Fire

Fast Forward: FIRE! Rewind: Ungulates

In the future, it looks like there will be a lot of fire in California. Whether that is Good Fire or Bad Fire depends on you…depends on each and every one of us. Although it might not be ‘natural,’ we need Good Fire because we messed up a long time ago by driving ungulates extinct. Can we rewind? Let’s see.

Infernal Invitation

Our part of Planet Earth is constantly producing tons of fuel for the next wildfire. The coastal prairies are the most productive grasslands in California, creating 4 tons of dry grass per acre every year. Oaks, madrones, redwoods, and Douglas fir grow fast and tall around here. Shrubby plant communities go from nothing to impenetrable, dense thickets in just six years, ready to carry another inferno shortly thereafter.

With plenty of plant biomass to burn, and because of climate change, it is only a matter of time and the right fire weather to set things ablaze across our landscape. Local tribes could get fires to carry through the forests every 4-6 years: that’s how quickly fuel builds up to carry flames. About 6 years after the last fire, we should start expecting the next one, especially if there’s the right conditions. 2 consecutive years of drought makes parts of plants die, creating the dry wildfire kindling. Next up…heat waves….and then wind….and then all that is needed is ignition. We expect more summer lightning to do the job of starting fires as climate change destabilizes weather patterns and sends parts of hurricanes spinning across California.

Compost Happens

People are wrong if they imagine that once plant leaves and stems fall, they quickly decompose into the soil. Lots of folks I talk to think that things rot…mushrooms break down plant parts, after all, right? The cycle of life is all about death, decay, and rebirth! In miniature experiments, many people work this cycle with compost piles, or at least they purchase compost and add it to their gardens. Compost is nature’s proof that decay happens, so it must be the same in the plant communities around here, right?

Mediterranean Mummies

Rot misconceptions are founded in moisture preconceptions. Half of the year, the hot part, is dry: no rain. The wet part of the year is cool. The combination slows decay. In the forests, from what I’ve seen no stem, branch, or trunk larger than 2”diameter will fully decay before it burns in the next fire. Rot resistant redwood needles accumulate in a thick mulch that carries smoldering fire. Grass stems in our prairies last 3-5 years if they don’t touch the ground or are grazed, so there’s lots of accumulation there, too. In shrubby areas, plants are so closely packed that nothing tips over onto the ground, so dead stems and whole dead bushes are held upright for years awaiting the next blaze.

Drier, Hotter, and Few Big Creatures

It hasn’t been this fire dangerous for very long in these parts. This coast was moister and cooler just 15,000 years ago. Pollen records show the departure of grand fir and the arrival of coast redwood around that time on the Santa Cruz coast. On the larger scale, California has been getting drier and hotter since the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada started blocking summer rain that came from that away. About 15,000 years ago, huge herds of animals went extinct here: elephant relatives, horse and camel relatives, bison, and many more grazing critters roamed in massive herds, grazing and browsing the landscape. This would have profoundly affected fuel accumulation and plant community structure. In that kind of situation, wildfire would have been much more patchily intense. Big grazing creatures crush brush, eat leaves, topple trees. Bears and ground sloths tear apart tree trunks. Dead plant parts plus big creature impacts plus moisture conditions would have made composting much more natural.

What Now?

Okay, so change is happening: what do we do now? Good Fire is the answer, and to make that happen will take everyone’s cooperation. Good Fire involves careful planning and enough labor to set ablaze large areas of nature…at the right time…at the right intensity…at the right season and interval. We will have to feel safe when people tend fires in our forests and grasslands, right up next to roads and homes. Not many people feel that sense of safety right now, but we are still learning and training, and getting better at working together and building trust.

Meanwhile

Meanwhile, how do we live around such a flammable and dangerous landscape? I see people clearing vegetation and trying all sorts of ways of disposing of dead plant parts. As fewer people burn wood for heat or cooking, that is decreasingly a means of wood disposal. People seem enamored with wood chip additions to landscaping, but wood chips only slowly decay and are a fire hazard for years. Some folks are ardent about hügelkultur and composting, but these systems are of limited potential, requiring intensive management and, often, summer irrigation to speed decay. I see many people attempting clearing and biomass addition – mulching, composting, and even summer irrigation – in our poor-soiled chaparral communities. These practices destroy epicenters of biodiversity, type converting precious habitat to flammable weeds and increasing the potential for pathogens to spread into the adjoining habitat. Better to carefully thin and prune back chaparral vegetation where necessary and have low-intensity wintertime burn piles.

