.

The remote camera is like a pair of eyes with a memory, camouflaged to blend with branch and bark. Clothed in the silences and sounds of the elements, it holds still, inactive, until something or someone moves. Snowflakes, sunbursts, the nearness or distance of a stealthy presence, branches rattling in storm winds – all set the camera whirring into quiet action. Being there but not being there, being invisible, provides me a strange intimacy with the enormity of natural cycles, the animals making their living within those cycles. They alert me to the significance of charred trees and logs I would otherwise clamber over or walk past and forget. All serve their wild residents when left in place.

My cameras are still out there, hidden among curtains of green. Like all visitors, I am an outsider, a speck moving across vast expanses, a mere instant, less than a blink, within vast timeframes. A ringtail cat drops a cluster of pine needles, dives between logs to retrieve it, and emerges to nibble the tiny knot joining the leaves. A gray fox cub jumps to the slant of a high log with the fluid ease of his parents. A young bear with glossy cinnamon fur comes to the mountain lion’s scratching post to absorb the afternoon sun. Later that evening, he visits again with his family. A long-tailed weasel crosses a small creek, stands on hind legs and flashes past – all within a second. His larger cousin, the Pacific fisher, catches a scent in another part of the forests and stands to attention, trying to gauge its direction. A healthy-looking bobcat rolls around on his back. The deer are wary while gleaning from the fresh new growth. Birds fill the valleys and ridgelines with their songs.

Here’s a new highlight, a fisher recorded in early in 2026.

And here’s an end note - these forests are best left intact. They are not places to remove, to “salvage”. They are the essentials of the wild. Unexpectedly beautiful surprises are sure to follow those who step into the wilds of California forests where the wildfires have cooled, where the new growing forest is beginning to peep out of the still-charred soil.