Date: 6/24/25 9:14 am From: Conor McMahon via groups.io <conormcmahon22...> Subject: [sbcobirding] Pino Alto - Birds and Post-fire Observations
Hi all,
On Saturday I birded at Pino Alto, parking at the gate and walking up the road to the peak.
The first part of the road here is mostly on south-facing slopes. In this area most of the canopy was completely top-killed, but almost all the oaks are now resprouting basally (a few resprouting from the branches as well). The understory has started coming back a bit, too. I think most of the conifers in this patch were killed and won't resprout. I saw no sign of conifer seedlings germinating post-fire anywhere on the trip.
After the sharp turn in the road halfway up (about 34.73516, -119.97634), the trail gets back into some mostly unburnt areas on the shadier north slope. Here there's still lots of surviving Douglas-fir and some pines, too.
The Pino Alto Campground area itself is pretty torched. There are a number of places where signs or benches were clearly burned completely (e.g. some concrete pads with only metal feet left that I assume used to anchor a wooden structure). The small loop trail there is very overgrown with Bromus and Avena invasive grasses and there's one large tree across the trail, but otherwise not hard to navigate. In this area several oaks had burnt so severely that nothing was left but holes in the ground, burnt down into the roots.
I think it seems like the conifer woodland overall here is meaningfully reduced, but there's still some. It will be interesting to see how it compares in coming years vs. what people found here previously.
Birds: 5 Western Wood-Pewee 5 Steller's Jay 3 Mountain Chickadee 3 Western Tanager (2 of them singing near picnic area) 0 Pygmy Nuthatch 0 Brown Creeper ? Olive-sided Flycatcher - thought I might have heard some pips (uncertain)
Breeding Evidence for Hairy Woodpecker, California Scrub-Jay, Oak Titmouse, Dark-eyed Junco.
I was a little surprised that I saw lots of Cliff Swallows but no Violet-green Swallows, which from eBird seem like they've been common here in past summers, and which I think of as fire followers. I have seen lots of the latter on recent trips to Sedgwick very nearby. Maybe I just got unlucky, or maybe they need a bit for new cavities to form after old ones burnt? Although that seems at odds with breeding Oak Titmice etc.
I've included lots of habitat photos of burnt areas in the eBird checklists for anyone interested:
