After a burn and a shot of rain, things green up. Bracken fern, an early successional plant, grows in a maturing forest of longleaf pine.

Excerpt from "A Matter of Aesthetics"

January 29, and South Carolina was in the first cold snap of the winter. At seven a.m. it was six degrees below freezing and windy when I stepped out of the house for a long drive to meet Judy Barnes, DNR wildlife biologist; Barclay McFadden, owner of Scotswood, a longleaf pine plantation; and plantation manager Craig McFadden . . .

Barclay McFadden loved to hunt quail, and quail need an early successional habitat. But Barclay also loved mature longleaf forests, and his intent was to reestablish one.

Fortunately, these were not rival affections. Frequent prescribed burning is one way to achieve an early successional habitat on the ground within a maturing forest. The seeming paradox of old-growth trees towering above an early successional habitat reminded me of the forest in Gary Snyder’s poem “Toward Climax”:

A virgin
Forest
Is ancient; many-
Breasted . . .

“I love to hunt, love the experience of being out with bird dogs and riding horseback,” said Barclay. “I don’t even need to shoot. I just like watching the dogs, watching my friends and family. More than that, it’s a matter of aesthetics, of finding a piece of property that’s been damaged and returning it to what it was to begin with--in this case, a longleaf/broomsedge savanna. You’ve seen pictures of those old savannas. We don’t have any of those original forests left in South Carolina, but look at a longleaf savanna that’s 70 or 80 years old--in my mind, there’s nothing prettier than that."

The fate of our Southern longleaf pine forests ultimately depends upon managing burns in the wildland-urban interface, the WUI


Excerpt from "WUI, pronounced Woo--eee"

March 15, eight p.m., and I was back home with a killer sinus headache. Gray, blue, and yellow smoke swirled inside my sinuses. I wondered if the men I had been with on the day’s burn had similar ailments. But I wasn’t complaining. It had been a good fire. I was still excited.

The night before, Pat Ferral of Ferral Environmental Services had called unexpectedly. Short notice, he said, but he was going to attempt the prescribed burn of a 36-acre tract in the Hitchcock Woods of Aiken, South Carolina, and he invited me along. At first, I was reluctant. I had already been on several burns. I pretty much knew the routine . . .

But this, really, was the chance I had been waiting for. The question--to burn or not to burn--and the future of fire, at least in Southeastern forest systems, did not depend upon the prescribed burns of remote, rural tracts where the only complaint might be smoke blowing across a little-traveled county road. The fate of fire, and ultimately the fate of longleaf pine forests and upland oak woodlands, as well, depended upon managing burns in the wildland-urban interface, the WUI.

Aiken is home to one of the oldest, biggest, and richest equestrian communities in America. Although Pat was only burning 36 acres, “this is a big one,” he said. “We got a very heavy fuel load. It hasn’t been burned in fifteen years and it’s right up against property lines . . . There’s a lot of liability, there’s gonna be a lot of smoke, and we have to take special precautions” . . .

Pat was happy but intense. Burning pumped him up, and this burn, especially. It’s an understatement to say a lot was riding on it--not just his good name and livelihood, but a forest of mature longleaf, a row of million dollar homes, and thoroughbreds as pricey as BMWs . . .

Excerpt from "Wild Turkeys"


“I don’t know if there is an ideal habitat,” said Mark Hatfield, wildlife biologist with the National Wild Turkey Federation. “In the past, people believed that turkeys needed large, mature, old-growth forests because that’s where turkeys were found, and people assumed there was a correlation. But those forests were just areas that had not been clearcut. Turkeys are very adaptable to hardwood ridges, bottoms, and upland sites. Overgrown fields are ideal for nesting. Turkeys need a variety of habitats--for example, early successional habitat, including warm season grasses. They also need mature forests and the transition areas between the two” . . .

