Few detections of black-backed woodpeckers (Picoides arcticus) in extreme wildfires in the Sierra Nevada

Abstract

Extreme wildfires in coniferous forests produce large areas of dead trees (snags) that are expected to provide much needed habitat for the Black-backed Woodpecker, a postfire associate. In an attempt to better understand extreme fire effects (including increasing fire size and decreasing diversity of fire effects), we monitored Black-backed Woodpeckers during the 2014 and 2015 breeding seasons following two wildfires (the 2013 Rim and 2014 King fire) that burned in the Sierra Nevada, USA under extreme fire conditions. Despite an extensive sampling effort including 1025 broadcast surveys and targeted nest searching over 2040 ha of habitat typically used for nesting, we detected few Black-backed Woodpeckers. Positive detections of Black-backed Woodpeckers at broadcast points were positively associated with increases in the percent of surrounding forest that burned at high-severity and with the distance to the fire perimeter, indicating that the severity and scale of the fire per se did not affect use by Black-backed woodpeckers within the fire area. However, we suggest that the timing of these fires late in the fire season may have limited colonization of prey resources, leading to more limited use of these fires by Black-backed Woodpeckers.