In his classic book A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wrote of how winter might look to various animals in cold climates like ours. For a meadow mouse, our warm, nearly snowless January would have been a disaster. Meadow mice spend the summer collecting grasses and storing them in caches on their home territories. These caches are their principal winter food. They scurry from cache to cache along runways on the ground. If snow does not come, their runways are exposed to the eyes of hungry predators. Under a sheltering blanket of snow, the runways become secure tunnels. “To the mouse,” Leopold wrote, “the snow means freedom from want and fear.”
The adult birds stayed by the nest as the flames approached. Then the male began to make repeated flights to the lake, returning each time with a fish in his talons. He carried each fish to the nest. The female stayed at the nest, frantically feeding the nestlings. It was as if they were trying to stuff the young so full of food that they would instantly grow flight feathers.
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So for that pair of birds, and especially for their unfortunate offspring, the fire was a disaster. But for many other raptorial species, it was a bonanza. The raptor frenzy, as McEneaney calls it, took advantage of all the mice, chipmunks, ground squirrels, lizards, snakes, and other small creatures that had to flee their usual shelters to escape the fires.
The raptor frenzy could have been predicted. Predators have been seen in similar actions many times. They gather in front of the flames on the plains of East Africa and on the llanos of South America. But McEneaney did not expect the large numbers of seed-eating birds that moved into burned areas as soon as the flames subsided. Red crossbills, pine siskins, pine grosbeaks, and Clark’s nutcrackers were the most common of these.
The one entity that seems to endure in nature is the ecosystem, the bewilderingly complex web of relationships that creates a home for every plant and animal. The ecosystem is the perfect example of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, and the preservation of ecosystems must be the goal of all our relations with the natural world.
