As might be expected the birds suffering most heavily were terrestrial species poorly equipped to escape by flight. The number of quail found on the Christmas count three months after the fire was 170, compared to 604 found the previous year, and the number of California thrashers was 19, compared to 41. Fringe areas of the fire, such as certain sections of the Botanic Garden, demonstrated an apparent increase in wrentits. These retiring little birds were not only more numerous, they acted bolder than normal and were consequently easy to observe. The overall picture turned out different, however. The 85 wrentits reported on the Christmas count showed a 50-percent decrease from the previous year. It seems more than likely that these three species, quail, thrashers and wrentits, suffered considerable losses in the fire.
Another ground dweller, the Oregon junco, showed an apparent increase because many flocks took to foraging in the burned-over areas and were easy to see in the absence of vegetative cover. Almost a thousand were reported on the Christmas count, double the previous year’s 474. The following year, when the ground vegetation was just about back to normal after a vast reseeding program, the number of juncos also returned to normal, 430; but wrentits remained at a low 84, thrashers at 24, and quail at 330.
Our most personal loss could not be attributed directly to the fire, yet I think it played a part. Johnny, our Scottish terrier, was thirteen at the time and his two wild nights as a refugee did nothing to lighten the load of his years. Up until then he’d been in good health, though his muzzle was long since grey and it had become increasingly apparent that either he was getting lower or the ground was getting higher.
His deterioration after the fire was very rapid. He began losing his hearing and his teeth, and an infection in his nose and eyes proved resistant both to all kinds of antibiotics and to cortisone. He also developed a heart condition which required a digitalis pill twice a day.
The usual technique of administering pills to animals involved a kind of force-feeding most unsuitable to a dog of Johnny’s advanced years and enormous dignity, as well as tender jaws. We therefore spent a considerable percentage of our time devising ways and means of concealing the pills in food. They were served buried in hamburger, wrapped in bacon or bologna, smothered in cottage cheese and scrambled eggs, hidden in chunks of cheddar, inserted in cunningly slit pockets in steak or wedged into frankfurters or liver sausage. After the cheese, steak, liver sausage, etcetera was consumed, we’d often find the digitalis pill on the floor. When this happened I thought of Bushman, the massive gorilla who was the star of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago in the days before tranquilizers and tranquilizer guns eased the difficulties of medical attention for larger animals. Bushman died of pneumonia because he couldn’t be fooled into swallowing the drugs hidden in his food.
By December, Johnny, blind, arthritic and deaf, had become almost completely dependent. It was a strange fate for this sturdy, self-reliant little creature, this most unlapdog of dogs. He had to be lifted in and out of the red leather chair where he slept, and carried up and down stairs. He could be let out alone in the fenced yard where he knew every plant and weed and blade of grass. Elsewhere, in the field next door, on the path down to the creek, or up the road to the neighboring houses, I went with him, keeping a tactful distance behind so as not to disturb his Scottish pride.
On a foggy evening shortly before Christmas a delivery boy left the fence gate open and Johnny disappeared. We roused the people next door and there began a frantic search by flashlight for a small black dog in a large black night. Eventually he was found on the other side of the circle, sitting calm and composed in a yard once occupied by his girlfriend, also a Scottie, named Annie Laurie. She had long since left the neighborhood, and perhaps life itself; but Johnny was dreaming of happier times, bright days, fast runs, fair ladies.
One morning in mid-February he began hemorrhaging, and at noon he was put to sleep.
The Coyote fire had taken a heavy toll. But for some people who lived far from the fire’s perimeter and never gave a thought to its effect on them, the worst was yet to come.
17
Death and Life in the Forest
The winter weather began on November 9 with an inch of rain, followed after a short pause by another three-quarters of an inch. This made a modest total of less than two inches. Yet it was enough, falling as it did on denuded hills and mountains, to cause severe flooding. Streets near creek beds were buried under four or five feet of mud, and boulders that looked too big to move washed downstream like pebbles. Tons of water-driven debris crushed houses and bridges and retaining walls in its inexorable journey to the sea.
The beaches were strewn with wood, some burned or half burned, some barely scorched, some as big as telephone poles, some small as palm fronds, pine cones and eucalyptus pods. For driftwood collectors it was a paradise, for swimmers, surfers and skin divers, a nightmare. In addition to the serious hazards of floating lumber there was the fact that for several hundred yards beyond the surf the water was as muddy as the lower Colorado River. This brought up another problem: fish can’t see any better in muddy water than humans can in a blizzard or dust storm. When Ken swam his usual half mile on the first day of the flood, he had thirteen encounters with fish. Whether he bumped into them or they bumped into him is immaterial. Among our friends in the wet set, not a particularly scientific group, this became recognized as a way of measuring the ocean’s visibility — how many ichthyoid contacts Ken made on his daily swim.
Little good comes from a flood. Reservoirs silt up, and topsoil is washed away, carrying with it the seeds necessary to reestablish watershed vegetation.
Fire, on the other hand, is a natural condition of life in the chaparral regions of southern California, and an essential condition if vegetation is to remain young and vigorous. Without an occasional clearing out, the underbrush gets so thick and high that deer and other mammals can’t penetrate it and ground-dwelling birds have trouble foraging. When this happens the chaparral, normally rich in wildlife, becomes incapable of supporting its usual share. Fire occurring at twenty-to twenty-five-year intervals is a benefit, a cleaning-out of dead and diseased wood and ground cover. (Before any nature lover sets off into the hills with a pack of matches, it should be noted that more frequent fires result in the destruction of chaparral, and its conversion to a different and less interesting type of vegetation.)
Some forty or more plant species are grouped together under the name chaparral. Chaparro is the Spanish word for scrub oak; it also means a short, stocky person, and perhaps this gives, to someone who has never seen it, a better idea of chaparral. Chaparral is short, stocky, tough vegetation, capable of withstanding a yearly drought of six months or more.
Throughout the centuries a number of ways have evolved for chaparral plants to survive burning. Some, like green-bark ceanothus, sprout new leaves directly from the “dead” stumps. Some have woody crowns or burls at ground level, like toyon, or underground, like Eastwood manzanita, which is back to full size in a few years. Others have seeds with a hard coat that must be split open by fire, or else soft-coated seeds which need very high temperatures to trigger their internal chemistry. Among the plants with seeds requiring fire in order to germinate are some of the most dominant and important in the chaparral group of this region — chamise, big berry manzanita, laurel sumac, hoary leaf ceanothus, big pod ceanothus, sugar bush and lemonade bush. All but chamise are frequently used in cultivated gardens.