Veld Fires: A Hidden Threat to Pangolins in South Africa

Published 21 June 2026 • AlphaPanga Editorial Team

The poaching crisis dominates discussions about pangolin survival in South Africa, and with good reason. But alongside the illegal trade, a quieter threat burns through pangolin habitat every year: veld fires. These fires — some natural, many human-caused — reshape the landscape pangolins depend on, with consequences that are only beginning to be systematically documented.

Fire is not inherently a threat to savanna and grassland ecosystems. Many South African biomes are fire-adapted; some plant species require fire to germinate, and periodic burns clear dense vegetation, encourage new growth, and reset nutrient cycles. But the timing, frequency, and intensity of fires matter enormously, and for a slow-moving, burrowing, insect-dependent animal like the Temminck's ground pangolin, a badly timed or unusually intense fire can be devastating.

How Pangolins Respond to Fire

Unlike many other savanna mammals, pangolins cannot outrun a fast-moving veld fire. Their maximum walking speed is modest — typically between 3 and 5 kilometres per hour — and they do not flee in the way that antelope or warthogs do. When threatened, a pangolin's instinct is to curl into a ball, relying on its overlapping scales to protect it from predators. This defensive posture is effective against jackals and hyenas but not against flames.

Underground burrows offer pangolins their primary fire refuge. A pangolin that has retreated to a burrow before a fire front arrives may survive unharmed, as burrows provide thermal insulation and the fire typically passes over them in seconds. However, if a pangolin is caught foraging in the open when a fire moves through — particularly at night, when most pangolins are active and fast-moving fires are harder to detect — the outcome can be fatal.

Post-fire burns also present a subtler hazard. The insect colonies that pangolins depend on — particularly termite mounds and the ant nests at their base — can be damaged or temporarily depopulated by intense fires. In the weeks immediately following a major veld fire, food availability for pangolins in the affected area may decline sharply, forcing them to travel further to forage.

Displacement and Secondary Threats

When a veld fire moves through a pangolin's home range, the animal does not simply wait for conditions to recover. GPS tracking studies conducted in KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo have shown that pangolins displaced by fire events move beyond their normal range boundaries, travelling distances they would not normally cover in search of unburned foraging habitat and intact burrow systems.

This displacement creates a cascade of secondary risks. Moving outside familiar territory means losing knowledge of safe routes, reliable burrow locations, and the spatial memory of where termite mounds are concentrated. It means crossing roads more frequently. It means entering areas where human activity — farming, settlements, livestock grazing — is more intense. And it means venturing into zones where poachers may be operating, far from the animal's known and monitored location.

The link between fire displacement and poaching vulnerability is not yet well-quantified, but rangers and rehabilitation specialists in South Africa report an anecdotal correlation: rescues of injured or confiscated pangolins tend to cluster in the weeks following significant fire events in adjacent areas. The animal's disorientation makes it easier to locate and catch.

The Changing Fire Regime in South Africa

South Africa's fire regime is changing. Climate projections for the subcontinent indicate a trend toward hotter, drier conditions in many regions, with longer fire seasons and more intense fire events when they occur. This is already visible in the data: fire extent records across several South African provinces have been broken multiple times in the past decade.

Human ignition patterns compound the climate trend. Arson for land clearing, fires escaping from agricultural burns, lightning strikes in dry conditions, and deliberate burning by poachers (to flush animals from cover) all contribute to a fire landscape that is increasingly unpredictable. For a species with small, fragmented populations in isolated reserves, more frequent and intense fires reduce the margin for recovery after each event.

Prescribed burning programmes — controlled fires set by reserve managers to manage vegetation structure and reduce accumulated fuel loads — are a standard management tool in South African protected areas. When well-managed, these burns are conducted at times and in conditions that minimise risk to wildlife. Pangolin monitoring teams are sometimes consulted on burn planning in reserves where pangolins are known to be present, allowing managers to avoid burning areas of high pangolin activity at critical times.

Fire and Termite Mound Ecology

Termite mounds are fire-resistant structures to a degree — their clay-rich walls conduct heat poorly, and a fast-moving grass fire typically does not penetrate deeply into a mound's structure. However, the grass and leaf litter at the base of mounds, where many ant species nest and where foraging pangolins spend considerable time, is exactly the material that burns. In the immediate post-fire period, this foraging microhabitat is temporarily destroyed.

Research on savanna termite ecology indicates that mound-building termite colonies can repopulate the surface structures of their mounds within weeks of a fire, though the recovery of their foraging galleries and above-ground activity depends on rainfall and the regrowth of vegetation. For a pangolin patrolling a burnt area, the recovery of reliable food sources may take four to eight weeks depending on fire intensity and subsequent rainfall.

In areas subject to frequent or very hot fires, permanent changes in termite community composition have been documented. Species that build large above-ground mounds tend to recover more quickly than those that forage primarily in leaf litter and grass roots. This shift in available prey may influence which pangolin foraging strategies are most effective in heavily burnt landscapes, and it may affect the long-term suitability of repeatedly burned areas as pangolin habitat.

Reserve Management Responses

Progressive game reserves in South Africa are incorporating pangolin vulnerability into their fire management planning. This typically involves:

Firebreak maintenance around high-density pangolin zones. Where GPS tracking has identified core pangolin areas within a reserve, land managers are increasingly maintaining cleared firebreaks that slow or stop fires from penetrating these zones, buying pangolins time to shelter underground.

Real-time fire monitoring with rapid response teams. Some reserves with active pangolin populations maintain fire response teams equipped to track active fires and, when safe to do so, locate and temporarily secure pangolins caught in the open. This requires knowing where tracked animals are at any given time — an argument for higher rates of GPS collar fitting on reserve pangolins.

Post-fire welfare checks. Reserves with active pangolin monitoring programmes routinely check on known individuals in the days following fire events to assess condition, confirm they are foraging, and identify any animals that may require veterinary attention.

Community Land and the Private Landowner Problem

The challenge of fire management for pangolins extends well beyond formal protected areas. Much of South Africa's remaining pangolin habitat sits on communal land, private farms, and small-scale game farms with no formal management infrastructure. On these lands, fire management practices are highly variable, and the link between fire events and pangolin welfare is generally not considered.

Community conservation programmes that support landowners adjacent to pangolin habitat — providing information on fire management, monitoring support, and rapid-response contacts — are one of the most cost-effective interventions available. When a farmer understands that a pangolin detected on their land is worth more alive (through conservation payments, tourism potential, and ecosystem services) than the convenience of an unmanaged burn, the incentive structure shifts.

What Needs to Happen

Addressing the fire threat to pangolins requires integration across several domains: better fire monitoring in pangolin habitat, more systematic tracking of pangolin locations and movements during fire seasons, greater inclusion of pangolin welfare in reserve burn planning, and expanded community outreach to private landowners.

Longer term, reducing the frequency and intensity of anthropogenic fires — those caused by human activity rather than lightning — requires engagement with the farming and rural communities that manage or influence the landscape. This is not a pangolin-specific problem, but pangolins are among the species that would benefit most from a more careful and conservation-aware approach to fire on the South African landscape.

Veld fire is not the primary threat to pangolins in South Africa — poaching holds that grim distinction. But fire is a multiplier of risk, displacing animals into unfamiliar territory, reducing their prey base, and creating the conditions in which secondary threats become more likely. A conservation strategy focused exclusively on the illegal trade misses the ecological complexity of what pangolins actually need to survive. Fire management is part of that picture, and it deserves more attention than it currently receives.