Wildlife experts scramble to save threatened species after California wildfires

By DON THOMPSON
The Associated Press
11/5/03 2:03 AM

CEDAR GLEN, Calif. (AP) -- Wildlife experts are beginning extraordinary efforts to protect animal species whose habitats were charred by wildfires and now face the risk of imminent flooding.

"Particularly in Southern California, we have endemic species -- they're not found any place else in the world. If we lose them, the world has lost them," said Chamois Andersen, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Fish and Game.

One species in trouble is a strain of mountain yellow-legged frog separated for millennia from its Sierra Nevada brethren and now making its home in a 10-mile stretch of the San Bernardino Mountains' City Creek.

With no more vegetation to hold the soil and sop up impending rain, flooding into the Santa Ana River could push the frogs more than 30 miles downstream.

"They just would never make it back," said Steve Loe, a U.S. Forest Service wildlife biologist. "There's a good chance if we don't do some fairly significant recovery work, we could lose them forever from these mountains."

He spent Monday working the phones at a makeshift Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation team headquarters in the basement of the San Bernardino Convention Center, trying to find them a temporary home.

He hoped to place them in an artificial stream, but that means catching a significant breeding population of the critters, a problem immensely complicated because the frogs already are going into hibernation in stream-side cracks and crevices.

"We may need to get an army of biologists scavenging the stream," Loe said.

Facing the same fate are Santa Ana River speckled dace, two- to three-inch fish isolated in five burned-over creek drainages upstream from concrete stream channels cut through San Bernardino.

"We're thinking each of these streams has its own speckled dace that evolved over thousands of years," Loe said. Each may need its own artificial stream to keep the genetically distinct fish from interbreeding.

Loe estimates the fires burned 10 percent of the southernmost old growth habitat of the California spotted owl and its sometime prey, the San Bernardino flying squirrel.

"The owls are in trouble in Southern California, so losing 10 percent is significant," he said. "If their habitat burned hot, it could be 50, 100 years before it recovers."

Mary Meyer, a California Department of Fish and Game plant ecologist, is pleased firefighters managed to stop a wildfire short of the Bear Creek watershed.

"There are like 30 species of plants that are unique to the Big Bear Mountains," she said.

Though hundreds of thousands of acres of mature trees burned, some, like the rare Cuyamaca cypress, depend on fire to crack open their cones and release seeds to start a new generation.

Meyer also is expecting an explosion of wild flowers, while grasses and shrubs stimulated by the fall rain will begin sprouting new growth within weeks.

Fish and Game biologist Chanelle Davis plans to spend Thursday flying over the San Gabriel Mountains with a radio receiver, trying to locate six Nelson's bighorn sheep wearing radio collars.

Three of the six were in areas burned by a wildfire, but the biologist is hopeful they escaped. About a hundred of the sheep remained before the fire, down from about 700 in the 1970s.

Those that survive should thrive, she said. Until the fire, the sheep were being killed off by predators -- perhaps coyotes, dogs or mountain lions -- creeping through the tangled undergrowth, while the mature woody plants weren't providing them with enough nutrition.

"Fire is great for this habitat. It needed to burn" and hadn't in more than 20 years, Davis said. "Of course, we would have preferred it didn't burn all at once."

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