In the Long Run, Fire Is a Friend to Nature : Wilderness: Many native plants and trees benefit from burning. Some areas recover quickly but it may take decades for land to heal in some instances.

In the aftermath of the devastation to the man-made environment, nature, at least, holds out the promise of quick and abundant renewal. The fires this week may have blackened some of the region’s most scenic parks and wilderness areas, but many native plants and trees benefit from burning. A lush spring often follows an autumn fire.

“Where it has burned, there will be wildflowers we haven’t seen for many years,” said Klaus Radtke, a private consultant who specializes in fire ecology. “Much of the natural environment is fire dependent.”

That doesn’t mean nature isn’t paying a steep price. It could take years, if not decades, for the scarred land to completely recover, and some trees and wildlife have been lost forever.

The fires ravaged pristine countryside throughout Pt. Mugu State Park in southern Ventura County, along the front range of the San Gabriel Mountains directly above Los Angeles, in Crystal Cove State Park in southern Orange County and in a multitude of undeveloped canyons and hillsides across Southern California.

The Laguna Beach-Newport Coast fire scorched about 12,000 acres of coastal sage and woodlands in local parks and preserves. Some of the richest habitat in the region, it is nesting ground for the California gnatcatcher, recently declared a threatened species. As many as 100 pairs of the rare songbird were either wiped out or displaced by the fire, say officials of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

In Caspers Wilderness Park near San Juan Capistrano in Orange County, park officials said they saw bobcats, gray foxes, deer and rabbits running from the flames.

In the Angeles National Forest north of Altadena, county fire officials estimate that 5,000 acres of popular hiking and mountain biking country were consumed. Casualties included a historic tree farm at Henniger Flats and a nature center in Eaton Canyon along with its captive population of about 40 birds, snakes, desert tortoises and other small animals.

Naturalists held out more hope for animals in an area as large as Angeles National Forest.

Bill Brown, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service, said he would be surprised to find many casualties among the deer, black bear, mountain lions, bobcats, foxes and coyote that inhabit the wilds there.

As Brown and other field biologists begin picking their way through the embers today, a question uppermost in their minds will be how much plant life the fire cleansed and how much it destroyed.

Normally, the seeds and roots of plants are stimulated by fire. “Fire is a natural part of the ecosystem. Plants depend on it,” said Larry Freilich of the Sierra Club. “But with a fire of enormous intensity, you can get incredible subsurface heat that creates an effect like a kiln, turning everything to ash.”

Fire intensity builds in proportion to the amount of old, dead growth that has been allowed to accumulate. Where a succession of small fires has burned, the accumulation of natural debris is at a minimum and the plant cover is green and moist, new fires tend to be slower moving, more easily contained. And they are more likely to have a salutary effect on the natural environment.

As a result, fire officials try to periodically stage controlled burns. But a variety of factors--weather, air quality, vulnerability of endangered species, the proximity of residential neighborhoods--all can be obstacles.

In Los Angeles, so far this year, only five proscribed burns have been conducted, according to fire officials.

One of the next places on their list, said Paul Rippens, chief of the department’s Forestry Division, was an area near Henniger Flats in the Angeles National Forest.

The Altadena wildfire got there first.

The need for small-scale periodic fire is a controversial subject.

Environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club, point a finger at real estate developers for building in fire-dependent habitat.

“By suppressing natural fires to protect developments, we have, over the years, allowed an enormous amount of fuel to develop, resulting in uncontrollable fire storms,” read a Sierra Club statement issued Thursday.

Meanwhile, angry Riverside County residents whose Winchester neighborhood was devastated blame federal wildlife officials for restricting the mowing of thick brush around their homes in order to protect two endangered species--the Stephens’ kangaroo rat and the gnatcatcher.

But Riverside County Fire Chief Mike Harris said state and federal wildlife agencies have been generally cooperative in allowing cutting of brush, and that the restrictions have not been excessive.

Despite the intensity of many of the fires, ecologists were optimistic about nature’s recuperative powers.

“Most of these areas evolved with fire, so you know nature will come through this OK. These plants and animals have been around for a long time and they will come back,” said Jim Trumbly, a senior state parks resource ecologist. “But if we had our druthers, we’d rather the fires be smaller scale and not affect so much at one time. The scale is wrong--you don’t want your whole park gone.”

Rich Gililland, a park service interpretive specialist at Crystal Cove, said while damage there was severe, “the area should come back relatively rapidly. Aside from the loss of the old-growth trees, the scrub communities will actually thrive after a fire.”

David Brown of the California Native Plant Society was similarly upbeat about burned portions of the Santa Monica Mountains, including Pt. Mugu State Park.

“For the short term, it won’t be very attractive for recreation. But by spring, if we get a decent rainfall,” Brown said, “it will recover.”

But after surveying the scorched earth in Crystal Cove State Park and the newly created Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, other people were not quite so sanguine.

“So many people have invested their emotions, their time, their energies, their money in protecting that area,” said Bob Fisher, director of Orange County’s Harbors, Beaches and Parks Department. “We were preparing a plan to open it up to the public and letting people enjoy the area, and now somebody apparently intentionally started a fire, which makes it doubly difficult to deal with.”

Although fire is part of a natural evolving ecosystem, “when we talk about renewal, we talk about a process that takes hundreds of years,” Fisher said.

Built to Burn

Much of Southern California’s native canyon and hillside vegetation is born in flame: Seeds of the chapparal germinate only after a brush fire has passed through. In an area prone to brief rains and long droughts, the leaves of these plants are coated with oily or resinous material to preserve moisture within. The oils and resins are highly flammable.Here is a sampling of fire-prone plants.

Chamise: Member of the rose family. One of the most abundant chapparal shrubs and among the most inflammable. Grows 4 to 8 feet tall, has small, needlelike leaves and tiny white flowers when in bloom in spring. With ideal weather conditions, may resprout almost immediately after a fire, sometimes within a day.

Manzanita: Heather family. Handsome shrubs with crooked, graceful, reddish-brown limbs. Stiff, grayish-green, oval leaves, with small pink or white flowers in spring. One common local variety, Eastwood Manzanita, sends up new shoots from the base of a burned bush.

Sagebrush: Sunflower family. Many species exist in Southern California, but all have narrow, gray-green leaves and small greenish flowers. Common “soft chapparal” plant, a highly flammable deciduous shrub, acts as kindling in spreading a brushfire.

READY TO IGNITE

Moisture content of chaparral plants fluctuates according to seasonal rains, as chart shows. The lower the moisture (as percent of dry weight), the greater the threat that the plant will burn. The dip in the autumn corresponds to prime Santa Ana conditions.

Sources: “Fuel Moisture and Fire Behavior: an Update,” Carol L. Rice and Robert E. Martin; Los Angeles County Fire Department; “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” John McPhee; “Roadside Plants of Southern California,” Thomas J. Belzer; “Native Shrubs of Southern California,” Peter H. Raven; Dave Faires, Tim Paysen, Marcia Narog, U.S. Forest Service, Riverside Fire Laboratory.

Researched by VICKY McCARGAR and NONA YATES / Los Angeles Times