Essays
Moseying: Exploring the Natural World
2008 – the worst year ever for wildfires
April 23, 2008
“This is the worst year ever for wildfires!” Landowners, oil field personnel, and many others have commented on the multitude of fires in the rural landscape during the first three months of 2008. A number of people have asked the staff of the Sibley Nature Center for an explanation. Part of the answer is obvious; much of last year’s above average rainfall came during the warmer months when grasses grow fastest. We have had other wet years before (especially during the 1980s), so why are there more fires this year?
In the last twenty years a couple of things have changed. Fewer landowners “optimize the forage potential” of their land. Very few landowners rely on livestock production as their primary source of income. Ranches are lightly stocked, for the most part. Many ranches have absentee ownership more interested in their property’s hunting potential. The other major change is the increase in population in the region. Midland County, for example, has almost 40,000 more people than in the 1980s. In a number of areas in West Texas there is considerably more oilfield activity. Not everybody is as careful as oldtimers are in their efforts to prevent wildfires. Some people are downright ignorant.
“A cigarette cannot start a grassfire,” a reader wrote to the Odessa American. We have had several people say the same thing to us at presentations throughout the region (and we have been all over the map this spring, giving programs in an area bounded by Sonora, Fort Stockton, Andrews, and Sweetwater). I was giving a program in Sonora when one the Eaton Hill Nature Preserve staff received a phone call to help out the Sutton County Volunteer Fire Department. I asked her about cigarettes and wildfires and she said that cigarettes started almost half of the fires she had worked this spring. “Another twenty percent are started by catalytic converters on vehicles, and welders started most of the rest.”
Several of the 2008 class of the Llano Estacado Chapter of the Texas Master Naturalists began photographing some of the burned areas near Midland to record how long it takes for the landscape to become revegetated. “We found green sprigs of grass less than a week after one fire,” Leslie Harmon (a teacher at Midland Montessori) reported. “It looks like some mesquite was actually killed,” J.D. Driscoll commented. “The greenest part of the landscape in April were the sites of the fires,” Chris Cherry noted. In the near future a new photoessay on wildfire by the Chapter will be added to the Prairie to Mesquite brushland section of the Habitats section of this website.
South of Sterling City a wildfire burned about ten miles along the road. The old fences with cedar posts mostly lay on the ground, but the fences with t-bar metal posts were still standing. At least eighty percent of the mesquite appeared to be killed, along with seventy percent of the juniper and ninety percent of the prickly pear. The mesquite may still sprout from the root crown, but the landscape has been significantly altered. The grass there was a verdant luscious green on Tax Day.
Late winter fires appear to rejuvenate the prairie. A fire during the hot summer is much slower to recover. A fire started by lightning in midsummer at the Sibley Nature Center in the late 1980s has yet to return to its pre-burn condition. The burned root crowns of the grass did not receive moisture for three months and eighty percent of the grass died. The next year tall annual weeds grew, preventing grass growth, and over the years tall weeds kept returning, until much of the fire area became a tumbleweed jungle after 2007’s rains.
Modern land managers often consider prescribed burning to reduce brush so more grasses are available for livestock. Last year in February the Texas Nature Conservancy burned part of the Diamond Y Preserve north of Fort Stockton. The burn specialists for the Conservancy and Texas Forest Service worked with Pecos County officials, and the oil companies with wells on the property to burn about 200 acres. In five hours the fire was out. During the summer, it became evident that most of the salt cedar thickets along the creek were severely set back. American Indians managed the landscape using fire as a tool, too.
The Kwerkenuh (an old name the Nemeneh used for themselves, since “Comanche” means “enemy” in Pawnee) were no fools. Buffalo medicine is the art of knowing the very best time to set a fire to get the grass green quickly, magically drawing the buffalo close for a successful spring hunt.
Lightening from the irregular spring thunderstorms would also catch the prairie on fire, and the insistent southwest winds herded the fire for days. Flaring up during windy days and slowing to a smolder on calmer nights, the fires burned and burned for miles, until stopped by the rocky country of the breaks, or a draw with lush green winter grass that snuffed the flames quiet. For a hundred miles, or two hundred, or even three, the fire rode the will of the winds. Afterward, remnants of winter moisture fed quick growth; within two weeks a blackened prairie became green.
Knowing that fire meant food, buffalo turn and walk towards thunderstorms climbing fifty thousand feet into the sky, or turn into winds laden with the scent of old and traveled grass smoke. Shamans shaking rattles and singing songs, tossing special herbs into the breeze; it was not superstition, but sophisticated ecological understanding dressed up as a pageant.
The landscape of Central and West Texas has become mostly covered with mesquite, juniper, and other species of brush since the days of the Indians. In the past one hundred and fifty years species of woody trees and shrubs have increased a thousandfold. Fires today burn wooden fence posts, houses, barns, and sometimes livestock, so we seek to put fires out as soon as possible. The fires of 2008 are a reminder of the past.