At almost 65,000 acres, the Monroe Canyon fire is not only threatening power lines and highways, but also wildlife.
Thousands of fish, deer and elk reside in the area where the wildfire is burning. Even when the flames die out, food scarcity and habitat damage will create new challenges for animals in the following months and years.
Kent Hersey is a big game projects coordinator for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. He’s heard one report of nine deer that were surrounded and killed by the fire. But for the most part, he said deer and elk are pretty good at quickly moving away from fire.
“They see it coming, and they realize it's a threat, and they're able to figure out how to get away from that,” he said.
In the long term, he expects the burn will be a good thing.
“Most of this area that's been burned, at least initially, was up high elevation summer range for these animals, so those actually tend to be good fires for ungulates,” he said. “They come back pretty well. They give new, better vegetation, and so in a year or two, that should be a real positive effect.”
But in the short term, Hersey said he’s worried about food sources in what’s considered the winter range. That includes lower elevation vegetation, like sagebrush and oak brush. If there are too many deer and elk wandering around without food, the state will consider adding some late-season hunts, depending on how the fall hunts go, Hersey said.
“We're hoping to keep those hunts open as much as possible and harvest some of those animals, get mouths off the landscape that way,” he added. “We have options to hunt them harder, if needed, and we'll just keep assessing the situation and adjusting permits and seasons as needed.”
Big game animals may struggle to find food, but human intervention will come a lot faster for them than it will for aquatic wildlife.
Eight lakes and five streams in the fire’s path carry fish, including rainbow trout, Bonneville cutthroat trout and tiger trout.
Aquatic wildlife face several risks, according to DWR Southern Region Aquatic Manager Mike Hadley. After a burn area gets its first rain, ash falls into lakes and streams.
“It kills the fish just by coating their gills so they can't breathe,” Hadley said. “Or sometimes it'll change the chemistry of the water and make it more acidic, so that can also impact the fish.”
If a large flood runs through the burn area, it can physically kill fish by washing them downstream or out of the water completely. As land erosion happens, more nutrients are added to streams and lakes, which can lead to poor water quality.
“That's another thing we'll be looking at, is to see if there are long term impacts to increased nutrient loads that causes things like algae blooms that we see in a lot of other lakes,” he said.
This all depends on the topography and severity of the burn. And it can take anywhere from five to 30 years for an aquatic habitat to return to normal.
Because flooding can happen right after a wildfire, Hadley said they usually wait for five years until they start habitat restoration for aquatic environments.
“Then we'll go in and actually use a lot of the burned trees that are in the area to create stream habitat, not only just to create habitat for fish, but it also helps to stabilize the stream and some of the banks and help it recover from some of that damage,” he said.
There’s not a lot that can be done for the fish right now, though earlier this summer, the state relocated a population of Bonneville Cutthroat trout during the France Canyon fire. With the Monroe Canyon fire, Hadley said they’re in a “wait and see” mode with fish, but for other wildlife, the DWR plans to start rehabilitation efforts as soon as possible.
Habitat Conservation Coordinator Daniel Eddington said before any work can start, agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management and the National Forest Service, will work with the state to assess how much the blaze damaged the land.
“We do a lot of the work in some of those higher to moderate severity burn areas where the fire burned a little bit hotter,” Eddington said.
Some Aspen tree roots should sprout soon, which will help stabilize the soil, but that won’t be enough to avoid erosion. Eddington said they will need to put sterile wheat grass down with aerial seeding, so raindrops hit vegetation instead of soil.
“That's kind of the initial stab that we take at that, just trying to get something out there to cover the soil, so that when we do have rain events, hopefully we can prevent the erosions that will likely come into some of our streams and cause water quality issues,” he said.
In the long term, they will try to get native grasses, flowers and shrubs back. They will focus on moderate to severely burned areas, since the heat would have killed any underground seeding in those areas.
With potential flash flooding events, they’re in a vulnerable position, and it’s hard to predict what will happen to the landscape the first year after a wildfire. But Eddington said they’re ready to seed as soon as they can.
“Our main goal is to get something down this fall, because if we get something down this fall, for sure, we'll have germination,” Eddington said.