In many other situations, wintertime burn piles seem a fitting solution while we await better alternatives, such as Good Fire. Burning piled up biomass takes skill and careful planning to do it right. There are good regulations which get you started on the right path to pile burning: they require not too big of pile and that the biomass is dry so as to create not too much smoke. Permissible burn days assure smoke doesn’t too badly affect human health. I suggest a few other items to the list of things to pay attention to when pile burning. First, don’t burn a pile where it sits: a fox skeleton was the first sign that taught me that. Poor fox, cowering in the pile of brush hoping we’d go away only to be set on fire! There are lots of other critters living under that pile of dead plants! Also, why not use that burn pile to do something else useful? For instance, use the heat to kill an unwanted tree, shrub, or weed. French broom seedbanks might be devastated by a burn pile. A jubata grass plant could be eradicated. A coyote bush that would otherwise start to invade a meadow could be taken out. Also, one might have a group around the bonfire for a social occasion. And, think about how the nutrients and burned bare patch might affect the natural situation: weeds (or natives) will grow stronger, fire-following plants might germinate along the perimeter!

Here’s to learning how to live in a new era on this wonderful landscape. Join a bonfire this winter and pitch some biomass onto the flames to make our community safer!

-this post originally published by Bruce Bratton in his laudable weekly blog at BrattonOnline.com

Dead Wood

Such a negative connotation, the term “Dead Wood.” The phrase makes you think about useless things that get in the way, and, in the terrible capitalist production context, unproductive people. Now, turn your mind away from this type of meaning and think instead of the dead wood of forests or the logs floating along in streams or lakes, log rafts in the ocean, or driftwood piled up on the beach. Dead wood in those contexts is what this essay is about. Why might dead wood be ecologically important or how can it be dangerous, and what should we do about it?

Presenting Food for Woodpeckers and Bears

For some, dead wood is promising. Up on the North Coast, I’ve been hearing the cackling calls of “Woody” (aka pileated) Woodpecker, here on the southern end of its range along the coast. Pileated woodpeckers have been well fed since the Lockheed Fire and are about to have great feasts and lots of homes as a result of the CZU Lightning Complex Fire. And, it’s not just the pileated woodpeckers- round here there are also hairy, downy, Nuttall’s and acorn woodpeckers that will also benefit from lots of standing Dead Wood. Flickers will also enjoy lots of pecking space in the dead trees where millions of insects are burrowing through trunk and branch or gathering just under exfoliating bark.

How much wood would a woodpeckers peck if the wood were specked upon the ground? Not much. But, if we had bears, they would tear that wood apart pronto. There are big, greasy, tasty grubs deep inside decomposing trees, whether they are standing or fallen over, and bears have the nose to sniff them and the paws to get at them. In bear country, you’ll often see shredded dead trees where bears have been foraging.

Home is Where the Hole Is – Life in the Big Brown Pole

Dead Wood is home to many critters other than the bugs that feast on it. The insects, fungi, and bacteria make the dead wood soft enough to excavate into nest cavities for birds. The list of local nesting birds that need Dead Wood cavities to nest is long (at least 22 species as follows): Western bluebirds, owls- barn, Western screech, Northern saw-whet, Northern pygmy, and spotted… Northern flickers, woodpeckers- hairy, downy, Nuttall’s and acorn…American kestrels, swallows- both violet green and tree…purple martins, ash-throated flycatchers, chestnut backed chickadees, nuthatches: both white-breasted and pygmy…and finally wrens: winter, house, and Bewick’s.  Competing with those native birds for nest cavities are the increasingly burgeoning populations of house sparrows and European starlings. Each of these species has their own particular type of hole, varying in size, habitat, orientation, depth, etc. While the birds are nesting, other critters like cockroaches proliferate amongst the dank nesting material in the hole. After the birds have nested, mice or bats move in.

Dead Wood for Woodpeckers – a roasted large Douglas Fir awaits beneficial reuse

Home is Where the Hole Is – Life in the Rotting Log

Once the log is on the ground, animals scurry to claim it as territory. My favorite find in a rotting log is a rubber boa, a plain brown snake with an unusually wrinkly skin and blunt head. They really like snuzzling into the crumbliest of rotting wood. Another score when exploring rotting wood is the California salamander, an orange and brown bug-eyed friend that squinches into the spaces between bark and wood on fallen timber. Under the logs, there are still more species of snakes, salamanders, and much more. Back inside especially rotten logs, you can find mouse nests- piles of shredded bark, leaves, or grass tucked away to make an excavated tunnel cozy.

