Yukon Wildlife and Wildfire
Wildfire can leave a landscape looking like a lifeless moonscape, but the forest isn’t dead. Beneath the blackened stumps and charred ground, new life emerges. Equipped with field guides, binoculars and a healthy dose of curiosity, Carrie and Karen, intrepid naturalists with the Government of Yukon’s Wildlife Viewing Program, trek through post-fire landscapes to see what’s sprouting, who’s passing through and why it all matters for the boreal forest.
Yukon Wildlife and Wildfire
Fox Lake Fire: Aspen, Hare we come
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
The Fox Lake Fire of 1998 burned all summer. Almost 30 years later, the leafy forest growing back provides food and shelter for Snowshoe Hare (including a wrong-coloured one hiding from Carrie and Karen) and all the animals that eat hare — which is pretty much everything. This forest is also primed for Northern Flickers, which have a very important job. But the show stealer is a mysterious fungus-filled tree and the wily rodent responsible for it.
Show notes
Key topics
Fox Lake Fire (2:10)
Fire mosaic (3:08)
Forest succession (3:50)
Fire cycle and the fire-resistant stage (5:06)
Fox Lake Burn rest stop (7:23)
History of the Fox Lake Fire (7:52)
Snowshoe hare (9:00)
Snowshoe Hare colour change (9:48)
Canada Lynx (10:30)
Hare and lynx cycle (10:55)
Hare predators (12:50)
Aspen versus spruce tree (14:07)
Forest understory (14:49)
Red-backed voles and predators (15:20)
Weasels and marten (15:45)
Elk (16:15)
Ruffed Grouse (17:35)
Northern Flicker (18:47)
American Kestrel (20:07)
Nest trees (20:18)
Nest webs and tree cavities (20:51)
Hare browse (22:45)
Red Squirrel (23:23)
Mushroom tree (23:54)
Coyote (25:45)
Interviews and audio clips:
- Jill Johnstone, affiliate research scientist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks and research associate with Yukon University
- Tom Jung, senior wildlife biologist with the Yukon Department of Environment
- Katie Aitken, associate professor and program coordinator in the Northern Environmental and Conservation Sciences program at Yukon University and adjunct professor at University of Alberta.
Episode artwork
Photo of Canada Lynx by Cameron Eckert.
Music credits
- Acoustic guitar melody #003 by GuitarStringTheory – freesound.org/s/733990/ – License: Attribution 4.0
- Acoustic guitar melody #010 by GuitarStringTheory – freesound.org/s/734804/ – License: Attribution 4.0
- Acoustic guitar melody #008 by GuitarStringTheory – freesound.org/s/734793/ – License: Attribution 4.0
- Baddum Tish - Comedy Rimshots - classic rim shot.wav by OverlookHotelRecords –freesound.org/s/271208/ – License: Creative Commons 0
Sound effects
- Ruffed Grouse: Logan McLeod, XC433034. Accessible at xeno-canto.org/433034.
Yukon Wildlife/Wildfire is produced by the Government of Yukon’s Wildlife Viewing Program and hosted by Karen McColl and Carrie McClelland. Sound design is by Mark Koepke. The podcast logo was designed by Dan Bushnell and Department of Environment.
The theme song, White Bark Pine, was written and produced in the Yukon by Dana Jennejohn and performed in collaboration with the Bennett Sun.
Learn more about Wildlife Viewing in the Yukon, including free events and publications.
Sign up for the Wildlife Viewing newsletter.
Follow Yukon Environment on Facebook.