If there’s one habitat that wild turkeys can’t live without, however, it’s an open understory. Although the birds can fly up to 35 miles per hour, their primary mode of escape is running. “Their avoidance of predators is based on sight and hearing,” said Mark. “When there’s a dense understory and they can’t see or hear well, they will avoid those areas.”

The most natural, cost-effective, and efficient tool for achieving an open understory is fire. Opening the understory not only gives turkeys clear lines of sight and escape, it encourages new plant and insect growth--bugs with sprouts--for browsing. “Remove the midstory of sweetgums, kill their root system with herbicides or fire, especially during the spring, and remove the leaf litter cover,” said Mark. “That will spawn new growth of native plants” . . .

“Fire is a disturbance that’s needed in nature. I get calls from people who say, ‘Hey, I just bought a hundred acres. I’m not gonna do anything to it but give it to wildlife.’ But Mother Nature’s dynamic. Change is never-ending. Fire brings new growth. You have a greater diversity of plants and, therefore, a greater diversity of insects, which the poults need for the high protein content” . . .

Carolina Sandhills NWR wildlife biologist Laura Housh, using a peeper scope to view chicks inside a red-cockaded woodpecker cavity nest


Excerpt from "Translocation"


5:30 p.m., September 29, and I was standing outside the Carolina Sandhills’ NWR office next to wildlife biologist Laura Housh, forester Clay Ware and 8 others, including Neal Humke and Brian Watts of The Nature Conservancy, who had driven down from Piney Grove Plantation in Virginia for the occasion--an attempt to translocate 6 red-cockaded woodpeckers to their refuge . . .

At dusk, each RCW would bed down in its own cavity, cozily ignorant of the US Fish and Wildlife Red-Cockaded Recovery Act of 1985 which mandated translocation, chirpilly unaware that with nightfall it might be stalked, startled from its sleep, frightened from its nest, netted, bagged, boxed and shipped to become part of a different colony in a different state and thereby participate in a gambit for its species’ survival. The birds would be stressed. Laura was stressed, too, although I would not have known it if she had not hinted to me how much depended on this day . . .

As we approached, Laura was kneeling at the trunk of the cavity tree, holding the frightened bird. “The toes of one of its feet are snagged in the net,” she said. Neal held a flashlight in one hand and the data sheet in the other as Laura noted the colored bands on the free leg--“white, white, mauve.” She then asked Neal to grasp the bird so that she could free its other leg and read the number of the aluminum band. This was a dramatic moment. Not only might the bird escape as it changed hands, it was also the first time that Neal would hold one of the endangered birds . . .

Inside each box, the birds were pecking loudly now like miners trapped in black caves testing the walls with pickaxes for the best routes of escape, or like prisoners in solitary cells tapping messages in morse code to other inmates, planning their breakout--”Where are we now, how many were caught, how do we get free?” . . .

The result of the hunt: 3 Homo sapiens motoring off in the night with 2 male and 3 female Picoides borealis in an effort to save one of the most resourceful and feisty little avians on the planet.

Clay Ware, forester at the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge


Excerpt from "In Search of the Elusive White Wicky"


As we stepped out of forester Clay Ware’s truck, biting yellow flies swarmed us. I sprayed my neck and arms with Deep Woods Off; it made me smelly and sticky. Clay went DEETless. He must have known the flies would disappear when we reached the pocosin . . .

“During prescribed burns, we run fire down into the stream heads,” he said. “You see how thick this is now. If we didn’t burn, the white wicky would get choked out by all the holly and red bay. But if you burn to set the other plants back, white wicky will keep on sprouting. . . . White wicky requires fire . . . It’s what enables this endangered plant to survive” . . .

“Here’s the white wicky--all of this right here,” Clay said, stooping. It was almost an undramatic moment. I had expected, I don’t know, a billboard or something to announce it . . . Then realized I was standing next to the three-foot tall, slender woody stem of one of the more endangered plants on the planet.

