Time and space to learn and grow
Guest post by student Taylor Hancock -
During my previous reflection, the main thing the stuck with me during the first week of our trip was the different viewpoints people hold here regarding conservation and what it means to them. And while the past few days we have spent more time in the forest and less time on the prairie, I think the theme of conservation is still the key to understanding this land, however in a varying way. In this regard, I think that conservation and resilience go hand in hand and that is the idea which has been most impactful to me over the course of the last several days. During this section of the study, we have been collecting forage samples, doing transects, and Plant ID – and this balance between conservation and resilience has come up many times.
The first time being during Dr. Aguerre’s section. During his section, we were mainly focused on the quality of forages in different areas of the ranch. Our different areas included treatments on the land regarding fire. This has been exponentially important because one of the most impactful things on the land is fire. In 2019, on Frosty Creek and High Meadow ranch in the Bull mountains there was a very large fire called the Bobcat fire. For sampling in all 20 total plots, there are un-thinned and unburned sections (plots that have not been thinned out nor burned in he fire), thinned and burned sections (plots that were affected by the Bobcat fire as well as being thinned prior to), and a combination of each of those. During Dr. Aguerre’s section we went to each of these plots and collected forage samples from them. These will later be dried and ground down in the lab in order to analyze the nutrient contents of the forages which were able to grow in these different conditions. There is something about being in the woods that really makes a person reflect on their surroundings and all the while, I kept thinking about how this relates back to the idea of conservation. These forages (and the land in general) has been able to survive, overcome, and adapt to the challenges the land gives them. These ecosystems have been extremely resilient. Not that long ago the Bobcat fire wiped out almost all of the plant community in the area, and it is amazing to see all of the new growth that has come up. We have been able to see firsthand how the forages and grasses respond to changes in their environment. We have also seen how thinning can create a more diverse forage community and how that can be beneficial to the grazers that occupy this area. I have learned that fire is a protector of the land despite having a negative connotation that it is destructive.
We also learned about things like rotational grazing, preventing overgrazing, and supplementing roughages, haylages, and silages to take some of the pressures off of the rangeland. Which brings me to the second way I have been thinking about conservation during the forages section. From a rancher’s perspective, protecting and preserving the grasses are infinitely important because they need to have something to feed their cattle. Not only do they need to protect the rangeland to feed the cows, but they also need to protect the quality of the plants in order to keep their animals healthy. This all circles back to conserving the land, and as mentioned in my previous reflection, preserving a way of life. I am very excited to be able to get into the lab this coming fall so we can start to see the results of the nutrient content for the different treatment areas.
On the other side of the coin, the theme of resilience applies to so many other areas of concepts we have been talking about with Dr. Hagan. The first example of this is how resilient wildlife has been in the face of the challenges against them. Fire is not the biggest enemy to wildlife. In most cases, humans are. The destructive nature of humans is a stark difference to the way fire behaves. Sure, fire can be destructive – but it also opens the opportunity for the ecosystem to reset and for it to absolutely thrive. In the 1900’s for almost an entire century prescribed burning was not allowed, and this mismanagement of the rangeland is still having negative impacts today. When we let fires burn, the fuels do not have a way to build up. In the most basic sense, burning prevents the detrimental fires that poorly impact people’s livelihoods and their homes. Again, a way to protect the land is to burn it. On our plots, the un-thinned and unburned are the sites that have the least amount of biodiversity and the least amount of plant growth. These plants are even smaller in size. What I am getting at is that fire is an excellent tool of conservation.
Further, we have spent a lot of time talking about how indigenous communities knew that to be fact and actually practiced prescribed burning for thousands of years before laws were written to prevent it. We are just now getting back to a place where we are doing prescribed burns on the rangelands, but public perceptions of it tend to be negative as fire is viewed as a destructive and scary thing. None of this is to say that fire is never destructive and is never harmful, but I do think it is very important to reflect on how indigenous communities had this taken from them – and this is yet another thing that we can learn from how they lived with the land.
To sum everything up, the time we have spent on the plots has been time I am truly grateful. It may not be the most exciting thing in the world to collect forage samples and do plant ID for a week straight, but there is so much value in the time we’ve spent gathering data. We have been able to see the resilience these ecosystems process and we have learned more about how conservation has so many meanings. After the first week I concluded that conservation was the fundamental ideal to Montana, and after the second week I still hold that to be true. A huge thank you to Dr. Hagan and Dr. Aguerre for their time and the space to learn and grow.