Music and sounds credits – intro:
- Thunder/raven: Mark Koepke
- Fire ignition: Lighting a Fire by plasterbrain—freesound.org/s/534702/ – License: Creative Commons 0/
- Black-backed woodpecker: Aiden Place, XC488401. Accessible at xeno-canto.org/488401
- Red Squirrel: Backyard squirrel by SoundsLikeYukon—freesound.org/s/820322/ – License: Creative Commons 0/
- Woodpecker: SMA13024_20230620_051500
- Boreal Chickadee: Logan McLeod, XC610278. Accessible at xeno-canto.org/610278
One of the things I remember when I first moved here, so that was like ten years after the fire, is you could drive this highway and this was like where you would go to see fireweed. That was the view, like the hills would be pink and it was gorgeous, and you tell people, like, if you want to see a beautiful view of fireweed, go drive up to the Fox Lake Burn. But now that's not really the case anymore. And it's interesting we have to kind of change some of our interpretive materials because forests change and they and regenerate. And so now I say, come drive the highway in the fall to see the trembling aspen when they turn golden in the fall. Because this whole valley is just glowing yellow, like like golden. And if you catch it on one of those crisp sunny days in September, you have to pull over and just look and appreciate it. The whole hill is yellow. It's beautiful. This is Yukon Wildlife and Wildfire. In this series, we take a walk in the woods and look at how the forest changes and evolves after wildfire. At every step, we're on the lookout for plants and animals, big and small. And sometimes we ask passionate researchers and experts to chime in. I'm Karen McCall, and I'm Carrie McClelland. We're both naturalists with the Yukon Department of Environment's Wildlife Viewing Program. We don't leave home without binoculars and field guides.
SPEAKER_07This podcast is for everyone who has burning questions about wildlife and wildfire. That's good. I see what you did there. In our last two episodes, we went to the Tikini Bridge Fire of 2023 and wandered around the burn to look at what is growing back and what animals might come into those areas. If you haven't listened to those episodes, go back and check them out. Today we're going to go to the Fox Lake Burn from a fire in 1998. Right. And this fire, it was started by people, right? Yeah, sadly from a campfire that wasn't put out well enough. Right.
SPEAKER_05So this fire is on the North Klondike Highway, and you you don't start seeing it till the very north end of Fox Lake is where you might notice some changes in the forest.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, about 45 minutes north of Whitehorse, maybe even less.
SPEAKER_05This was a big fire, like especially compared to the Tikini Bridge Fire. This was a serious big fire.
SPEAKER_07So the Tikini Bridge fire that we were in was 12 square kilometers. This one is 400 square kilometers. So even if, you know, nobody can picture 400 square kilometers, you just you still know that that's exponentially bigger. And because of that, too, it also um fires don't burn evenly. The vegetation is varied, the landscape, the angles, the dryness. So it creates what's called a fire mosaic. You can imagine like a patchwork quilt of uh areas that burned differently, different temperatures and whatnot. So that creates a very diverse habitat.
SPEAKER_05Okay, so that's like when you see a one hillside that's burned to a crisp, and then at the very bottom, for unknown reasons, there's there's like 12 trees that didn't burn. And, you know, the magic of fire, it just doesn't burn everything always completely. It's uh it's a mosaic out there.
SPEAKER_07In our last episodes, uh, I talked to boreal ecologist Jill Johnstone, and she talked about succession and how we can expect a forest to grow back after fire.
SPEAKER_01I like to think of vegetation succession in the boreal forest as shuffling a deck of cards. And the deal is laid or played when the fire happens, and then which cards are played out as a result of which seeds get there or which vegetation was present before the fire, that determines the hand that you play. And how long you play is related to other factors, like who else is at the board.
SPEAKER_05Okay, so how does that metaphor work for you?
SPEAKER_07I like the metaphor, you know, saying that what you can expect to grow back would be similar to what was there before the fire, roughly, but of course there are a lot of factors. As we know from this fire, because you and I have been there, that there's a lot of aspen growing back. And that's not surprising because we're roughly 30 years post-fire now, and we know from succession that that's around the time when the aspen trees would be outgrowing all the shrubbery and that the aspen would be sort of like the dominant canopy in a forest.
SPEAKER_05We know that the forest fire cycle is on this 50 to 200 year roughly cycle. Let's explain to folks what's going on ecologically at 50 years that suddenly says, yeah, I'm ready to start a fire again in the forest.
