SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS, Calif. — Tuna Canyon was too quiet. The rugged gorge on the edge of Los Angeles, overlooking the twinkling Pacific Ocean, would normally be buzzing with the sounds of life: birdsong from the bushes, the patter of paws on the hillside, the splash of newts in the stream below.
That was before the mountains burned. The January firestorms across this Southern California county torched entire neighborhoods and displaced thousands of people. But the disaster also tore through the natural world, disrupting fragile ecosystems that — despite popular imagination — define Los Angeles just as much as its freeways and strip malls.
Roughly three months after the fires broke out, the damage to these valuable habitats and the wildlife that called them home is continuing to come into focus. The Palisades and Eaton fires, the largest of the infernos, chewed through mountains and forests on opposite sides of Los Angeles. Flames and smoke killed countless land animals and left in their wake charred trees and incinerated underbrush. The loose soil that remained later washed into waterways, choking them down to a trickle, smothering fish and amphibians.
And in Tuna Canyon, the fire left behind an eerie silence.
“Right now, we’re just hearing nothing,” said Seth Riley, wildlife branch chief at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, as he looked over the scorched ravine on a recent morning. “These huge areas have been transformed.”
The Santa Monicas are a crucial part of a larger biodiversity hot spot, one of just 36 worldwide, and the mountains host more than 50 threatened or endangered plants and animals, one of the highest concentrations of rare species in the country. They offer a vital natural refuge amid a sprawling metropolis.
Before the Palisades fire early this year, the Franklin fire of 2024 and the Woolsey fire of 2018 seared large swaths of the Santa Monica Mountains. Even though wildlife here have evolved to live in a landscape that burns, scientists say the animals are not equipped to survive fires so frequent and so ferocious — the by-product of a changing climate and encroaching human development.
The blazes add up, Riley said, pushing animals into increasingly smaller slices of viable habitat, an already scarce resource. Just like so many other Angelenos, they will need years to recover — and their homes may never be the same.
‘They just can’t escape’
The most famous species to roam these parts is the local population of mountain lions, big cats that require big territory. They must already navigate habitat fragmented by freeways and subdivisions, and major fires make matters worse.
“If you’re a mountain lion and your area burns, one strategy is to move to where it’s not burned. Well, you can’t do that if there’s a road in the way, or if the only green space is in a neighborhood,” said Beth Pratt, the National Wildlife Federation’s California regional executive director, who has been raising money for a record-breaking wildlife crossing to help remedy this crisis.
“They’re out of options because of the urban interface,” she said. “The animals’ survival strategies don’t work long-term.”
After the Woolsey fire burned half of the available habitat for the area’s mountain lions, the animals began taking more risks. Driven off their home turf, they went looking for interim housing, venturing across dangerous roads and into rivals’ domains, according to a study by UCLA and National Park Service researchers, including Riley, which drew on data from tracking collars scientists had attached to the animals.
One cat, P-61, crossed the 405 freeway to escape the Woolsey fire burn zone and wound up muzzle-to-muzzle with a larger lion, an encounter caught on video. P-61 attempted to flee back across the 405, but he was struck and killed by a vehicle.
Another mountain lion, P-64, burned his paws escaping the Woolsey fire and, unable to hunt, was found a few weeks later, dead from starvation.
So far, it’s not clear whether the Palisades fire has been directly responsible for the death of any of the region’s mountain lions, but National Park Service scientists — who have been studying the animals here for more than two decades — did recover one body in the burn zone recently.
The lion, P-63, had soot in his nose but not in his lungs, Riley said, ruling out smoke inhalation, and he bore no burn marks. His official cause of death was unrelated liver disease.
A fire’s impact increases further down the food chain. Smaller animals have a harder time outrunning the flames — “They just can’t escape,” Riley said. And unlike large mammals, there’s not enough tracking data to accurately quantify how many might have been lost in a large burn.
“We have almost no knowledge other than it’s probably massive,” Riley said of the toll on smaller species.
