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In the public imagination, forest fires are seen as simply destructive. In fact, these blazes can benefit a forest and its animal inhabitants, provided they do not happen too often or spread widely. Two examples are worth considering here.
In the first instance, fires can make food gathering easier for some species of animals. Wild turkeys are often seen lurking around the fringes of burning groves or thickets waiting for insects to flee the flames. Normally, hunting insects is time-consuming work for the birds. But since fire frightens the insects, turkeys find it easy to catch large numbers of the distracted prey.
In the second example, fire actually makes breeding and hatching the young easier for some selected few species. Take the mountain pine beetle, found from British Columbia, across the Rocky Mountain West and down into northern Mexico. Normally its numbers are severely limited by the fact that the bark of many conifers such as the Ponderosa Pine is toxic to the beetles. As fate or evolution would have it, the beetles need to lay their eggs under the bark. When there is a forest fire, however, the bark is burned off a large number of standing trees. Thus the beetles can bore into the wood and lay their eggs without danger. And, after the eggs hatch, the larvae are not exposed to toxin from the bark. Thus, for such species, forest fires are a blessing.