SPEAKER_07Well, for the first 50 years of a forest's lifespan, if we can call it that, there's a lot of deciduous vegetation. So lots of green leafy stuff, willows, shrubs, aspen. And we know kind of intuitively, I think, that this kind of vegetation doesn't burn that easily. It's not the kind of stuff you would collect for your campfire.
SPEAKER_05That's great.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. And you think of an aspen, it's got this smooth bark and it doesn't have any branches along the ground for a ground fire to burn up. So at this 50-year mark, that's roughly when the coniferous trees, the pine and the spruce trees, could start to outgrow the aspen trees and cutting the aspen trees off from the sunlight, and eventually the aspen trees die out. And these coniferous trees are a lot more flammable. You think of that, like the rough bark and those dry branches close to the ground, and a fire is coming along the ground and can quite easily burn up into the tree.
SPEAKER_05Like those branches are the key for starting your campfire. You always go looking for those dry, dry, understory branches of spruce and pine. So that doesn't mean that there can't be a fire in an aspen forest. It's just less likely to catch that spark as easily because this this wood is like green and very moist. Like aspen and poplar trees hold a lot of moisture naturally. And so it's just more fire resistant than a dry coniferous forest.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, and today we're gonna head out to one very small part of this burn of the whole 400 square kilometers. But we'll see on this trail that there is a lot of down wood. There is a lot of wood that could burn. It would just burn differently than if it was a fully coniferous forest. Yeah, let's go. Let's head out there. We drive about an hour north of Whitehorse and pull off at a rest stop at kilometer 272 of the North Klondike Highway.
SPEAKER_06All right, Fox Lake Burn viewpoint.
SPEAKER_07We park beside an outhouse in a carved wooden sign that reads Fox Lake Burn, the fire of 98. Our predecessors at Yukon Wildlife Viewing developed a short interpretive trail here many years ago. The first interpretive panel reads, What happened here? History of the Fox Lake Fire. It informs us that this fire was started during the July-long weekend of 1998 by campers who didn't properly extinguish their campfire near Little Fox Lake. The fire danger at the time was extreme. Strong wind quickly whipped the small blaze into a crown fire that roared through the treetops. At that stage, a fire is near impossible to control. Efforts continued all summer to contain the fire. Over winter, it smoldered in the ground and was extinguished in the spring. The Fox Lake fire cost $2.2 million to fight, in 1998 dollars, of course, and altered the look and life of the landscape. No kidding. Another more perfunctory sign informs us that the interpretive trail leads 200 meters one way to a viewpoint. So this is 27 years after the fire, so we're talking about the stage of succession.
SPEAKER_05One of the things that I find super interesting about this trail in particular is even in my career. Oh, there's a snowshoe hare. But it's already turned white.
SPEAKER_07But it hasn't snowed yet. A snowshoe hare cowers against some bushes less than three meters away. Staying still and blending in with its surroundings is a defense strategy hares use. Normally it might work well, but this bunny's stark white fur stands out against the brown foliage. Brown because it's October. It's out of sync with the surrounding terrain. I wonder if it thinks we can't see it. I wonder. Carrie tries to get a photo of the unlucky hare, but the animal darts into the bush. As it turns out, we aren't the only ones seeing white hairs out of season. According to a 2025 paper published in the Royal Society of Open Science, snowshoe hare in the Klawani region of the Yukon are not changing color any later than usual in the fall in response to climate change, meaning that while it might be snowing later in the season on average, these hares are still molting in October. Winter be darned. Snowshoe hare are named for their big feet, but it wasn't until I saw a photo from a motion-triggered camera that I truly appreciated this. It captured the hare mid-leap with its massive hind feet reaching forward and its toes spread wide for extra support on the snow. In winter, you can see from their tracks that their hind feet, which land first, are much bigger than their front feet.