Wish we had bears…. photo by J Gilardi

Wood Made Fish Holes

“Logjam” is another term with an unnecessarily unpleasant connotation, somewhat related to “Dead Wood.” Logjams in streams and rivers back up sediment and create waterfalls that carve downwards, creating cooler, deeper pools that fish love. More than that, these chunks of Dead Wood block up streamflow and force flow-carried sediment out of the stream to storage areas in the floodplain. Dead wood moves streams about to scour oxbow pools that are important for frogs, turtles, and salamanders.

Logs a’Hoy!

If that Dead Wood isn’t permanently trapped along the stream or river, it ends up in the downstream lake, estuary, or ocean. Picture the line up of Western pond turtles on a log jutting out into a freshwater lake: that’s their favorite place, basking in the sun ready to drop into the water if they feel unsafe. Logs scattered around an otherwise mud-banked estuary might serve as the solid substrate necessary for oysters and other estuarine organisms. Rafts of logs in the ocean or on rivers are boat hazards before they wash up on beaches. Once on the beach, Dead Wood gets its first nice nickname: ‘driftwood.’ Driftwood on the beach diversifies dunes, creates rare shade and shelter, and captures rafts of seaweed for huge compost piles, fueling insect abundance for foraging shorebirds. I like sitting on driftwood to keep my bottom from getting sandy or wet. Unfortunately, people like to burn up all the driftwood as if it had been just waiting for their bonfires, which create a pall of stinky saltwater smoke downwind.

Burning Log a’Fire

Throughout the fire-scarred forests of California, there are millions of big brown poles waiting to add fuel to the next fires. In the footprint of the Lockheed Fire where the CZU Fire burned, the heat was tremendous, the fire stoked by the Lockheed fire’s Dead Wood. Maybe after a few 10-year interval fires, the Dead Wood will be all cleared out and a forest can regrow more safely. Meanwhile, my hypothesis is that Dead Wood is mostly fuel for the next fire, at least around here.

Michael Uhler illustrating a post fire ecology with Dead Wood a’plenty in the background: future fuel for future wildfire

Smokey the Bear

Now, what if we had bears? Would the log-shredding bears help with the decomposition process and at least somewhat reduce wildfire danger? Maybe that’s what made people think up Smokey the Bear to begin with.

Goldilocks and the 3 Bears

What’s just the right amount of dead wood? None of the native cavity nesting birds I mentioned are common enough to say we have enough standing dead wood, anywhere. In the streams and rivers, not enough logjamming is a problem for fish; too many logjams in the wrong places are a worry for human infrastructure (bridges, roads). Boaters don’t want any floating logs, at all. My friends the rubber boas need some rotting logs to replace the burned up ones in the CZU fire scar. Is there anything we can do to make sure we have the right amount of dead wood in the right places? Sure there is.

What are We to Do?

Wouldn’t it be nice if society supported more scientific inquiry? When was the last time you heard this question for a Congressional candidate: ‘How will you work to support funding for ecological science?’ A good answer would include federal funding for the National Science Foundation. Would you consider supporting the candidate with the best answer with your donations and your vote? We need better answers to the Dead Wood questions…and support for organizations like the Coastal Commission, CAL FIRE, parks agencies, land trusts, and state and federal wildlife agencies that integrate the Dead Wood answers into their decision making. Its not what you thought it was: we all need Dead Wood.

-this post reprinted from my weekly column at Bruce Bratton’s online blog Brattononline.com

Heat waves and chilly nights

Heat waves and chilly nights, hills drying in what is becoming one of the driest February months on record…after an extremely wet December. After the orchard workparty last Saturday, we stood on a hillside overlooking the farm to be intermittently chilled to shiver and warmed as if by a nearby fire. There were alternating breeze directions ushering in big pillows of air with vastly different temperatures.

To our human senses, the world sometimes seems upside down and the same is true for non-human organisms. Living things share the same genetic structure, allowing us intergenerational memory and the potential for adaptation. Global weirding isn’t just about climate disruption, it is a symptom of human disfunction, feeding psychological malfunctions, creating disequilibrium, mayhem and chaos.

