Fire and Earthly Paradise (Part II)

Six weeks ago, we did a controlled burn across Nan Awaya Farm. We've done burns before, but with this one, even more with than the others, we can see exactly why Indigenous land managers liked to burn their land. This spring, everything is emerald green even though we're in a D1 drought. All kinds of special plant species are popping up, without a mature thorn vine in sight. Even more deer are around than usual, yet no ticks. In the aftermath of this burn, the farm's landscapes are more pleasant to be on than we've ever seen them before. This spring, it's finally dawned on me that a freshly burned landscape shares a lot in common with traditional Choctaw concepts of The Land of Souls (aka Heaven).

For those just tuning in, a cool aspect of native landscapes, and especially grasslands, is that they are constantly in a state of change. From one day, one season, and one year to the next, a grassland can be different colors, heights, and look like it's made up of totally different plant compositions. That's its nature, because in our part of the world, grassland exists because of disturbance. Thousands of years of management by people, lightening-set fire, and grazing are what kept it from becoming thick woodland. In working to restore the landscape of Nan Awaya Farm, we have to re-create the conditions that helped to shape this landscape in the first place. That means periodic grazing and fire. When we burned this land in early March, we committed to sharing updates on how it would respond through the growing season via this blog. The rest of this post is a series of pictures taken on a short walk around the land combined with the explanations of what fire-related thing is going on in each photo.

6 weeks after the burn, walking around the land, the first thing you notice is the color green -everywhere. The freshly burned grass is full of nutrients and flavor for grazing animals. Our neighbors' cows have broken through the fence I don't known how many times and places since the burn, trying to get to this luscious native grass.

I start my walk heading downhill to check on the seep. The creek is flowing cool water. An hour before the walk, we turned on Merlin and it identified calls from about 20 different bird species in the seep, ranging from catbirds to a fittingly green-colored bird known as the White Eyed Vireo.

Down in the seep, a lighter shade of green indicates native grasses and rushes are taking over ground. Formerly, the understory of the land in this picture was almost completely dominated by dark-green wire grass, a native plant that grazing animals don't eat. We let this part of the land rest from grazing for a year before the burn. The combined effect of rest, going to seed, then burning, has created the conditions for this area to now support more forage-producing plants for the bison. That's like buying more acres of land for free.

The other main change with the seep is how open the fire has made it. If I'd walked this same path two months ago, my clothes would have literally been cut to pieces on me by all of the vicious thorns. Today, I easily strolled through in shorts and sandals. I took exactly one thorn wound, and it was in a finger tip. Cleared of old growth, the blackberry vines will be back next year, producing more abundant fruit and, alas, thorns.

Last week, we saw an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail as we worked on fence. It's the state butterfly of Alabama. We were afraid that it might be having trouble finding food so early in the season. Then, we went down to the seep and saw more Swamp Thistles than we've known this land to ever produce. There were multiple, big Swallowtails fluttering around them going after the thistle nectar.

Here's a bumblebee where it spent last night. Stinger-up, situated among a hundred spines in the thistle's foliage seems like a pretty safe way to catch some zzz's.

As I leave the seep for the uplands, I'm joined on my walk by Amy and Chunna the cat. Both are great company (and Chunna's orange fur makes a nice contrast with the green). Chunna is riding pretty high right now. Last week, iNaturalist identified him as a Siberian tiger.

When you look at a native landscape from a distance, you might only see a forest or a grassland. A lot of what's really neat, though, comes with a closer look. There are hundreds of species of native plants and insects living out there, each with their own stories. Together, their hundreds of individual stories make up a big part of the story of a native landscape. The landscape of Nan Awaya Farm is becoming more vibrantly native, and this burn is another step in that transition.

Queen's Delight (Trecul stillingia) is a sand-loving plant. I don't see it a lot in our region, outside of Nan Awaya Farm. Here, it grows remnant within a few steps of our house, and is popping up in new places after the burn. It will make 3-ft tall sub-bushes later this spring.

Old Plainsman, (Hymenopappus scabiosaeus) also grows remnant within steps of our house. Usually, we just see a few plants in a couple of pastures. After the burn, this single patch now has over 200 plants. Old Plainsman has one of the all-time best names for a prairie plant. Unfortunately, I don't see it growing around our area a whole lot, mostly in the tiny roadside prairie remnants between here and Bennington, OK.