SPEAKER_05I think uh this is a great forest for snowshoe hare. There's lots of brows for them. There's lots of low shrubs like the willows are starting to get a bit tall, but there's some smaller species. There's lots of soap berries, um, low-lying shrubs, and that's key for them. So not only do they have something to eat, but they have someplace to hide. They need to, they need all this debris to weave in and out. But snowshoe hares are like a major food source for a number of different species, in particular lynx. So this is a great place to come and look for lynx. And again, the open aspen forest means that you have the chance of seeing something a long way off. So lynx, like all cats, are very stealthy, and you could walk right by one or it could walk right by you and you would never know because they're so silent. But in a forest like this, that's there's quite a bit more open, you have a better chance of being able to see them.
SPEAKER_07Canada lynx have evolved to feed primarily on snowshoe hare. The hare population in southern Yukon follows a roughly 10-year cycle. In that time, the number of hares peaks and plunges. I ask our colleague Tom Jung, senior wildlife biologist, to elaborate on the much-studied relationship between snowshoe hare and lynx.
SPEAKER_00Of lynx, he says Their fortunes rise and fall without a snowshoe hairs. So it's a real boom-bust economy out there in the food web of the boreal forest that when you have these booms of snowshoe hares of bunnies, uh, that there will be a following increase in the lynx population. Usually there's a leg of one or two years. It takes the lynx one or two years for their populations to build up in response to bunnies. So what's happening is you're having better fed mothers that have a more kits, but b healthier kits that survive. So that process over one or two lynx generations results in more lynx.
SPEAKER_07Conversely, when the snowshoe hair population crashes, it leads to an eventual decline in the lynx population. At the moment, though, we're in a snowshoe hair population upswing of record magnitude.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell In Southwestern Yukon, Dr. Charles Krebs from the University of British Columbia and many others that have helped him have been looking at snowshoe hair cycles since 1973. And uh what we've been seeing this year in 2025, we've been seeing a really rapid increase of snowshoe hairs from a low. In fact, right now, based on trapping we did in September of this year, it's the most bunnies we've seen at this stage of the cycle since Charlie Krebs has been monitoring them since the 1970s and 1980s. And we think we're not even there yet. We think there's another year to go. So what we believe we're witnessing is a super peak, which is super exciting.
SPEAKER_07This superpeak has the potential to fill a lot of bellies.
SPEAKER_00The bunnies are what we call the keystone species. They're the engine that drives the food web of the boreal forest. So it's a whole long list, but it includes things like lynx, which are the main predator of bunnies that specialize on eating them, coyotes, foxes, wolves, uh uh wolverines, all the birds of prey, go from golden eagles to great-horned owls. Uh, nobody's gonna escape eating a bunny. Even red squirrels will eat baby bunnies, as sad as that sounds.
SPEAKER_07Those red squirrels are feisty. Back in the Fox Lake Burn with Carrie, we revisit what she was saying just before we got distracted by the white-haired snowshoe hare.
SPEAKER_05So, what I I find so interesting about this trail is that even in my lifetime I've seen the change, which you think about regeneration after a fire, forest fire having like going on for decades and decades, and it does. You know, you know, a forest, when we said reaches kind of climax for 50 to 200 years. But when I first got here, you could you could see along this trail that the landscape all around you, it was quite barren, and now it's it's almost overgrown and you can't see it. It's kind of makes you wonder like, why would they put a trail here? There's nothing to see. And then it's like, well, that's not what the forest looked like when we first built it.
SPEAKER_07This patch of forest is a mix of willows of various sizes, full-sized aspen, and the odd spruce and pine tree that are taller than me, but not by much. Now, Carrie here, this is kind of a good example here before we get into the wind of like uh an aspen and spruce tree side by side.
SPEAKER_06So the aspen tree is almost three times as tall as the spruce tree, but this kind of shows that the spruce tree is a slower growing species, but eventually at some point it will outgrow this aspen tree.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I mean, 27 years is still pretty young for a landscape.
