Guest post by Clemson student Joseph Romano
A trip into an unburned forest just beyond the Bobcat fire
area showed us an ecotone that shifted from scattered trees and grass to dense
forestation where shade from the Ponderosa Pines had slowly killed off most
grasses and other sunlight dependent plants. Since fire had been excluded from
this area for so long, the change in habitat was drastic. I learned a little
more detail about how fire history can be read from the burned and healed over
scars on the trees. It is possible to extrapolate what fires happened in what
years given enough available data from multiple trees. If they are cut down
then you can see which age rings of a tree were burned by fire. You can also
see the probable movement of a fire through the forest by the sides on which
still standing trees were burned. The trees also told stories of thunderstorms
from their lightning scars.
On another
day we got to see cattle vaccinations for Brucellosis. One veterinary Doctor
and husband and wife ranchers normally do the whole job for dozens of cattle.
We were able to offer a little help and learn how the herding, gate systems,
chute system works. I found that these ranchers, Terry and Lavonne, were fully
aware that elk were the main threat for the spreading of Brucellosis to cattle
from their bodily fluids. The requirements for vaccination are quite stringent.
There is a small window of age for them to receive the vaccination, there are
tattoos of numbers for proof of vaccination, and they must have them if they
are to cross state lines. One way Terry and Lavonne helped with efforts to
shrink their ecosystem negative impact was by following the DNRC’s
recommendation to allow 1 field at a time to lay fallow for a year.
Later we
saw the fire manager’s perspective of fires in Montana. They both take measures
to fight fire and prevent it from damaging personal property and economic
valuables, and they intentionally use it in a controlled fashion to prevent
future potential fires from burning as intensely and rapidly and for ecosystem
benefits. Prescribed fire has only recently made its way to the parts of the
West. Rapidly growing research shows its benefits for improving wildlife
habitat, decreasing the severity and intensity of fires when they do happen,
and more. Using prescribed fire and thinning in concert can reduce the hazard
which applying prescribed fire presents in the west, where winds can carry
fires further faster, and the lack of humidity in the atmosphere dries the fuel
loads more. There are other risks when deliberately applying fire like this.
Sometimes a fire can burn down through a root system underground and emerge
aboveground up to months later and reignite. There are also coal veins nearby
the area we surveyed which of course are highly inflammable. After thinning and
burning applications, leaving a mosaic of spaced-out tree clusters, wildlife
has been observed moving back in and sometimes more than before. It also has an
impact on vegetation type, but I’m not sure what the effects are for any given
area. It seems like invasives like cheat grass can be given an advantage, but
it could help many native species too as we saw in some areas where they were
present in dense quantities. There are challenges for this kind of fire
management though, as timber sales of Ponderosa Pine are not highly demanded.
Using logging to thin the trees and sell the merchantable timber makes overall
costs of management reasonable. If they can’t find buyers for the timber however,
mulching the trees is viable, but far more costly. Since most of Montana’s land
is classified as rangeland rather than forest, funding for what is normally a
forestry task is difficult to come by.
By the end
of this trip, we were shown the effects of the different treatments with
thinning and burning on vegetation and forage. I only really understood that
there was a statistically significant effect on vegetation quantity under
burned and even more so under thinned and burned in concert treatment areas we
surveyed. There are many other variables fires and thinning can have a massive
effect on. Burning a pile of cuttings for example, if not done when there is
enough moisture available, can burn so hot on the ground it sterilizes the
soil, and that could make it unviable for certain vegetation except for the
most robust generalists.
On our last
day we got a taste of a little more history of the land. Some pictographs told
stories of native lifestyles. Some lived always on the move, and some took up
agriculture and lived in houses not so different from our own, using the
topography of the land to improve their shelter. Seeing how various topography
provided for not just the people, but very specific wildlife was interesting
too. Cliff Swallows need cliffs as their name suggests. Their nests were
nothing like any bird nest I’ve ever seen, glued as they were up the vertical
faces of sandstone.
