Each fire has a story. Like a living being, each fire has an origin—a place where it comes to life and someone or something that keeps it alive. After the first spark the fire grows, nurtured by what its environment provides. Vegetation, wind, humidity, and temperature determine how a fire grows and where it will inhabit. Sometimes a fire runs fast and wild, while in other occasions slowly, but intensively, that fire can expand throughout an entire landscape. Eventually, every fire will diminish and find an end whether it is by human hands or due to the lack of fuel. Everything in this world ends, even fire.
Fire does not have a voice to tell us its story. Yet, post-fire, a more-than-human echo remains. Once fire touches a forest, fast combustion sets in motion processes of transformation. Crossing flames change chemical identities, vibrating with frequencies humans cannot easily understand by means of their own senses, inciting rhythms of evasion, sheltering, forces of attraction and repulsion. Fire imprints signatures on landscapes that conceal multispecies stories, which can be puzzled together by combining quantitative and qualitative methods.
The driving question for us centres on what recovery means for the humans and nonhumans whose relations depend on fire. In this regard, we have established an ethical framework that guides our research and practice, namely to avoid non-intrusive methods with the animals we want to follow—no tracking collars, nor any form of capture or captivity. We therefore are exploring methods which, as far as possible, aim at safeguarding the wellbeing of the species we encounter.
…across Serra da Estrela
We, Nuno and Kuai, decided to try two distinctive approaches that could aid us in drafting an epilogue about the stories behind the fires that severely burned Parque Natural da Serra da Estrela in 2017 and 2022. For the period of 6 days in September 2024, using sound recordings and camera trapping, we mapped six sites around the freguesias of Sameiro, Vale de Amoreira, Verdelhos, Valhelhas, Folgosinho, and Famalicão. We deployed automated recording units (ARUs) using Audiomoths. Additionally, we registered the soundscape by employing a 32-bit portable recorder (Zoom F3) coupled with condenser, piezoelectric, and seismic microphones. This kind of acoustic mapping was complemented by three camera traps (Browning) placed next to the ARUs. The primary intention was to begin an audiovisual inventory of the species that inhabit burned and unburned landscapes.
The scars left by the fires that affected Serra da Estrela in 2017 and 2022 conceal stories bound to different ecological contingencies and distinctive kinds of fuels.1 Both were deemed as wildfires that severely changed the land. The fire of 2017 lasted less than one day, whereas the fire of 2022 lasted more than one week. On most sites, we witnessed Serra da Estrela’s fire-prone vegetation: where there was an extensive pine forest (Pinus pinaster), now giestas (Cytisus striatus) and esteva (Cistus ladanifer) dominate. Between carbonised areas, new Pinus trees sprouting, some tiny ones we barely saw, whilst others were already stretching 50 cm high. On other places, we admired the fire resilience of oak trees (Quercus pyrenaica and Q. robur), the sweet chestnut forests (Castanea sativa), and the riparian vegetation, which altogether performed as a firewall, reducing the advance of fire fronts in 2022—even stopping it completely.2 Quercus pyrenaica is a fire resilient and pyrophilic species, and we did find several of these deciduous trees completely burnt. However, the charcoaled, burnout first-impression is deceiving. New branches from the buttress of a burned stump of Quercus pyrenaica, in Valhelhas, were greeting the sunlight of a new day. Maybe recovery is a process rather than a destination!
The observations from our field trip signal to stories of survival, resistance, adaptability; the entanglements that are hidden to our limited senses when we do not carefully include other lifeforms affected by fires. Many animals can’t be seen, because they conceal their lives, or are so small that escape our awareness. When we look at territories that have lived with fires for decades, we only perceive a small amount of what happened, what is happening, and what could happen. The camera traps revealed shy nocturnal animals which avoid being seen, and those who remained or moved to places untouched by fire. The sound recording method allowed us to hear the entanglement of biophony and geophony: birds, insects, bats, even the burned wood was populated by invisible insects; and fire-plants, through their vascular and root system, the xylem and phloem running through the branches, amplified the sound of the wind. And, although we became audience for a concert of dialogs conducted in cryptic frequencies, and we went the troubles of grasping to understand a different language written by and with fire, we cannot avoid thinking that our human presence also means something to them—that we are part of the recovery orchestra that is now playing.
The Abide family seeks to carefully watch and listen to the remnants of wildfires and the multispecies voices within. We are working in creating a narrative capable of overturning the tone of disaster that usually colours wildfires through the senses of species which return to, benefit from, or re-emerge out of the soot and ashes.
1, 2 Conversation with Jacinto Diamantino, ICNF, Manteigas.