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How Fires Affect The Hunt

Sytes

Sytes

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What's your experience with fires and your hunt? Interested in wildland firefighter, biologist, and hunter experience. I have limited experience hunting areas in relative proximity of a forest fire though not sure I was really focused on the habits of wildlife vs assuring my own safety, etc.

At what distance from a fire does wildlife move?
How far from a fire do they settle?
Does it reduce, or increase, (or no difference) ungulate alert level to human / predator threat?
How does smoke effect their ability to catch scent, or does it have any effect?
Do ungulates gravitate towards more specific geographic locations? i.e. coolies/ravines? high elevation? Thick or sparse treed area, etc?
Does their feed / sleep time modify or remain?
Any other interesting thoughts about big game / predators worth noting for hunters?
Is there a difference for those questions based on the animal - elk, deer, bear, wolf?

Yes - hunters need to check for fire restrictions. Agree hunters need to be very aware of fire use even when restrictions are not present. Advised to contact the ranger station that covers the area of the hunt for most updated info on fires, etc... I'm interested in the wildlife activity during a fire. The ethics, brain power of the hunter is an entirely different topic. :)

Thanks all.

edit added: changed title "Effect" to "Affect". verbiage use. haha!
 
Last edited:
Great questions, I have no experience with this but look forward to following along
 
i know from what CPW has said to the public is that wildlife usually have no problem getting well ahead of even fast moving wildfires

that's the only thing i have heard from authorities for certain. where they decide to chill after this, if their behavior is heightened or more alert... i'd love to know

do they take the direction perpendicular to wind to escape wildfires? or just outrun them? they still try to stay in summer areas? or just high tail it to wintering grounds?

the effect i'm damn certain of is whether or not i'll be allowed in my hunt area - cpw sent me an email today to say my deer tag is now approved for refund and +1 pp restoration due to fire. i'm not giving it back yet...
 
Too many variables to say for sure. But I have read & seen some things.
Most large critters manage to get thru them. Outrun or just run thru thin spot to burned areas.
How much rain? What is native plantlife? etc...
Many critters did not make it thru the present massive monsters. Just moving too fast still & too large. Forests could be impacted til winter...many closed.
Just saying.
 
Even in very HOT fires that nuke the ground, in a matter of just a few weeks, you see new green growth.
I have seen deer and elk move back in, in less than two weeks. Bear and coyotes will be back in days to feast on slow animal carcasses.
Sometimes the stumps are still soldering.
 
I think every question in that list has so many variables that they are unanswerable. In short, it depends...I don’t think there are one-size-fits-all answers to any of those.

What species, and what are it’s needs? How big is the fire? What resources are left and available to them vs what was destroyed? Weather? Timing? Terrain? Fire behavior and intensity? Areas with active attack and lots of activity vs remote areas left alone to burn?

I’ve seen animals back in the black within 24 hours in places, some places where they simply ran around the flames and never left, and places so moonscaped I didn’t see anything for months. If the surrounding area is rich in resources they might not go far at all. If not, they’ll go until they find what they need. Their response to scent and predators will probably depend on how much disturbance they were subjected to, weather, how secure they feel where they are, etc.

I think as a hunter, you need to consider the specifics of that particular fire, how that fits in with the specifics of that landscape, and then think about how those together might influence your species of interest in that particular location. Will vary fire to fire, and probably from place to place within the same fire.
 
In my experience as a hunter since 1960s especially with deer and elk is they do move when smoke gets thick. Some of the young of the year and often the old and sick are unable to move fast enough so they perish in the fire and become food for predators who return right after the fire. Where and which direction, I do not know but I suspect away from the fire until the smoke is not so thick. I have found that burned out areas become prime hunting grounds almost as soon as the next fall assuming the fire is in the summer/fall of prior year. I have prior burns marked on my map and on my On-X and plan to check each one this year. But you are right. No one size fits all. Each fire is different and each animal reacts to it different. Depends on how much danger they sense.
 
A friend (firefighter and chaplain) who was involved in fighting one of the fires in Oregon this year, said the fire moved so fast at times that they would find deer carcasses that looked as though they had frozen in mid leap. The conditions for those fires were crazy - low humidity, very high east winds, and many spot starts from downed power lines. That may have cut off many escape routes. But there were a lot of large animals killed in that series of fires.
 
There has been so many fires this year due to extreme drought conditions and some I think are deliberately started. But what it has taught me is what I thought I knew about wildlife behavior with wildfire is generally wrong. I think we all can have a learning experience and even those of us that are truly expert in this can even learn new things about wildfires effect on wildlife.
 
Very tough to give short & concise answers to your questions....I am sure each can be short podcast by Randy or Corey. My experience this year in SW Montana was the smoke was heavy at a time the rut should have been going on full-on. It seemed to me & my party to have quieted down the bugling. I wonder it impacted the rut to the degree that the population this next year will decline?
 
SBAHunts said:
Very tough to give short & concise answers to your questions....I am sure each can be short podcast by Randy or Corey. My experience this year in SW Montana was the smoke was heavy at a time the rut should have been going on full-on. It seemed to me & my party to have quieted down the bugling. I wonder it impacted the rut to the degree that the population this next year will decline?
Click to expand...
I am not a biologist and this is my observation of it. Effect of the fires and the smoke on big game was marginal. Main effect was those who got trapped and died in the fire. They appeared to me to simply move around the fire and go back in when the fire died back down. On antelope, they took shelter in the areas I hunted, but came back out in droves once the fire died down. I hunted in very dense smoke and saw no antelope so I came back home. Dense smoke did affect my hunting.

I drove through the fire areas just to see what I saw and ran into several deer but no elk. I know they are in the area from the signs but I think they moved in to the FS areas where I have no tag on my leftover cow and my general is good off the FS area where I have been trying to hunt.

I am learning better how fires affect hunting and wildlife from the 2020 fires. Before I always hunted after the fires were mostly out or completely out. My observation then was wildlife moved back in almost immediately.
 
These fires will take years to recover from. I am still frustrated that we don't have better forest management and people focused too much on endangered species that we have these big fires as a result. States like California will not allow controlled burns or cleanup of debris along high powered electrical lines that spark some of the fire. Logging is severely restricted in some states. Wildfires are natural but huge ones like we had this year I think could be avoided with better management and controlled burns especially in beetle kill areas.
 
So cool, hard to imagine they count them that way. You would think with video technology these days there would be something to help them out a bit.
 
Hey everybody! I'm a LONG time lurker and this is my first post. I work with dogs, specifically using them to locate people through scent. You ask the question about the smoke covering human odor, and I would tend to say it's doubtful. I've done some research on deer olfactory systems and they are very similar to dogs. Dogs have the ability to differentiate between odors. Easiest way to explain is, humans can tell the odor of pizza, but a dog can smell each ingredient separate. I would be willing to bet deer and elk do the same. So they would just smell smoke AND human odor.

As far as fires go on their behavior, I'm not sure. I've hunted elk several years around fires and what I've found to be the biggest limiting factor is how long I can put up with inhaling the smoke. My two cents.
 
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