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Be prepared for you and your furry friends.
Dear Reader,
Perhaps Dot is biased, having spent a few days in July navigating a surreal orange haze as wildfires burned to the north of my city, but this has felt like the summer of wildfires. (Though you, like Dot, might be surprised to learn that, while Spain, France, and a few other countries in Europe are enduring a brutal year of wildfires, Europe as a whole is having fewer than usual, the numbers offset by lower burn in the Balkans.)
Of course, that’s little comfort to anyone who’s had to live through a wildfire. Nobody cares about numbers when the flames are licking at your door. (Don’t miss this Bluedot story, via an innovative program at the University of Victoria, that understands the benefits of survivors recounting their experiences. And that same reporter recently brought us this story about an Indigenous teen in Northern Alberta who works to help her remote community prepare, in the wake of wildfires, for an uncertain future.)
But Dot wondered, too, about the animals. How do they fare when their home is on fire? Perhaps you, too, have the images of singed koalas seared into your brain following the devastating fires in Australia in 2019/20.
The good news is that most animals survive. The most deadly part of a wildfire for animals is the devastation that follows, according to this story Dot stumbled upon. “Survival comes down to a mix of mobility, the fire's behavior, and instincts that many species have spent millennia refining,” the story tells us, with U.S. Forest Service’s research ecologist Gavin Jones noting that “‘Animals have adapted warning systems and have to be able to recognize those dangers,’ describing how creatures register smoke, shifts in heat, and the crackle of approaching embers, giving them enough time to escape.”
Climate change, of course, is demanding that we navigate hotter, faster wildfires, of a type that animal instincts developed over millennia weren’t built for. It’s a reckoning that’s straining, too, our human warning systems, our own instincts as we try to keep pace with a new kind of fire.
Scorchingly,
Dot
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