Navigating
Smoky Skies
AS
CLIMATE CHANGE lengthens and intensifies the
wildfire season along the West Coast of the
United States, questions of survival emerge for
everyone — including the birds flying through
the smoke. Moses Aubrey, a researcher with the
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County,
watched this play out in real time during the
devastating January 2025 fires in the LA
neighborhoods of Altadena and Pacific Palisades.
While ash fell from the sky, Aubrey noticed how
birds vanished from their usual haunts, except
for one resilient species that stuck around
despite the apocalyptic conditions.
“The
thing that was most shocking is that, where I
was living in LA, it was raining ash and most of
the birds that I would see normally weren’t
around,” remembers Aubrey. “But the black phoebe
was just doing its thing. I thought that was
pretty crazy.”
Observations
like Aubrey’s raise pressing questions about
avian survival strategies, yet there is a
critical gap in our understanding of how birds
respond to increasingly destructive
fires. Research from UC
Irvine confirmed that California’s wildfire
season has lengthened, and the yearly peak in
fires has moved from August to July. The recent
catastrophic fires in Los Angeles, which
occurred well outside the traditional fire
season, further signal a shift in wildfire
patterns that disrupts both human communities
and wildlife populations.
Journalist
Rebecca Lerner reports on a crowdsourced
research project on wildfire and birds that is
recruiting citizen scientists across California,
Oregon, and Washington to conduct weekly bird
surveys during peak wildfire
season. | 
