There was a crunch with every step Melissa Merrick took as she veered farther off trail. She wasn't looking at the leaves littering the ground, but at the branches they fell from.
Through her binoculars, Merrick scanned every treetop for a sign of a nest. Any cluster of leaves could be home to the rare species she was looking for: the Chiricahua fox squirrel.
The Chiricahua squirrel is a subspecies of the Mexican fox squirrel and is native to the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona. After the 2011 Horseshoe II Fire scorched over 220,000 acres of the Chiricahua National Monument, the survival of the bushy-tailed critter and the state of its habitat in the monument was uncertain.