SPEAKER_07This spruce tree may have also started growing after the aspen, especially if the aspen regrew from underground roots in the first season after the fire. The spruce tree had to arrive by seed, either in the wind or in or on an animal. Labrador tea? Yeah. You would not find that in a young forest. Soapberry. Quite a bit more soapberry than than what we saw at the Ibex fire.
SPEAKER_05We couldn't go cross country as easily as we did at the Ibex fire here. There's like tons of shrubs, willows are grown up, logs have either they fell in the fire or they fell later, and now um travel would be, I mean, not impossible, but it definitely would be more challenging than there was in the Ibex fire.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, you'd be properly bushwalking through here a little bit. The understory is full of fallen over trees and logs and upturned roots. Tom says this three-dimensional quality to the forest creates structure. And that structure provides mini travel runways and corridors for animals like red-backed voles. And when the voles move in, yep, so do their predators.
SPEAKER_00Which are weasels, pine marten, for example, boreal owls, uh, for example, uh, will come in. And that structure is really good to weasels and marten, for example, uh, not just because of the voles, but it uh provides a lot of what we call rest sites, which are really den-like structures. Uh and so as we talked about, the overturned trees and the root wads, those are great spots that martens will use to get into and get out of the weather, get a little bit of insulation from the cold because the snow will pile up around them, and essentially they become their homes.
SPEAKER_07The trail leads us out of the forest to a bluff overlooking a creek. Across the valley is a mostly aspen-covered mountain hillside interspersed with clumps of conifers. It's quite scenic.
SPEAKER_05This is still, I mean, the Fox Lake Fire, this is still prime elk habitat. It's still that open aspen parkland. And so this would be up here at Fox Lake, this would be more likely Brayburn herd territory. And we do see on this hillside across the valley some game trails where probably elk have been walking back and forth uh quite frequently.
SPEAKER_07Oh, we got more elk poop here. You won't find elk much further north than here. Carmax, about an hour's drive, is at the northern edge of their range. It's believed that elk migrated to the Yukon during the last ice age, over 10,000 years ago, but at some point they disappeared from the landscape. They were reintroduced in the 1950s. There are only a few hundred in the whole territory, mostly in the triangular area between Whitehorse, Carmax, and Haynes Junction. This ridge offers a view up and down the valley. It would be a great place to be at sunset to sit quietly and watch for elk to wander by. But right now it's windy and chilly, so we retreat the way we came, stepping off the trail to investigate the bush. Why don't we why don't we come in here? Why don't we um oh, here's a bunch of grouse poop. Grouse poop always amazes me because it's so big, like the piles of it, like the volume of it compared to the size of the bird. That trips me up. Like I think it's porcupine. Because I was like, there's no way a a small chicken would need that much poop. Grouse are, as Carrie says, chicken sized. Their scat, it's important to know, is pencil sized in diameter and about three-quarters of an inch long. That's not huge, but as mentioned, the size of the piles are rather extraordinary. There are several species of grouse in the Yukon. This scat could be from the ruffed grouse, which feeds on the buds and leaves of shrubs. Ruffed grouse can also digest and tolerate the bitter compound chemical present in aspen trees, which is a defense mechanism the aspen trees have against overbrowsing. This is important for ruffed grouse because aspen is an important food source for them in winter. This adaptation allows them to survive this far north. Ruffed grouse are also quite showy. When a male ruffed grouse is on the hunt for a female, it fluffs up its feathers around its head into a collar or ruff. Males will also make a drumming sound by beating their wings rapidly against their body. If you've ever heard the sound of a car backing up in the middle of the woods, you might have heard the ruffed grouse. It sounds like another bird that relies heavily on aspen trees, although in a much different way, is the northern flicker. It's a type of woodpecker and I think one of the more striking birds in the boreal forest. It has polka dots on its chest and a flash of red on its head. But it's often its white rump that gives it away when it's flying through the forest. I spoke to Dr. Katie Aitken about northern flickers. She has spent most of her career studying animals that make and use tree cavities.