Fire’s lessons

Organic farms like ours rely on creativity. Instead of turning to the newest synthetic chemical pesticide, one of the many creative tricks we use is conventional breeding and plant selection to select stronger plants, taking advantage of the creativity of DNA. Our orchard is planting trees bred for disease resistance.

Once the plants are in the ground, we provide them everything they need for maximum health, creatively experimenting with new foods, including concoctions that feed the ecosystem that supports the crops.

As much as organic farmers creatively produce food, we live in evolving natural systems and we are challenged to constantly adapt. What can we learn from Nature?

One of many burn pile remnants – what would have fueled wildfire now fertilizes a mulch field

Lupines

The wildfire triggered germination of thousands of lupine bushes in the habitat areas we steward around our farm. Years ago, two of our members requested that we nurture these bush lupines, mowing and clearing around them. This was one instance of these partners’ contribution to the pool of collective creativity, nurturing beauty that turned out also to be post-fire habitat, pollinator support, and erosion control.

Just now, we are seeing an eruption of tussock moths that love to eat bush lupine leaves. The moth caterpillars will feed Western bluebirds and many other beautiful, feathered friends. The frass that the caterpillars drop will feed other wildflowers and native grasses, diversifying the hillsides.

Bush lupine became tussock moth fodder, opening up sun to a newly fertilized understory

Learning from Nature

From fire to lupines, from lupines to pests, and then from pests to birds and fertilizer…these are a few of Nature’s cycles. What might we learn from these cycles? Because farmers must be keen observers of nature, we tap into this type of ancient wisdom. As co-owners of a beautiful property, our collective is also learning the creativity necessary for evolving and adapting as a group. Cooperatives and organic farms are amazing experimental grounds for solutions to the root causes of the climate crisis.

To tap into the deep potential for creativity embedded in the DNA we inherited from millennia of experimentation, we must turn away from potential-destroying toxins. We must embrace stewarding diversity in the face of the tempting and ‘easier’ monocrop, lest tussock moth-like sieges take place. And, when the pests do erupt, instead of hiding behind toxins, we must invest in deeper contemplation and more complex negotiations, as evolution has long taught us. Until recently, we were taught evolution meant survival of the fittest, but now we understand that cooperative relationships are the key to success. Mutualism. Symbiosis. We have so much to learn.

-originally posted on Molino Creek Farm’s web page as part of my regular blog at that site.

The Chaparral of Santa Cruz County’s Highest Neighboring Mountain: Loma Prieta

Essay originally published in Bruce Bratton’s weekly online blog BrattonOnline.com.

Many of us are drawn to mountain tops if not physically at least visually, some even spiritually. Botanists go to see the unique flora. Some botanists are “peak baggers” along with many others. There is no “bagging” Loma Prieta, but the flora around it is very special. And the peak has been sacred to some but has been defiled by others, now buzzing with communications towers that make you want to stay far away.

At 3,790’ Loma Prieta towers above Santa Cruz, the highest peak of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The mountain is near the Santa Clara/Santa Cruz County Line and looks over the nearby San Andreas Fault. More people know the name of the peak from 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake – the epicenter was just west of the mountain.

Recharge

It snows up there almost every year and the rain falls in torrents because the highest peaks catch the most rain. There is little soil near Loma Prieta, but lots of well drained rock. There are patches of sandstone surrounded by a massive amount of mudstone. Craggy dark sandstone outcrops accent the slopes near Loma Prieta. Roadcuts reveal fascinating patterns formed by the nearby faulting. The mudstone and sandstone rocks were created by sediment washed into the Pacific from ancient California’s rivers, laid down in layer after layer, with different layers of slightly different colors, textures, and thicknesses. Tectonic movement has pitched those layers this way and that, sometimes in great undulating waves, other times tilted this way and that. The roadcut rock is fascinating mosaic art.

Rain soaks through these fractured stones, bubbling out below to form the headwaters of streams that provide drinking water for hundreds of thousands. Looking out from the mountain, you see the steep and thickly wooded Soquel Creek canyon or turn towards the other side and look down Uvas Creek that leads to the Uvas Reservoir and onto the Pajaro River, or gaze north into streams headed to the Lexington Reservoir.

