Painting the Landscape with Fire: Longleaf Pines and Fire Ecology

Fire Is Good

1 Fire Is Good the carolina sandhills are ancient. The hills are small, often just subtle risings and fallings in the land. It is easy to imagine when you drive down a dirt road or hike through a forest there that the Sandhills are the timewasted dunes of a Paleozoic sea. A geologist tells me that’s not the case. The Sandhills are the eroded peaks of the Appalachians, the oldest chain of mountains in the world, mountains that stood as high as the Himalayas before their heights were ground to dust by wind and rain and washed down by Mesozoic rivers. As lowly as the Sandhills seem, however, they are older than the Himalayas. The geologist says that I should not be overly impressed by this as the Himalayas are not old geologically.1 Still, it impresses me. To an untrained eye, the pine forest of the Sandhills may look monotonous . Like an old midwestern prairie, it is “a subtle landscape, typically underwhelming for the casual observer.”2 But the Sandhills harbor a remnant of one of the rarer ecosystems on Earth—a longleaf pine forest, which is home to approximately eight hundred plant species. At first glance this southeastern woodland appears to be just pines, grass, and scrub oaks, but it is rich in species that thrive only in this ecosystem. Carolinians don’t have to trek to Alaska or the Amazon to find the wild or the rare. Sadly, they don’t have to go far to find the endangered either. In the Sandhills some plant and animal species are hanging onto life with slender roots or talons. I went to the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge in search of a topic in 2003. Two years earlier I had started writing nature essays on reptiles , geology, raptors, botany, and so forth for local newspapers and magazines , and I was looking for a new subject, maybe cottonmouths or coyotes. I like researching and writing about natural science. It gets me out of the office and into the woods and wetlands, where I meet experts who love their 2 Painting the Landscape with Fire work and are generous with their time. At the refuge I introduced myself to manager Scott Lanier. Scott asked me to write a news article explaining to a sometimes hostile public the need for prescribed burns in longleaf pine forests, a topic about which I knew nothing. Scott’s headquarters is a red brick building surrounded by forty-five thousand acres of tall pines, wiregrass, upland bogs called pocosins, ponds, and purple-flowered lupines. Dressed in a khaki shirt, green slacks, and boots, Scott was fit and clean shaven, with a warm smile and shock of boyish brown hair. His upper sleeve sported the badge of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—a logo of sun, mountains, lake, fish, and duck. He welcomed me into his office. I immediately noticed Scott’s professionalism and respect for his staff’s expertise. The Carolina Sandhills prescribed fire crew is among the most experienced in the United States in a region, the Southeast, that has more prescribed burns than any other in the nation. A healthy longleaf forest is open and lacks a hardwood midstory. Saplings grow with few or no lateral branches to raise their terminal buds above the next fire. The ground cover here is bracken fern. Photograph courtesy of USFWS. Fire Is Good 3 Prescribed burns are a hot topic both locally and nationally. In 2000 in New Mexico a prescribed burn of nine hundred acres raged into a wildfire that burned forty-seven thousand acres and destroyed more than two hundred homes. A letter to a local newspaper complained that prescribed burns at the refuge are set by “fire arsons” who “burn up the timber and animals in the forest.” Another agreed: “The people at the Sandhills will tell you also that they burn to create vegetation for the animals. Well, when you burn up the forest and engulf the animals with the flames, where are the animals to eat the vegetation?” Distrust of fire is inbred and widespread. Of course, it’s the burn that goes bad—not the ones that prevent future conflagrations—that kindles the 6:00 news. “Fire has been suppressed for so long that when a forest finally burns, it’s catastrophic,” Scott explained. “Had prescribed burns been introduced periodically, we might not have experienced those...