Fire escape How animals and plants survive wildfires

Here is an exceptionally informative look at how the forest and the animals and plants that inhabit it adapt to survive devastating wildfires. Garland's beautifully illustrated woodcuts, alongside vibrant color photographs, complement Stremer's text about how wild animals' keen senses help them detect and avoid danger from wildfires. Still, their survival isn't guaranteed, and the chapter discussing animal rescues has a content warning about animal injury and death. The treatment that Dr. Jamie Peyton developed using tilapia fish skin to treat burns is just one of the interesting facts included in the book. The text emphasizes how wildfires can also be beneficial to some plant and animal survival, as well as to help with forest regrowth. Climate change, global warming, and "poorly managed, unhealthy forests" are attributed to megafires, but techniques like the prescribed burns practiced by Native Americans are being adopted. The book describes the skills that firefighters need and their specialized roles in fighting wildfires--and that they have nothing on the ability of goats and beavers to eat vegetation and scrub to decrease fuel for fires or build dams and canals that create fire-preventing wetlands. A timely, engaging book that is as illuminating as it is fun to read. (With "fire facts" sidebars, glossary, source notes, index.)

Insights into how plants and animals control, survive, and recover from wildfires. Thanks to climate change and the U.S. Forest Service's shortsighted Smokey the Bear campaign, massively devastating wildfires are becoming ever more common--but, as Stremer astutely explains, nature itself has mechanisms in place for mitigating the damage and even benefiting from fire. So, along with describing how fires actually help lodgepole pines and certain beetles reproduce, she notes how some trees are protected by their bark and naturally prune lower-hanging branches to make it harder for ground fires to reach the canopy; she also notes how both goats and beavers serve to make woodlands generally less flammable. The author surveys ways in which wild fauna respond to fires, how livestock and zoo animals are evacuated, and, in a chapter headed by a trigger warning, how badly injured creatures are (when possible) rescued and treated. After retracing the natural stages of post-fire regrowth, she closes with general accounts of how controlled burns are managed and of wilderness firefighters in training and action; she caps it all off with bountiful source notes, citations, and resource lists. Crisp, drama-heightening photos of smoky or burned-out woodlands and of heavily equipped firefighters (racially ambiguous due to angle or distance) are interspersed with Garland's handsome painted images of flora and fauna. Must-reading on a hot topic. (glossary, bibliography, photo credits, index) (Nonfiction. 10-13) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.