Burning for Native Land (Part 1)

Range fire has been on the Oklahoma news a lot lately. Under the wrong circumstances, it can ruin or end lives in a hurry. I've always treated fire with respect. Even so, it has escaped on me before. At first, you race to try to smother the small, but growing flames with whatever is at hand. Despite your fastest efforts, it can quickly grow to be more than one person can handle. The flames leap and crackle, expanding out in a circle from every newly ignited spot. Soon, the fire is creating its own wind, blowing itself into a 10-ft-tall roar that races across the grass, seemingly consuming everything in its path. It can be a terrifying feeling to have something you care about sitting in that path.

Range fire has been in the American heartland since long before people were. It is a part of this land's native power, just like a July thunderstorm or a mama bear with cubs. For 40 million years, the grasslands and open woodlands of what is now the American heartland have been shaped by range fire and adapted to carry and spread it.

While fire has had a continental impact millions of year deep, many of its most important impacts are at the small scale. Fire removes dry thatch so that a patch of little bluestem grass can grow more prolific, nutritious shoots for spring bison calving. Fire parches the seed ticks hiding in the leaf litter, giving the deer a temporary reprieve. The seeds from blazing star, one of the most beautiful wildflowers in our area, are designed to germinate after getting exposed to the smoke from a range fire. Birds, like killdeer, need the open and short vegetation left by the fire to nest. The effects of fire can vary over the space of just a few human steps due to variables like micro elevation, micro humidity, specific ground cover, etc. The effects vary greatly by the season, too. Fall range fire kills young trees, helping to expand grasslands and open the canopies of woodlands. Winter fire stimulates the spring grasses. Spring fire promotes the dominant summer prairie grasses. Summer fire promotes forbs (pollinator plants), and creates a spike in grass protein the following growing season. All of this increases the diversity of the landscape, benefits native plants and animal communities, recycles nutrients, improves forage for grazing animals, and makes the landscape easier to walk through, along with a thousand other ecological services seen and unseen - The American heartland was made to burn.

We've been working for a decade, now, to restore the native landscape of Nan Awaya Farm through selective grazing and seed planting. Those efforts are a lot of difference, but we can't be successful without the third pillar: controlled fire. Up until this winter, we'd done several small burns at different seasons, covering a few acres here and there. This year is different. Due to a fencing issue, most of our pastures haven't been grazed in a year. We literally have a hundred tuns of dry, combustible fuel on the farm this spring. On top of that, our area formed its first burn association here just a couple weeks ago. - Burn associations are organizations where neighbors share expertise, man-power, and equipment to do controlled burns cooperatively. We have never had a better opportunity to do a controlled burn with an intense, fuel-rich fire which will have a significant impact over most of the farm.

For thousands of years, any Indigenous community could decide the landscape around them needed burning, light a fire, and let it go wherever it needed to. Today, a lot of planning, work, and partnership goes into doing a controlled burn that will do its work on the desired piece of land, without jumping onto other land and creating the next wildfire story on the news. The rest of this post shares the process of setting up and doing the burn at Nan Awaya Farm, yesterday. Future posts, later the growing season, will return to look at how this landscape responds to this burn.

Preparations began in January. Cole, a controlled burn professional with Oaks and Prairies Joint Venture, came to look at the current state of our land and advise us on creating a burn plan. A burn plan is a written document that lays out how the controlled burn will be done. It specifies how the fire lines will be constructed, what the temperate, humidity, and wind parameters will be on the day of the burn, how many people and what equipment will be on hand for the burn, how the fire will be ignited and what neighbors and fire departments will be contacted ahead of time. It's helpful to have such a list to make sure that nothing gets overlooked. The burn plan also keeps things objectively safe. On the day of the burn, when you have people assembled to help you, the pressure can be high to get things moving. If the wind and humidity are not quite right, if you don't have quite enough people or equipment to do the burn safely, the burn plan provides objectivity that prevents the possibility of getting caught up in the moment. If the conditions laid out in the burn plan are not met in full, you don't do the burn that day, full stop. One spring, we rescheduled a burn seven times and never actually got to do it because we never had the right conditions. That was better than having the fire escape.

This time, we set up to burn 150 acres, nearly the entire farm. One of our fire lines was road. I prepared the other mile and a half of fire line by brush hogging it twice, then hand-raking away all of the leaves and cut grass. The day before the burn, I went over the line one more time with a leaf-blower. Amy used a weed whacker to trim to the bare ground around every single wooden fence post that would be within the burn area. In the hours before the burn, Michael helped me pen up our bison: the little ones together, the big ones together, the mean one by herself, and the horses by themselves, to keep them from crashing through a fence or hurting each other if they got excited from the fire, Their pens are in an area as far out of the smoke as possible.

South perimeter fire line the evening before the burn.