SPEAKER_02I'm an associate professor and program coordinator in the Northern Environmental and Conservation Sciences program at Yukon University. And we offer this program in partnership with University of Alberta. So I'm also an adjunct professor at University of Alberta.
SPEAKER_07Northern flickers are quite a large woodpecker, but Katie says their bills aren't as strong as other woodpeckers, like the black-backed woodpecker we talked about in episode one. So flickers select softer trees for their cavities. They often target aspen because these trees are susceptible to trunk rot. This fungus causes decay inside the tree, making it easier for flickers to excavate once they get through the outer bark.
SPEAKER_02So the woodpecker just has to break through that hard open open shelf, and then they can get inside the tree where things are rotting out and further dig out a hole that they can then stand or roost in.
SPEAKER_07The northern flicker eats insects like ants and beetles. But unlike other woodpeckers, they mostly forage on the ground. Flickers are known to reuse cavities from one season to another. When they do move out, other birds and mammals move in. Katie says American kestrels often use cavities made by flickers. They're a small raptor, about the size of a pigeon, but don't be fooled by their stature. They can tear into small rodents and songbirds, preferring to forage in open areas.
SPEAKER_02One of the nest trees that I found in the Tikini burn was what we call an apartment tree where you have several cavities in it and you have multiple individuals nesting in that tree at the same time. So in this case, there was an American kestrel in one of the cavities with some chicks. And there was also a northern flicker with eggs in another cavity in that same tree, um, just kind of out in an open area. It was a big tall dead tree with a whole bunch of cavities in it. And so they were kind of sharing that tree in this open area in the derm, which was kind of fun to see.
SPEAKER_07Cavities that are lower in the tree can be used by red squirrel, voles, and mice, although they might not want to use the same tree as a kestrel. Katie is particularly interested in what she calls nest webs, the interconnections and dynamics between all the creatures that make and use tree cavities.
SPEAKER_02Once those cavities are created, they tend to stay in the landscape for quite a long time, especially here in the Yukon where things are pretty dry and don't rot very quickly. So those cavities can stay in that tree once they're created for two decades, potentially, if not longer. And so then other organisms can come and use. Those cavities that the wood recorders have been elegated. So you'll have a whole suite of birds and small mammals that use them for nesting, raising young, roosting. Um, a lot of insects and different invertebrates use them, bees and wasps and things like that. Um, and essentially, then those different species that are using these cavities will then potentially be competing with one another to get access to those cavities.
SPEAKER_07Because of their size, Katie says northern flickers are an important provider of medium to large size cavities for animals that can't make their own. If flickers weren't present in the system for some reason, there would be a big ripple effect.
SPEAKER_02And so if any of these are lost, if something happens to them, then that potentially removes this really crucial resource for a lot of these species. So for for a lot of things like tree swallows, bluebirds, American kestrels, um there's several species of ducks that nest in cavities. And so for all of them, they if they can't find a suitable cavity that was created, say, by a woodpecker, then they can't read the period.
SPEAKER_07I've always appreciated northern flickers aesthetically, but I didn't realize how critical they are to the entire ecosystem. And one thing we're probably not gonna see in this aspen forest is the red squirrel.
SPEAKER_05When do you not hear a squirrel? I think we hear it so often that maybe we should filter it out, but it's it's interesting to walk in here and be like, something's missing, and it's squirrels. You don't hear them.
SPEAKER_07Red squirrels mainly eat the seeds of white spruce trees. Not much of that around here.
SPEAKER_05We stepped out of a predominantly aspen area, and now these are dead heads, like old snags that have been burned, and and tall, like two-meter tall willow, but we're not really surrounded by trembling aspen here.