Milkweed is the only food source for Monarch butterfly caterpillars. Four native species grow remnant on this farm, but none of them are very abundant. Hard to grow from seed, we've been scratching our heads on how to get this important plant to be more numerous here. Well, the fire certainly helped. There are a some places now where we've got 20 milkweed plants coming up within just a couple steps of each other. The single plant in the picture is Green Milkweed Asclepias viridis.

Nan Awaya Farm has over 200 species of native grassland plants growing remnant on it. Still, because of past abuse, some species are rarer here than the should be, or don't grow here at all any more. Every fall, we go out to local remnant prairies and hand-gather grocery bags of seed. We combine these with some store bought seed and plant them on the farm's landscapes that are in need of rehabilitation. The technique we use most often is to go out in a pasture and use a garden hoe to churn up 1ft-daimater patches, where we plant the seeds. Through the years, we've planted more than 10,000 of these patches. Overall, I'd say that about 1/3 of them ultimately produce a viable prairie plant.

By removing the thatch, this burn made planting a lot faster. In some places, instead of churning the ground with a hoe, the ground was bare enough that we could just scatter the seeds and rake them in. This season, with the aid of the fire, we've hoed/raked another 2,738 patches of prairie seed into the ground. We've also broadcast buckets of seed onto patches of bare soil before rainstorms. Most prairie plants are about the long game; they establish slowly. Most of what we planted this year won't show up until after our next burn in 2-3 years or later. With this burn, what we're seeing are past year's plantings coming to fruition.

Meet Silphi. She's a Rosinweed, Silphium integrifolium. By summer, she'll be 4-ft tall, with many sunflower-like flowers. Rosinweed is an important plant in the prairie remnants of southeastern Oklahoma, providing food for pollinators, deep roots, and top structure. Only two patches of rosinweed were growing remnant on this land when we moved here. Both were under trees and eventually got shaded out. That was until Silphi popped up last year, at least 5 years after we had planted her. After this spring's burn, new Silphis are popping up in multiple pastures.

Eastern Gamma Grass, Tripsacum dactyloides, is a prolific native grass, related to corn. The plant in front of Amy will grow to be 4ft high and 8ft wide by summer. You can see a dozen more behind her. Accounts from southeastern Oklahoma before the Trail of Tears describe Eastern Gamma as a major ground cover here. Today, it's rare to see it, because most of this plant has been grazed away. Since the burn, we've been seeing Eastern Gamma Grass plants coming up from seed that we planted clear back during the COVID shutdown.

The darker green in this foreground, like many places in Oklahoma, was originally covered in ragweed. Over a few years of our management, the ragweed gave way to broomsedge bluestem. This grass is a native, but the buffalo don't like to eat it for most of the season. Broomsedge puts chemicals in the soil that are toxic to other plants and it can make these huge stands of nothing but broomsedge that dominate the ground for decades. To try to break that dominance, we've experimented with broadcasting a diverse seed mix on the ground between the broomsedge plants every time we burn. The experiment is working - The taller, lighter-green grass in the foreground of this picture is mostly Indian grass plants that are now invading and out competing the broomsedge. In a few years, the seeds broadcast during this year's burn cycle will come up too and swing the pendulum even more.

Sunflowers are an important plant, both culturally and ecologically. We've tried hard to restore them to our uplands, without much success, at least for the first decade. For a couple years, we had regularly added Annual Sunflower, Helianthus annuus, in our seed mixes. These plants would come up, but soon get chomped by the deer or buffalo. Being annual plants, that seemed to be the end of them, so I eventually gave up on planting the seeds. However, now, there are dozens of little sunflowers like these coming up everywhere that the plants have grown in past years. Obviously, the chomped sunflowers were a lot more effective at producing seed and sewing it than I realized. These seeds had just sat there in the ground waiting for another burn to clear space for them to germinate. In a couple of months, these little sunflowers will be 3ft tall and covered in native bees. I'm going to start putting Annual Sunflower back in our seed mixes again!

Well, there's plenty more we could go see on this fire-shaped spring paradise, but Chunna is tired now (Have you ever noticed how short cat legs are?). He finished the walk by taking a rest by a patch of American Germander (another native wildflower that has benefited from the burn).

This recently burned land will continue changing significantly as we move farther into spring. Here before too long, we'll do another post on the progress and share some of the new things we're learning. As mentioned, and hopefully as demonstrated through this post, native grasslands are in a constant state of change. If you're like us, and you like variety in your life, you might consider working to protect or restore a native grassland that you can interact with on a regular basis. It can be as small as a garden patch, or as big as a park. If you think you might be interested in that, here is a great place to learn more.