Wildfire smoke and birds are colliding more often as longer, more intense fire seasons send haze far beyond burn zones, raising urgent questions for wildlife and people alike. On a wildflower-speckled hillside in Amherst, Massachusetts, Olivia Sanderfoot pauses to take in a burst of birdsong. An Eastern Wood-Pewee, a goldfinch, a downy woodpecker. It is a serene morning, but she knows not every day is like this.
Over the summer, smoke from distant Canadian fires drifted over the region, a scene that has become increasingly common as fires start earlier, last longer, and scorch more land.
“Smoke can blow hundreds to thousands of miles away from that burn site,” Sanderfoot says. The footprint of smoke often far exceeds the fire itself, she adds, raising a central question for her work: how do birds cope when the air turns toxic?
That inquiry underpins her push to build a new research arena she calls smoke ecology, aimed at understanding how wildfire smoke disturbs habitats and animals, and what can be done to lessen the damage.
Smoke ecology and shifting fire seasons
Air today, gone tomorrow
Sanderfoot’s fascination with smoke began in 2018 in Seattle, when fires burning in Eastern Washington shrouded the city in a sickly yellow-gray pall. She was told it was a fluke, yet two years later it happened again.
Her eyes burned as she stepped outside, and she wondered how wildlife was faring. Anecdotes hinted at disruption, from hushed dawn choruses to sudden surges of hungry, thirsty birds in backyards.
Smoke is a complex mix of pollutants, she says. It affects more than lungs. It also scrambles cues birds rely on to navigate their world, like light, visibility, and sound.
To untangle the science, Sanderfoot teams up with researchers across conservation biology, statistics, ecophysiology, and atmospheric chemistry. “Real-world problems don’t map cleanly onto academic silos,” says Tracey Holloway, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and lead of NASA’s Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team.
Understanding what birds inhale requires tracking how smoke moves through space and time. Winds, atmospheric chemistry, rainfall, and emission sources all shape exposure.
Air monitors, satellites, and advanced models help build that picture. Birds may be especially vulnerable because of how they breathe.
Unlike humans’ soft lungs, birds have rigid lungs and air sacs that push air through continuously, allowing roughly twice the oxygen uptake per breath. “That also increases exposure to whatever else is in the air,” Sanderfoot notes.
Ecologist Morgan Tingley of UCLA, a colleague in this growing effort, says the goal is to recognize smoke as a disturbance distinct from fire. Wildfires have clear edges and timelines.
Smoke does not. “It can be there one day, one hour, and gone the next,” he says, making its impacts hard to isolate and predict.
Since researchers cannot control smoke or ethically expose animals to it, they rely on observations collected everywhere, all the time. That is where armies of community scientists, conservation staff, and ornithologists come in, documenting birds before, during, and after smoke arrives.
Big army, little birds
On a bright August morning near Boston, Pam Sowizral, who coordinates bird projects at Mass Audubon’s Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary in Lincoln, taps on a nest box before opening it. Inside, two downy bluebird chicks nestle atop pine needles.
They are the last brood of the season. For nearly two decades, Sowizral and volunteers have checked boxes three times a week in spring and summer, tallying nests, eggs, and fledglings through sun, rain, and, lately, smoke.
“Those periods when the smoke was here, the air felt a little different,” she says, but the monitoring continued. Those counts, part of Cornell University’s NestWatch project, create timelines of behavior across conditions.
Sanderfoot uses such records, alongside breeding observations, to see how birds respond to wildfire smoke across landscapes. So far, three broad strategies are emerging, varying by species and even individuals: birds may stay put and ride it out, leave the area, or alter behavior by calling less or venturing out less often.
“That could be an attempt to reduce exposure,” Sanderfoot says, or a forced response if they feel unwell. Repeated smoke exposure appears to impair body condition in several species, leading to lower overall weight, according to findings she and colleagues have reported.
Responses differ widely, which is why Sanderfoot says the next step is to pinpoint smoke refugia, places that help birds endure poor air. She wants to know where birds go when it is smoky, what resources they seek, and what people can provide during risky periods, such as water, shelter, or food.
The work is personal, too. After fleeing fires in Los Angeles in early 2025, Sanderfoot watched smoke from remote Canadian blazes settle over parts of the U.S., including around Ithaca, where she now lives.
“We can expect that the future will be smokier,” she says. That reality affects both wildlife and communities, including in island regions that can see haze drift long distances.
As smoke ecology matures, Sanderfoot believes it can offer practical guidance for protecting birds and, in turn, ourselves. “By learning more about birds,” she says, “we might learn how to take care of ourselves and each other.”
Researchers say that changing fire regimes are intertwined with broader climate shifts already disrupting ecosystems and agriculture, echoing concerns raised as France wine harvest heads for historic low after extreme heat.
Organizations such as Mass Audubon are watching how smoke and heat reshape habitats, while communities weigh how best to protect both people and wildlife in a warming world.