SPEAKER_07These uh carry um looks like they've been gnawed off, like the tops of all these. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, you can see the bite marks at the very bottom, too. And it it's like fresh green growth, like really nutrient-rich. They don't like the the old woody stuff because it's it's not as delicious.
SPEAKER_07It looks like a snowshoe hare has been gnawing on these shrubs.
SPEAKER_05I do think it's interesting if you come back in the early spring after the snow and the the snowshoe hare walk on top of the snow, and so you'll definitely see evidence of brows at like knee level because that's where the the snowshoe hair were. And and so the tree is fine below and above it, but um at that sort of snow level. Are we just we just turned us into a lyre? It's right there in that pine tree. Oh, yeah, there is a red squirrel surviving off of that one pine tree in this whole stand. Thanks for making me a liar. That always happens though. I'm like, well, generally you won't find animals here doing this, and then like lo and behold. That's why I always tell people these are guidelines, these are trends, not rules.
SPEAKER_07We move closer to the pine tree. I see a couple of mushrooms on the ground below the tree. Squirrels often store mushrooms in trees to eat later. Then they're all stacked up right here. Oh, and there's a squirrel nest right there. Oh my.
SPEAKER_06So there's like five or six or seven or eight. No, there's like a dozen mushrooms on the ground. That's how I saw it. And then there's a whole bunch of mushrooms stored just like half a foot off the ground, and then at head height, I've never seen so many mushrooms.
SPEAKER_05I've seen this before. Okay, we almost walked by this. Hold on, let me.
SPEAKER_07There are like every nook and cranny in this tree is crammed with mushrooms. There must be more than a hundred. I've never seen more than a handful of mushrooms in a tree before.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, mushrooms crammed in there, and then and then this squirrel nest has so many mushrooms in it. This is so cool.
SPEAKER_05Okay, I gotta get to get a photo of this.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_07I wonder how long it's gonna take until this squirrel starts yelling at us. I'm flabbergasted by the adaptability of red squirrels. They live a fast and frantic life. Just a few months after being born, they strike out to establish their own territory and then have to gather and cache enough food to survive winter. Get away from uh stack worked hard. So when you read that red squirrels mostly eat the seeds of white spruce cones, well, it depends where the squirrel lives.
SPEAKER_06If the squirrel doesn't live in a spruce forest, it looks like it's eating pine cone seeds and mushrooms. And you can see the nest, like there's um there's grasses in there, there's feathers. Yeah, there's a whole bunch stacked on the nest. Like it's amazing. Ow! Branch in the face.
SPEAKER_07Wow, wow, wow, wow. Many red squirrels don't survive their first winter. I wonder how this squirrel will fare with its Herculean foraging efforts. Squirrels that do make it through the winter will be ready to breed in early spring. If it's a good food year, they might even breed a second time in summer. Like I said, it's a fast and frantic life. Double truck trailer. Um, oh my god, we had such amazing wildlife encounters today. I'm stoked. On the drive back to the office, we spot a coyote crossing the road. Do you say coyote or coyote? I think I'm in the coyote camp.
SPEAKER_05I think I only say coyote when I'm referring to an animal chasing a roadrunner.
SPEAKER_07How do you think our colleague Tom would say it? Senior wildlife biologist. Is that the authoritative voice? Whatever he does, we have to do. Well, let's let's hear from him.
SPEAKER_00Well, I I grew up always uh calling them coyotes.
SPEAKER_07Really? What? I thought for sure coyote was the more professional way. So to solve this conundrum, I looked it up in my Oxford Canadian dictionary, and uh it says coyote or coyote. Oh, it's classic Canadian.
SPEAKER_05We just have to make everyone happy. Although she's one.
SPEAKER_07We often debate along at the office here about how to say pika. Yeah. The little animal that lives in the alpine. Um, and that said pika. Some people say pika. Yeah. And even like, quote, pika experts I've heard say pika. So, anyways, in Canada, apparently it's a pika. Pika. Anyway, back to the coyote. Uh, Tom was also mentioning, as we know, that it's not surprising that we saw a coyote because uh now I'm saying coyote. Well, that's what Tom says. You gotta say it that way. It's not surprising that we would see a coyote or a coyote uh out there in the forest because they're they're such versatile animals. You can expect to see them basically anywhere in the forest below a certain elevation. They're generalists and they go with their food sources. Yeah, they eat all kinds of things, including squirrels. They would definitely eat that squirrel. The squirrels. The squirrels that piled up all those mushrooms in the tree. Oh my god, that was so cool. That squirrel went to so much effort. I hope that squirrel makes it through the winter.
SPEAKER_05It deserves to. Like it is really prepared for a like Game of Thrones level of winter.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, it was really cool wondering that. Just that like 200 meter stretch of a forest we walked through, just to see the diversity of the forest and all the critters that do or could live there, like the snowshoe hare and Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And I wouldn't say we were there at prime wildlife viewing time. Like it was the middle of the day. We know that animals are often crepuscular, dawn, dusk kind of is good viewing. Um, late in the season, lots of things have moved on, lots of birds have moved on, and we still had huge success just walking through that small patch of forest.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, we saw like lots of animal sign, even of animals we didn't necessarily see. And you compare that habitat to the Tikini Bridge fire burn that's only a couple of years old, and you can see how this habitat is just starting to grow up more, and there's just more abundance of habitat and things for animals to eat.
SPEAKER_05You really get a sense of the forest is recovering and animals are returning and it and um it will continue to grow.
SPEAKER_07And we know forests recover after fire. However, we do want to do a PSA that in this podcast we're talking a lot about the benefits of wildfire. Wildfire is very beneficial and it's necessary for the landscape, but that doesn't mean we want to be cavalier about it.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, like I don't want people to think like, oh, I can just leave my campfire because if it starts a forest fire, it's all good. The landscape needs it and the forest will grow back. Fighting these fires costs millions of dollars and tons of our resources and our time and our energy, and they put people's homes at risk. So the natural forest fire cycle is a good thing, but I just want folks to still be very careful in those hot, dry summers, making sure that they are taking care of their campfires. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_07Okay, next episode. Where are we headed? Have we decided yet? We're gonna go. We're going through the path of succession. So we're going to visit a pine, predominantly pine forest. So this is we're going to an older forest. An older forest, yet. We're going to visit the Tikini Valley Fire of 1958. So not to be confused with the Tikini Bridge Fire of 2023. Uh the Tikini Valley fire now is close to 70 years old. And there we see that it is a predominantly pine forest. At least, again, it was a big fire of there's a mosaic, but in the place we're visiting, it's predominantly a pine forest, and that's what we'll be looking at, the kind of habitat that that creates.
SPEAKER_05So these trees are more mature and different animals would be living there.
SPEAKER_07Exactly. Okay, looking forward to it. Me too. Oh, wait, I forgot to come up with a pun for this one. Um I'm pining for the next episode. Did you really just pull that out right now? I did, but I don't think it was that clever.
SPEAKER_05I but I couldn't, if you said come up with a pun, I would just sit there with a blank face. I'm so punny. I'm so funny. Okay, talk to you next time.
SPEAKER_07This podcast was produced by the Yukon Department of Environment's Wildlife Viewing Program. Mixing and sound design was by Mark Kepke. Our theme music, White Bark Pine, was written and produced in the Yukon by Dana Jenijon and performed in collaboration with The Bennett Sun. There are no White Bark Pines in the Yukon, but you already knew that. This song was inspired by the White Bark Pine that survived the 2013 Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park, California. To learn more about wildlife in the Yukon, go to Yukon.ca slash wildlife viewing. You can download guides, posters, and resources and find out about free walks and talks. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and share it with everyone you know who appreciates wildlife. Thanks for listening. See you on the trails.
SPEAKER_03For my home with its cheek against the sky upon the mountain spine, something grabbed a hold when I saw that white but pie.