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The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska Nebraska Home Contact Places We Protect Field Trips & Events Press Releases Ways of Giving |
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Prescribed Fire in Nebraska By conducting prescribed burns, The Nature Conservancy mimics the natural fire regime within fire-dependent systems. These prescribed burns have similar fire effects as a lightning-ignited wildfire, but reduce the negative impacts associated with a wildfire.
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Fire Training in Texas
By Dr. John Ortmann
Director of Science and Stewardship at the Niobrara Project Office
The Nature Conservancy
More than 20 people huddled in the damp, chill morning air on the vast Refugio-Goliad Prairie of coastal Texas in mid-February. Very shortly our professional reputations, safety and perhaps even our lives would depend on this diverse group instantly transforming into a well-oiled machine and performing flawlessly.
It worked. Before the day was out we helped prescribed fire specialist Ray Guse set a Texas Conservancy record for the most acres burned in the state in one day, just shy of 2,400.
Those acres were important for a host of reasons, including improving habitat for endangered species, making the most of limited resources and providing rare on-the-job training opportunities for aspiring Conservancy and federal prescribed-fire practitioners.
What’s Good for Guse is Good for the Chicken
Since 2003, the Texas Chapter has put special emphasis on restoring fire on a 600,000-acre block of relatively intact coastal prairie.
The prairie had been identified as the last, best hope for the Attwater’s prairie chicken, a subspecies of the greater prairie chicken that is essentially extinct in the wild. Captive birds produce offspring that are reintroduced to the site—a futile effort unless the habitat suits the birds’ strict requirements.
Like other prairie grouse, Attwater’s prairie chickens like wide-open grasslands with a variety of heights and structures. Vertical objects, even small trees, are threats because raptors use them as hunting perches, especially to key in on nesting hens.
Much of the Gulf coastal prairie is rapidly turning into impenetrable brush thickets. The reasons for the tree invasion, as with most ecological phenomenon, are complex, but one major factor is the virtual elimination of prairie burning.
When a Great Idea Catches Fire
Guse was grateful for the extra help. The burn originally was designed as two separate, smaller fires, but the large crew allowed both tracts of land to be burned on the same day. How and why those resources happened to be available was a long story with many actors.
A key figure was Jeremy Bailey, the Conservancy’s Fire Training and Networks Coordinator, who was marking only his six-month anniversary with the Conservancy that morning. Bailey, a 13-year veteran of elite Forest Service and National Park Service firefighting crews, first met many of his new colleagues in December 2007 when he attended a meeting of the Great Plains-Fire Learning Network in nearby Victoria, Texas.
There he heard oft-repeated discussions of two major issues; the difficulty of re-introducing fire to imperiled landscapes on the vast, privately-owned Great Plains and the difficulty many Conservancy staffers on the fire-starved Plains have in gaining sufficient on-the-job experience to achieve official ranking in various fire specialties. This level of training is required since the Conservancy became a member of the National Wildland Fire Coordinating Group in 2003.
Bailey saw a way to begin to address both vexing issues at once. He proposed bringing in the Conservancy and, in this case, Bureau of Land Management staff, who both were in need of training. At the same time, he saw the chance to beef up results on the ground at a critical time in the crucial Refugio-Goliad project.
It was an idea whose time had come, which encouraged sharing Conservancy resources across state lines, increased cooperation with our new federal fire partners and increased prescribed burning.
The Match is Lit
I was one of the strangers shivering in the damp on that February morning. I’ve been to some fires, but never one as big as this one promised to be. Plus, there’s always a major creep factor when burning in a strange environment and unfamiliar fuels for the first time.
And one doesn’t want to look the fool in front of the local experts, in this case Texas Conservancy crews from Refugio-Goliad and the Hill Country, especially when you haven’t even figured out which direction the sun rises in Texas.
It was as routine as fire ever can be. Ray Guse explained how he intended to organize the big crew, taking overall command himself and naming two other people to oversee all lighting and holding on each flank of the burn area, which were miles apart until the circle was closed that afternoon.
The flank bosses then in turn gave every individual a specific task for the day. We trooped from “staging,” the gathering point, to the planned starting point—a bit like the circus coming to town, with four engines and numerous smaller vehicles. Then Guse made the final “go/no-go” decision, and a single match that would blacken 2,400 acres was struck.
People were relaxed, yet serious and focused, a feeling that fortunately is contagious. Then everyone did their jobs. All day. Without a break. The inside got black and outside stayed brown. And some lucky folks got to see some Attwater’s prairie chickens, which seemed to be casting an approving eye on our efforts.
A second such multi-state and partner effort is planned for the spring burning season in Nebraska and South Dakota, both major grassland states with their own brush problems. If the model proves successful, it has potential to aid a longer-range objective to preserve the privately owned Great Plains grasslands as pure grasslands; namely to help educate and empower landowner-managers so that tending their land with fire becomes as routine as fence fixing, calving, branding and other annual chores they take for granted.
