Fire Recovery. Part 1

these days glenn helen regional park north of the city of san bernardino is a strange sight its lawns are green and dotted with leafy trees but its hills and the mountains surrounding it are brown and nearly bare except for a scraggly beard of charge shrubs biologist andy ferguson with the us fish and wildlife service steps to the edge of one of the hills as salutary charges polyester landscaper looking out was habitat for the federally threatened and coastal california gnatcatcher and we had to nesting pairs and one male in this area in two thousand ferguson says this is the only place in san bernardino county with a small gray birds were nesting no one knows if they survived the fire which burned all of their habitat in the glen helen area there was no place that jason and go to some other underneath trees here i that were planted by by the park with an attitude just no actually most native species are up quite accustomed to the native vegetation and don't adapt well to urban landscapes that catchers would say oh look at

that sometimes cherry trees everywhere with his closest to lift it said even before the fire is california nat captors had become rare because they'd lost much of their habitat to human development ferguson says although much of the remaining native vegetation should regenerate it will be several years before it's mature enough to support matt catchers she says biologists aren't sure whether the original birds if they survived or others will move back into the area we have so much urbanization now between her repeated elsewhere there in that catchers right at the san bernardino riverside county border it's something that we would dearly love to know how well can that catchers navigate through an urban landscape and arrive at the next available patch of suitable breeding habitat biologists say urbanization poses similar problems for other species we've kind of crammed over nature into smaller and smaller preserves steve low is that the san bernardino national

forest and when they burn like this there is some significant problems that maybe a hundred years ago when the bin that big of a deal but now they are big deal cause we don't have much natural areas left those biggest concern is for streams and the species that live in and around them because the critters that live there the frogs and the fish can't move they can't avoid it and the streams no longer connect to each other so if we get severe flooding in those streams and it blows the fish and the frogs out of those streams they're likely gone forever because they can work their way back and they're one of the rarest dream dwellers in southern california is the endangered mountain yellow legged frog in the san bernardino mountains the only place it's still lives is the east fork of city creeps along highway three very shortly before christmas biologist jesse bennett of the us fish and wildlife service stood alongside the creek looking up at this deep canyons that surrounded the region i think

you'd be pretty serious given the entire state water from this point to that league team besides washing frogs downstream into places they can survive floodwaters filled with mud and suffocate frog aids and bury their habitat it's a huge threat to an animal that's become isolated so if its populations without there's no source population to repatriate war to come back in bennett said endangered arroyo toads and a rare fish called the santa ana speckled dace are also vulnerable to post fire mudslides the mountain yellow legged frogs were considered so vulnerable that federal biologists took eleven juveniles and one tadpole out of city creek and drop into the la zoo and it's a good thing they did the christmas day mudslide swept huge flows of debris and car sized boulders intercity greek the forest service says it doesn't think the remaining frog survived in the san bernardino mountains else's at still at nine point three kpcc