One the day of the burn, we had a crew of ten people and four mounted water sprayers come to help us. Getting enough man power has always been our biggest challenge in conducting a burn. We're grateful to Cole Fagan and Ken Gee with Oaks and Prairies, to our community members in the burn association, and to our friends who came to help us. We started the fire on the downwind (north) side of the farm. Two crews began at the center of the north side and worked around the perimeter in opposite directions. First, a water line was put down on the edge on a section of the fire line. Then, we set fire to a foot-wide strip on the interior, with a sprayer watching to make sure that the little fire didn't cross the line. When the fire had slowly burned upwind to blacken a three-foot wide strip of ground, we'd ignite another three-foot wide strip. Before long, we had not only our mowed lines, but a 20-foot wide strip of blackened ground to contain the fire. The expression "fighting fire with fire" comes from this principle - starting a small, controllable fire to burn up fuel to keep a raging fire contained.

Creating a wet line and burning a strip along the downwind perimeter.

As we continued to light around the perimeter, the winds pushed the fire towards that 20-ft wide blacked area, so after the fire had done its job, there was nowhere for it to go but out. With all of the dry fuel, the fire burned really well. It crept across the dry leaf litter and rushed through the prairie grasses.

Setting fire along the driveway.

In the tallest grasses, the flames got 12-ft high. In the wet lowlands, 6-ft tall flames traveled right across the water through the wire grass and sedges. Ceder trees exploded in flames, We saw a few things during this fire that we hadn't seen before. The papery bark on the river birch trees shot flames all the way the tops of the trees. We experienced tree chimneys too. More on them below.

Results of the burn in the uplands. The blackest areas are the places where we've been most successful in establishing thick stands of dominant native tallgrasses. Little bluestem, big bluestem, Indian grass, switch grass, eastern gamma grass, sand lovegrass, brumesedge, and to slightly a lesser extent, purpletop, are made to burn to the ground. They promote fire because the fire gives them a competitive advantage to come back stronger than less fire-adapted plants the next growing season. Fire also promotes their seed production.

The burn went right through most of the seep. The soil here is boggy, with little trickles of surface water everywhere. You don't think about wet landscapes like this burning, but the non-woody native plants that grow in these seeps are adapted to spread fire too.

Our land has some places chocked out by thorn vines, where the brush grows up so thick the buffalo don't get in to graze it. It's good to have a few places like these for small animals to take refuge, but it doesn't help the land to have too many places like this. Here, you can see how the fire burned up the vines, burned up some of the fallen dead wood, and impacted the closely spaced trees. Future burnswill continue to open things up, so eventually there will be enough sun for grass and wildflowers on the ground and enough space for the bison to comfortably move through.

One of dozens of 15-year-old logging piles that were significantly reduced in this burn. Some of these will smolder until the rain comes later this week.

Thanks to all of the help and planning, the burn went like clockwork. Even though the flames raged, there was never a point where it seemed like there was even a possibility of them going where they weren't supped to.

The plant community on Nan Away Farm has been frozen in time through the winter. Nothing has changed much for months. Walking around the land every day, the different patches of grass, the leaves, the trees are all familiar. Its a bit surreal for all of that to change so much in the course of just a few hours, but it's all for the good. Not surprisingly, the brush blinds that I made to hunt deer from last month all turned to ash, and that's fine. What's really neat to see is how the land recovers from a burn, so green and fresh and vibrant. The last time part of the seep burned, it supported a tall blanket of wild flowers that summer, and in the fall it attracted significant amounts of monarch butterflies on their migration. We have a lot better handle on the types of plants growing down there now, and it will be cool to better see and comprehend the changes the fire will bring to this growing season. This fire will expand the native tallgrasses we've been working for years to get more thickly established in the uplands. Before then, the open ground will give us a window to easily plant lots more seed that we collected from roadsides this fall. In 2-3 years, the next fire will really bring out the seeds that we're sewing now.

The nighttime landscape the day after the burn is always neat place, a bit otherworldy. As we patrolled the fire lines last night, we heard the tree frogs and bullfrogs singing like never before. We checked on the glowing spots here and there in the dark. Most of them were piled tree branches burning each other into ash. We checked out one small glowing spot, to discover a 50-ft tall oak tree had caught fire inside. It was spouting smoke from a branch 12 ft off the ground. This is what is called a tree chimney. We couldn't see the fire burning on the inside until we were right on top of it and looking from the right angle. By late in the evening, a 4-ft wide cavity had burned out of the middle of the truck, leaving a shell glowing on the inside.

The burned tree cavity on the right, with our neighbor's controlled burn glowing in the background to the left. This isn't edited.

As we've noted in previous posts, Choctaw traditional culture and the native landscapes of the Choctaw homeland (as well as the Oklahoma Reservation) are two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other for very long. Responsibly burning the landscape is a deep part of culture and it supports culture. As mentioned, we'll follow up with more posts this growing season to show how the increasingly vibrant native landscapes of the farm respond to this February burn as the growing season moves through its timeless stages.

Thank you again to everyone who helped us today. We will return the favor!