Los Angeles — Behind the charred remnants of a town, the foothills are rich with new green and alive with birdsong.

Wildlife is returning to the Eaton Fire burn area, and scientists are attentively monitoring it four months after wildfires raged through the Angeles National Forest, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses in Altadena.

A group of volunteers mounted trail cameras, which captured the first mountain lion sighting in the area on March 26. It appeared again just two nights ago.

“My first inclination was to share that with people who have lost so much in this fire and our community in Altadena, because it’s a sign of hope that nature is returning, that nature is resilient,” said Kristen Ochoa, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, medical school who is leading the initiative.

Ochoa, a long-time Southern California resident, began documenting the plants and creatures that live along the Chaney Trail Corridor in July 2024. She launched the Chaney Trail Corridor Project and began uploading findings to iNaturalist, a volunteer-driven network of naturalists and citizen scientists that maps and shares biodiversity evidence from across the world.

The privately held acreage close to Angeles National Forest land, located just behind Altadena and with a trailhead approximately a mile (1.6 kilometres) up the road from neighbourhoods ravaged by the fires, was set to be sold and developed into a sports facility. Ochoa and other volunteers established a trail camera network to highlight the area’s biodiversity and compile a “inventory of everything that was valuable.”

Much of the country was scorched and barren as a result of the fires, and the crew lost all of its cameras while viewing photographs of the flames being broadcast before they went dark. However, less than two months after the fires began, Ochoa was able to return to the scene and install fresh ones to begin documenting the landscape’s recovery.

“The thing I really remember is coming here right after the fire — there was so much birdsong,” Ochoa told the reporter.

Many of the group’s volunteers are local locals who have lost their homes, and many have told Ochoa that seeing nature rebound in the area has given them hope.

While the fires burnt fiercely, they also burned unevenly, leaving patches of trees and a little oasis of greenery around a creek unharmed. Animals may find safety there while the rest of their home burned down.

They haven’t found any dead animals, she said, but there have been reports of an injured bear and deer.

The significant rain that fell in the weeks following the fires has aided in a speedy recovery.

On a recent Wednesday morning, Ochoa pointed out several burnt San Gabriel oak trees—only found in Southern California—with abundant green growth around their bases.

According to Ochoa, the “crown sprouting” is the result of the trees’ deep and established root systems, which have enabled them live for hundreds of years.

An intense bloom of yellow mustard blossoms, an invasive species, has also taken root on the slopes, potentially crowding out native plants such as California sagebrush and wild cucumber, which provide food for ground squirrels.

The organisation is collaborating with local scientists at UCLA to conduct studies on how bats and birds fared during the fires as well.

As she placed a recently donated trail camera, she pointed out bobcat scat and fresh deer tracks on a ridge that had burnt just months before.

A pair of red-tailed hawks circled each other in a mating dance high above the sky, a symbol of spring.