Key Takeaways: Wildlife vs. Wildfire
- Escape tactics are specific to the animal. Deer, black bears, and bobcats move to unburned ground; mice and voles drop into burrows; fishers and porcupines climb into the treetops; and some animals double back into already-burned "black" to slip past the front.
- A systematic review found that fires kill about 3% of tracked animals on average. The deadliest stretch comes after the fire passes. With food, water, and shelter burned away and predators hunting the exposed, the post-fire weeks claim more wildlife than the flames.
- Restoration is what brings wildlife home. Replanted forest starts pulling wildlife back long before the forest matures; birds can return within the first decade with amphibians, mammals, and insects returning soon after.
- Planting and natural regrowth both work, but differently. Replanted and naturally regenerating forests recover a similar range of species, but intentional planting rebuilds forest structure sooner and speeds the return of animals.
- Climate change is rewriting the survival math. Hotter, faster, and more frequent megafires can outpace even the most fire-adapted species. Restoration is critical: left alone, forest regains about 78% of what an undisturbed mature forest would show within 20 years, and intentional planting speeds the structural recovery needed for wildlife to return.
Where Do Animals Go in a Wildfire? Here’s What the Science Says
When Australia's Black Summer fires tore across the continent in 2019 and 2020, one figure dominated the coverage: nearly three billion animals were killed or displaced during the fires. The World Wide Fund for Nature put the toll at 143 million mammals, 2.46 billion reptiles, 180 million birds, and 51 million frogs across more than 11 million hectares — a figure its scientists called the largest wildlife disaster assessment ever attempted. The image that stuck in many minds was a singed koala rescued from the flames.
The image underscored the impact and the questions on the minds of everyone watching: when a wall of flames comes for a forest, where do all the animals go? And how soon can they and do they come back?
"Most animals survive fire," Gavin Jones, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service's wildlife ecology program at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, told KUNC.
Survival comes down to a mix of mobility, the fire's behavior, and instincts that many species have spent millennia refining.
"Animals have adapted warning systems and have to be able to recognize those dangers," Jones said, describing how creatures register smoke, shifts in heat, and the crackle of approaching embers, giving them enough time to escape.
"In a place where fire commonly burns or has commonly burned for a long time, you're going to have animals that sort of are primed to sense and be able to respond quickly and appropriately to fires when they come along."
How wildlife escape wildfires
The most thorough accounting to date is a review published in Global Change Biology in 2022. The team gathered every study they could find that tracked radio- or GPS-collared animals through a fire — 31 studies in all, spanning species from eight-gram fairywrens to four-tonne African elephants. On average, the fires killed just 3% of the tracked animals. In high-severity fires, like those that tore through Australia, that figure rose to 7%. And in almost two-thirds of the studies, not a single tracked animal died directly from the fire.
Where the animals go depends largely on what they are. According to the National Forest Foundation, large mammals like deer, bears, and bobcats will move to unburned ground, and elk and moose will wade into lakes and ponds to wait it out. Small mammals such as mice and voles drop into underground burrows, where soil insulates them, while climbers like porcupines and fishers may head up into the canopy. Adult birds fly off, and amphibians and reptiles tuck under logs, rocks, and wet ground.
Jones describes the same range of tactics, including a counterintuitive one that firefighters borrow. "Some animals will actually double back into places that have recently burned in order to avoid the oncoming firefront," he said. "That's a strategy that a lot of wildland firefighters use: it's safer to go back into the black."
All of the mountain brushtail possums tracked through Victoria's intense 2009 Black Saturday fires survived, researchers found. Frill-necked lizards in northern Australia sheltered in the tree canopy, a tactic that works perfectly during cool early-season burns; when more severe late-season fires scorched the canopy, a quarter of the tracked lizards died, and the ones that lived had sheltered in termite mounds instead.
The danger is mostly after the fire
While the fire front is often survivable, the weeks that follow often are not. For many animals, finding long-term shelter, with food and water sources is a struggle, especially if they return to the post-fire landscape, which can stay hostile for months. California residents who evacuated their home during the deadly Eaton Fire in 2025, returned to find a 525-pound bear in the crawl space underneath their home. It took rescuers weeks to lure the bear out.
Brad Banuli, a senior terrestrial biologist with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, told KUNC that wildlife “generally adapt and use the closest available habitat to their traditional home ranges,” but, he noted, “they may have to move farther to find quality food, shelter and water."
That critical window for survival explains the response after Australia's Black Summer fires, when New South Wales rangers airdropped thousands of kilograms of carrots and sweet potatoes to endangered brush-tailed rock-wallabies stranded in burned ranges with little to eat. The wallabies had survived the flames; the food kept them alive in the months that followed. The researchers point to this kind of work — supplementing food and water, providing temporary shelter, controlling predators hunting exposed survivors — as where help does the most good.
Fire as a new beginning
For a meaningful share of species, the burn is an opening. "Wildfire is a natural process in so many of the systems that we know and love," Jones said. "And it's a regenerative process, so it sort of restarts the ecological trajectory in a system." Some animals are built to exploit that reset. The black-backed woodpecker colonizes severely burned forest almost immediately, nesting in the standing dead trees and feasting on the wood-boring beetle larvae that arrive with them; researchers at Cornell now use the bird as a guide for post-fire forest management.
The lesson ecologists draw is that a fire rarely leaves a uniform wasteland. "Fire often doesn't just create this kind of blank slate of nothingness," Jones said. "Often, fire generates a lot of variation in the forest conditions." That patchwork — burned stands threaded with unburned refuges — is what scientists call pyrodiversity, and it tends to produce more kinds of habitat and, in turn, more kinds of animals. "Pyrodiversity begets biodiversity," Jones said. For deer and elk, a mosaic burn — one that leaves scorched ground and untouched stands sitting side by side — can deliver nutrient-dense new growth. But, increasingly, those areas are becoming rarer. UCLA researchers found high-severity fires now burn 30 times more acreage than they did 40 years ago, outpacing restorative controlled burns.
Replanting the way back
The collar studies tracked animals in ordinary burns and planned ones — not the firestorms of a Black Summer, and the authors admit they "know next to nothing" about death rates during catastrophic megafires, which leave a far narrower path to survival. As climate change pushes fires hotter, faster, and into regions that rarely burned before, those instincts start to fail in two ways. Animals in newly flammable places never evolved the escape behaviors fire demands, and even fire-adapted species can be outpaced by flames that move faster and burn hotter than anything in their evolutionary memory.
Where fire only thins and diversifies a forest, animals filter back on their own. Where it strips the canopy outright, or where megafire erases habitat that took centuries to build, their return depends on what regrows and how fast — which is where restoration research comes in.
Pooling 77 sites across the tropics, Lourens Poorter and colleagues reported that naturally regrowing forests reach about 78% of old-growth values within 20 years — levels found in undisturbed mature forest — measured across a dozen attributes from soil and biomass to canopy structure and species diversity. Diversity itself recovers over roughly two-and-a-half to six decades and the original mix of species takes more than a century to reassemble.
A 2025 survey of critically endangered Australian lowland subtropical rainforest, published in Ecology and Evolution, recorded 72 bird species across remnant and replanted patches and found that revegetated sites supported bird communities on par with surviving remnants, with canopy cover the strongest predictor of whether rainforest-dependent species moved in.
The practical lesson for a warming world more prone to catastrophic wildfires is that rebuilding structure, particularly canopy, is what draws wildlife home. Reforestation can close the gap faster than waiting for the land to mend on its own.
"I would guess that fire survival probably will decrease as fires become more destructive in areas or more intense in areas where they previously were not," Jones said. "You're going to have species that are naive to fire and less adept at escaping it and surviving it."
Wildlife has been outrunning wildfires for ages. But with climate change accelerating wildfire intensity and frequency, the question is whether they can outrun the wildfires of a hotter century — and whether the forest they run back to can grow back enough to be home again.