Longleaf pines, which may exist in the grass stage "up to 10 years," have survival strategies tested under fire


Excerpt from "After the Fire: Longleafs and New Growth"


“The pine’s new year begins in May, when the terminal bud becomes ‘the candle,’” wrote Aldo Leopold. “Whoever coined that name for the new growth had subtlety in his soul. ‘The candle’ sounds like a platitudinous reference to obvious facts: the new shoot is waxy, upright, brittle. But he who lives with pines knows that candle has a deeper meaning, for at its tip burns the eternal flame that lights a path into the future. May after May my pines follow their candles skyward, each headed straight for the zenith . . .”

To study the adaptation of longleaf-wire grass forests to fire, I went in late May to a woods in the Carolina Sandhills NWR with Forester Clay Ware. This threatened ecosystem needs periodic low-intensity fires to fend off hardwood encroachment. Early in May and “well into the growing season,” said Clay, the NWR crew had staged one of the last burns of the year to preserve a portion of this ecosystem.

Dead, fire-scarred leaves dangled from blackened branches of five- to eight-foot scrub oaks. Last fall, Clay explained, the oaks had stored nutrients in their roots for the next growing season. “This spring, those nutrients were allocated to leaf production. By the time of the burn, the oaks--which we’re trying to get rid of--had already leafed out. When you burn this time of year and kill the scrub oaks’ leaves, you really put the hurt on them. They have limited nutrients stored in the root system to produce new leaves” . . .

The ground we stood on was still black and charred. At first glance, the only color I noticed was a sprinkling of orange longleaf needles. “Needle cast,” said Clay. I was surprised by the length of the needles--up to 18 inches. More heat-singed needles hung from the lower branches of more mature pines, which were often 50 feet tall and 12 inches or more in diameter . . .

I surveyed the black forest floor and for the first time noticed hundreds of grass-stage pines festooning the ground. Although each was charred, each boasted a spray of little green needles. “You can see all of this new growth right above the needle scorch,” he said.

I was impressed and asked if most of the grass-stage longleafs had survived the fire. “Oh yeah,” said Clay. At this stage, their terminal buds are small, hard, and fire-resistant. Even if a fire kills the bud, at the root collar there's a latent bud which steps up, enabling the seedling to survive.

A crew member leans from the open door of a helicopter, dropping incendiary "ping-pong balls" into the burn zone

Excerpt from “Getting the Job Done Safely”


Rules and safety are key to Hayden Bergen, the helicopter pilot. “Some of the pilots that firefighters don’t want to fly with are ‘cowboys’ who try to show off. You can’t show government firefighters something they haven’t seen before. It’s not like you need to impress them. They’re more impressed with getting the job done safely and efficiently and with getting home at night” . . .

I asked how he trained to fly burns. “A lot of your trainers are the people you work with. The people I work with--Mark and Mike and Terri---are awesome. This is my third year, and these guys are by far the best I’ve seen. Mark and Mike have a lot of fire experience. Mark repelled out of a helicopter for years--100, 200 feet up. Those guys are pretty highly regarded” . . .

“Learning to fly a helicopter is not overly hard,” he said. “But this job at the Sandhills--you really have to know how to fly. A pilot who isn’t comfortable won’t be able to do it. When a pilot learns to fly, he has lessons in safety and emergency landings. For example, he follows flight profiles which protect him if his engine fails. On a prescribed burn, though, I may fly about 30 feet above the pines. If something goes wrong, we’re going into the trees. It’s a calculated risk. You do everything you can, but the risk is there. Everyone on the helicopter knows that” . . .

On an ATV, forestry technician Mark Parker patrols the perimeter of a fire break


Excerpt from "Prescription for a Burn"


Compared with the last prescribed burn I had witnessed, Unit 2.2 was trashed with undergrowth--abundant pine needles and leaves, fallen branches, and an encroaching midstory of hardwoods, mostly turkey, red, white, and water oaks. The excess of fuel on the ground made me nervous.