Take for example the dusky-footed wood rat, a native mammal that is an important source of food for bobcats, coyotes and mountain lions. Wood rats build palatial dens, which can approach the size of small cars, from branches, twigs and leaves. They pass the structures down from generation to generation, sometimes for decades. And they scurry into their dens when they sense danger, which, Riley noted, “is not a great fire survival strategy.”
Wildlife cameras have captured some of these terrifying moments from a creature’s-eye view.
One set of images taken during the Franklin fire, which burned over 4,000 acres in December, begins around midnight on the blaze’s second day. A rabbit is seen foraging in a canyon a few miles north of Pacific Coast Highway, its ears perked as if sensing the flames closing in.
Just 10 minutes later, half the camera frame is glowing red. In another three minutes, the bush where the rabbit was rummaging has become a fireball. Seconds after that, the picture is entirely scarlet and the camera’s temperature gauge is skyrocketing. It tops 140 degrees before the device burns and goes blank.
Hope in the ashes
When fires roar through so quickly, streams become safe havens — but only for a time.
In steep ravines like Tuna Canyon, blackened hillsides easily shed sediment during rain, clogging waterways below. Such debris flows turn streams into flat, uninhabitable “bowling alleys” of caked mud, said Katy Delaney, a wildlife ecologist at the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
The amphibians she studies — newts and tree frogs — probably sheltered in the stream during the blaze and, she hopes, escaped before the rain-fueled debris arrived. But just like mountain lions and other mammals, they lose access to habitat and breeding ground for years after a fire.
The Palisades fire burned at least seven streams that Delaney and her colleagues monitor in regular surveys where they tally the number of amphibians living in the mountains.
“It’ll be pretty easy to do this year,” she said, “because there’s not a whole lot to count.”
Scientists are even more concerned about the fish, which cannot escape their streams — at least, not without some help.
In late January, after the most recent fires cooled, researchers donned waders and splashed into Malibu’s Topanga Creek for a pair of desperate rescue missions to save two endangered species of fish from incoming debris.
Isaac Yelchin, a biologist with the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains, was part of both teams, which saved and relocated about 270 Southern California steelhead trout and 760 northern tidewater gobies from the threatened watershed. They made it just in time: The first rains came soon after, burying the creek in feet of sediment.
Some of the gobies left behind appear to have survived, Yelchin said on a recent visit to the site, but all remaining trout, over 100, died in the mudflows — a blow because the Topanga Creek population was the last in the Santa Monica Mountains.
“A fish can’t even swim in a half-inch of water like that,” Yelchin said, nodding toward the shallow creek bed. He and his colleagues canceled a snorkel survey of the creek this year for the same reason.
At some point, scientists will try to bring the rescued fish or their descendants back to Topanga Creek and begin repopulating the waterway, said Noa Rishe Khalili, a natural resources program manager for California State Parks. The mountains’ wildlife is resilient, she said, but their fate is tied to a place that is burning more often and more intensely. If big blazes hit the same areas repeatedly, the land won’t have a chance to recover and could be permanently altered — a phenomenon known as type conversion.
“The landscape has a huge capacity for self-regeneration,” Rishe Khalili said. “But can it continue to regenerate after multiple fires across the same area? No.”
Areas that recently burned must be protected, she said, otherwise the long-term survival of species that depend on specific habitats will be threatened. One high-profile example is the monarch butterfly. More than 100 monarchs once rode out winters in a eucalyptus tree that towers over Topanga Creek, which was initially feared destroyed in what would have been a devastating development for an insect whose California population was near record-low levels this year.
But Sara Cuadra-Vargas, a conservation biologist with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, said the site appears to have survived its burns.
It’s too soon to know whether the monarchs will return next winter, Cuadra-Vargas said, but she’s relieved the tree and those around it weren’t lost, which could have led to type conversion and driven monarchs out of the habitat for good.
The site sits just off the Pacific Coast Highway, where the wreckage of homes and beloved beachside haunts is still visible. For Yelchin and Cuadra-Vargas — two native Angelenos — the leaves sprouting from burned branches and the tree frog tadpoles hatching in puddles of creek water offer something that is in short supply these days.
“People were feeling hopeless,” Cuadra-Vargas said. “But there is hope. I believe there is hope.”