STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Over the summer, many Americans smelled and saw smoke from Canadian wildfires. Scientists behind a new field of study are asking how smoke like that affects wildlife. NPR's Ari Daniel has the story.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Olivia Sanderfoot is waiting for me on a flower-freckled hillside in Amherst in western Massachusetts. She listens for a moment, and a volley of birdsong flutters forth.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS CHIRPING)
OLIVIA SANDERFOOT: So you can hear an eastern wood pewee in the background. Oh, that's a goldfinch. That's a downy woodpecker. It's just magical.
DANIEL: Sanderfoot spends her time investigating what happens to these and other birds when a plume of wildfire smoke rolls in, an increasingly common occurrence, even in places untouched by flames.
SANDERFOOT: Smoke can blow hundreds to thousands of miles away from that burn site. That means that the footprint of a smoke event greatly exceeds that of any fire.
DANIEL: Sanderfoot's curiosity about smoke emerged in 2018 when she was living in Seattle and wildfires blazed in eastern Washington.
SANDERFOOT: The air smelled acrid.
DANIEL: She was told it was a one-time event, yet the same thing happened two years later.
SANDERFOOT: I remember walking outside and my eyes were just burning. And I thought, what on earth are animals doing? How do birds deal with that?
DANIEL: Very little was known apart from anecdotes, like the absence of birdsong or the arrival of droves of birds to a backyard famished and parched.
SANDERFOOT: It's not just about what they're inhaling, which is inevitably bad for them. It's also about how the cues that they use to navigate their world are upended when it gets smoky outside.
DANIEL: To puzzle out what was going on, Sanderfoot began collaborating with conservation biologists, physiologists and atmospheric chemists to work on creating a new field called smoke ecology, the study of how smoke disturbs wildlife and their habitats. Morgan Tingley is in the cohort. He studied wildfires as an ecologist at UCLA, events with a clear start and stop and defined borders. Smoke, he says, is different.
MORGAN TINGLEY: Smoke is extremely hard to predict, which means it's hard to actually disentangle what its impacts are because you can't really control it.
DANIEL: Making it difficult to anticipate where smoke will appear or when. So to study wildfire smoke and birds, the trick is to gather data everywhere. To do so, the researchers rely on legions of amateur and professional birders across the country, like Pam Sowizral, the bird project coordinator at Drumlin Farm in Lincoln, Mass.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAND KNOCKING)
PAM SOWIZRAL: Always give a little knock first, let them know you're coming.
DANIEL: Sowizral gingerly opens a bluebird nest box.
Wow.
SOWIZRAL: Got two chicks in there, right?
DANIEL: Two feathery puffballs huddle on a bed of pine needles. Nearly every year for the last two decades, multiple times a week in spring and summer, Sowizral and her volunteers check the bird boxes here, count the nests and the eggs and how many chicks fledge.
SOWIZRAL: Including those periods of time when the smoke was here. So that didn't stop us from doing our usual monitoring of our boxes.
DANIEL: That's key. Nationally, counts like this one provide a portrait of bird activity before, during and after smoke events, no matter where and when they occur. Back in Amherst, on that hillside, Olivia Sanderfoot says she's using these kinds of observations to understand how birds cope with wildfire smoke in a variety of places. She's documented changes in their behavior and health. One of her top priorities is to determine what birds need to weather these smoke events.
SANDERFOOT: I want to know where birds are going when it's smoky, what resources they're seeking out, and what we could provide to help them during a risky time.
DANIEL: Like shelter or food, perhaps, and water. Sanderfoot, who's now at Cornell University, says her personal experiences with wildfires have continued last year in LA and this summer in Ithaca, when smoke from the Canadian infernos blew in.
SANDERFOOT: I almost feel like the smoke is following me.
DANIEL: She says she doesn't think this is a coincidence.
SANDERFOOT: Let's put it this way. We can expect that the future will be smokier.
DANIEL: A fact that's true for birds and people, making all that Sanderfoot and her colleagues learn under smoke ecology clues to reveal a clearer way forward for us all.
Ari Daniel, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WILDFIRE")
WATCHHOUSE: (Singing) Wildfire. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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