I waited with Don Cockman, Assistant Refuge Manager, by his truck, hoping to get a photo of the burn crew dropping dotted lines of flame with drip torches along the fire break or the edge of the road . . . Don told me that the lines of fire they were laying down would be visual cues for Terri Jenkins, the helicopter’s burn boss. If not for these, the helicopter’s crew “would have a hard time seeing the road” and might accidentally start a fire on the wrong side . . . A moment later over Don's radio I heard Terri Jenkins, the helicopter boss, say something about a dozen blue herons.

“There’s a beaver pond in this unit,” Don explained, “and a big old pond pine snag with a heron rookery.”

The rookery, Mark later told me, was “down in Black Creek bottom in a beaver pond. It’s too wet there, it won’t burn. The herons ate a little smoke, but that’s about it" . . .

Soon the helicopter was shuttling overhead and things heated up. As the aircraft banked fifty feet above the trees, I could see a crew member in its open door working the aerial ignition machine. White “ping-pong balls” fell in lines, fizzed, and burst into small circles of fire seconds after impact. Soon orange flames jumped through the woods, and gray-white smoke wrapped the crowns of the pines. . . .

Forestry Tech Mark Parker, the day's burn boss, briefs the crew on the morning's burn. To Mark's left is helicopter pilot Hayden Bergen

Excerpt from "Definitely an Art”


I followed Mike into the briefing room. Sitting on a table was Hayden Bergen, the helicopter pilot. Mike introduced us. Tall, tan and wearing a green jumpsuit, dark tortoise-shell sunglasses and rock-star hair, the pilot had an accent I couldn’t place. English? Australian? “Ne-ew Zayland,” he said.

On contract from Decatur, Texas, Hayden and the Bell LongRanger helicopter were stationed at the Sandhills through the burn season, from February to May. The next summer, Hayden would be on fire detail at the Moab Desert in Utah, where he would drop 100-gallon buckets of water from his helicopter onto fledgling wildfires so we wouldn’t get to hear about them on the evening news.

Hayden had 2 responsibilities. One was to fly patterns above the burn zone so that the helicopter crew could drop lines of incendiary “ping-pong balls” to start fires. The other was to get the crew back safely.

At an earlier prescribed burn, I’d stood in a fire break and watched the helicopter hover, bank, turn, and shuttle back and forth fifty feet above the trees along the edge of the smoke while a crew member, leaning from the open door of the chopper and manning the aerial ignition machine, dropped balls to seed the flames.

I wondered how the devil Hayden could see the forest through the smoke. . . .

At the Carolina Sandhills NWR, Mike Housh, Mark Parker, and crew fill drip torches with slash fuel in preparation for a prescribed burn

Excerpt from "Staging a Burn"

A morning in late April, 7:00 a.m. I received calls from Scott Lanier, Manager of the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge, and Mike Housh, Fire Management Officer. “We’ll try a prescribed burn,” they said, “if we can round up a few extra bodies” . . . A freelance writer, I’d been invited along to watch.

I had a cup of coffee and turned on the Weather Channel. Low of 46. High of 80. Unlimited visibility. Humidity 93. Dew point . . . Sleepy, I wondered what a dew point was. . . .

An hour later, I was at the NWR headquarters in the office of Forestry Tech Mark Parker when Mike Housh entered from the hallway. It was the first time we had met. Strongly built, with a day’s growth of beard and a goatee, dip in his lip and a can in his back pocket, he wore a black t-shirt, green fire-retardant pants, and a ball cap lettered “Carolina Sandhills NWR Fire Region 4 District 2.” In a previous life, Mike had played rugby in Washington State, Texas, and Columbia, SC. I found out later that the helicopter pilot was also a former semipro rugby player. I wondered if there was a Pavlovian connection between the brutal contact sport and fire fighting or just some shared, unconditioned need for the rough-and-tumble.

Planning the burn, Mike and Mark immmediately fell into the shorthand dialog of those who had worked together a long time and knew the terrain. . . .