Drought, fires take a toll on wildlife
The startling appearance by the ursine visitor underscores a problem across the West this summer as catastrophic fires combined with drought have driven thousands of animals, from ants to antelopes, out of their wildland homes. Many have turned up on people's blackened doorsteps.
"A lot of evacuees in the Show Low and Pinetop-Lakeside area are returning home and finding visitors — wild ones," Arizona game officials said in a report on the 468,000-acre fire that forced the evacuations of 30,000 people and burned 467 homes.
After the huge blaze, the Arizona Game and Fish Department identified 200 fire-displaced species, including endangered Mexican gray wolves, mountain lions, coyotes, weasels, bobcats, snakes and 162 kinds of birds.
The privately run Wildlife Center in Espanola has three times the normal contingent of bears and other mammals.
"Normal is to have two-thirds of my cages empty at this time of year," said Katherine Ramsey, a veterinarian who now has 170 wild animals at the center, which rehabilitates and returns stressed animals to the wild.
Deborah Gordon, an associate professor of biology at Stanford University, said only the weather, not chemicals, can drive them away.
"Putting out pesticides won't make any difference. . . . They come in because of the weather and they go out because of the weather," she said in an online university publication.
If the drought persists in tandem with fire, animals face dramatically low birth rates over several years, biologists and other wildlife experts say.
"The antelope fawns are way, way down. Normally, going out into the prairies right now you'd see baby antelope everywhere. You're not seeing them," Ramsey said.
"I have heard of almost no baby bears born," she said. "That's because last year the females weren't heavy enough to get pregnant. So we're just not seeing them. We're going to see that in a lot of other species this year, too."
"It's going to take bears years to get body weight built up adequately so that they're carrying enough fat that they can get pregnant," Ramsey said. "It will be five years from this time before we have a good, active breeding population of bears."
That's if the drought ended tomorrow.
She recently beefed up a female black bear that wandered into the lakeside village of Eagle Nest, just south of some of New Mexico's biggest wildfires of the season.
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