Second Act
As anyone who's ever experienced a house fire knows, the effects don't end when the flames are put out. The same is true for landscapes burned in a wildfire.
"People look at burned areas and think they're dead. They're not dead. They've just changed," Patricia Kennedy, a wildlife biologist at Oregon State University in Union, said in 2014. "It's a whole new habitat."
Which can also mean new opportunities. In some places, for example, woodpeckers will fly in and feast on bark beetles in dead and dying trees. "They gorge on these invertebrates," Kennedy says, then leave when the beetles are gone.