Views

I try to visit the area’s peaks once a year to get my bearing and appreciate this place. And, I can see most of those peaks from Loma Prieta: Mount Diablo, Mount Hamilton, Fremont Peak, Devil’s Peak, and Ben Lomond Mountain are visible from there. A while back, I would visit Loma Prieta to get a good view of the region’s fireworks on July Fourth. Back then, the shoreline of the Monterey Bay was lit by many displays and there were many displays in towns all the way to San Francisco and beyond. It is a delightful place to see the entire Monterey Bay and a huge expanse of the sparkling Pacific Ocean. But really, I go for the plants.

This Chaparral’s Shrub Diversity

My favorite plants to visit up that way are two subspecies of at type of manzanita that is normally found a long ways north, but which have outlying patches on sandstone near Loma Prieta. The Hoary (A. canescens ssp. canescens)and Sonoma (A. canescens ssp. sonomensis) are beautiful silvery shrubs with smooth red bark so dark it is almost black. I visited last weekend and it was just starting to blossom, some shrubs had pure white and others very pink flowers.

This is a very shrub diverse area. In a short distance, in addition to the above, you can find three other manzanitas: Santa Cruz manzanita (A. andersonii) and brittle leaved manzanita (A. crustacea ssp. crustacea) and Rose’s manzanita (A. crustacea ssp. rosei). And, the ceanthus that normally accompany manzanitas are equally diverse with 5 species also occurring in close proximity to Loma Prieta: warty leaved ceanothus (C. papillosus); blue blossom (C. thrysiflorus var thrysiflous), wavy-leaf ceanothus (C. foliosus var. foliosus), buck brush (C. cuneatus var. cuneatus) and Jim brush (C. oliganthus var. sorediatus). More shrubs still include 3 species of silk tassel – bear brush (G. fremontii), silk tassel (G. eliptica), and ashy silk tassel (G. flavescens), mountain mahogany, pitcher sage, chaparral pea, bush poppy, coffee berry, coyote bush, and on and on. With this menagerie of chaparral shrubs, the scents are awesome as the sun warms the millions of resinous leaves.

…and Tree Diversity

Trees are super diverse up there, too. It is surprising to see a rare local conifer California nutmeg emerging from the chaparral. The canyon live oaks are everywhere in multi-trunked patches resprouting from multiple fires. There is also interior live oak, foothill pine, and knobcone pine. Some trees are odd: the madrones have paler orange bark than normal, the bay trees have more flakey bark, and the tanoaks have longer and or smaller more toothed leaves. The patches of trees are especially thickly festooned with beards of mosses and dense carpets of lichens.

Clearing the Shrubs – the March of Weeds

With the exception of a few patches managed by public parks, most of the area is privately owned, and it shows. A County Planner has told me on many occasions that the County’s policy is to not allow clearing of this rare chaparral type. And yet, you can see the expansive clearing from Highway One. There are immense mansions and squalid trailers, many with massive fire clearance zones. And, there are acres and acres of vineyards and horse corrals as well as sprawling greenhouses.

This network of development and the roads that serve them has badly fragmented this beautiful chaparral, especially in the last 15 years. Human incursions are made evident by aisles and acres of weeds: jubata grass, Scotch and French broom, and acacia are the most evident.

Even with all of the clearing but especially with the influx of flammable weeds along the roads, this area seems likely to burn badly one day.

A History of Fires

Many areas around Loma Prieta have not burned in a long, long time; but there have been recent fires. North and West of Loma Prieta, there are some of the oldest, largest knobcone pines I’ve ever seen, evidence that it has been a long time since fire. South and East of Loma Prieta, are miles of skeletons of trees and shrubs that belie more recent fires. The 2008 Summit Fire (4,200 acres), the 2009 Loma Fire (435 acres), and then the 2016 Loma Fire (4,470 acres) all have scorched areas around Loma Prieta, and all were human caused.

How to Visit

You can visit patches of this unique chaparral in a few parks. Some of this type of chaparral is at Mount Madonna County Park. The more shrub-diverse type is found in the Sierra Azul Preserve managed by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District at Mount Umunhum, the next peak north of, and not far from, Loma Prieta. The top of Santa Clara County Park’s Uvas Canyon County Park touches the shoulder of Loma Prieta south of the peak. This type of chaparral gets less interestingly diverse but still remains expansive in the upper areas of Nisene Marks State Park, say along the top of Aptos Fire Road.