Birds
in the black: Through following avian wildlife, a UM scientist has
discovered that burned forests play a critical role in the health and
diversity of the Western landscape
By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian
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University of Montana professor of ornithology and research scientist Richard Hutto
began studying fire's effect on birds soon after the 1988 fires
blackened thousands of acres in Montana and Yellowstone National Park.
Of particular interest was the black-backed woodpecker's reliance on
hotly burned forests.
Photographed by MICHAEL GALLACHER of the Missoulian
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WEST
GLACIER - Back in the summer of 1988, when research scientist Richard
Hutto started asking questions about the possible benefits of
wildfires, the time wasn't exactly ripe for a reasoned discussion.
Yellowstone
National Park was going up in smoke, national forests looked like war
zones, and the public was clamoring for more wildland firefighters,
more firefighting dollars and more protection from blazes. Headlines
nationwide screamed out adjectives such as "torched," "blackened" and
"destroyed."
"What I wanted to know," Hutto said, "was what in
the world is a burned forest worth? Is there any value at all in all
that destruction?"
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With
support from the National Geographic Society, Hutto set off on his
search for answers, a search that would follow the unlikely path of the
black-backed woodpecker. After visiting some three dozen sites burned
in 1988, "one of the most interesting things that popped up right away
was the fact that there was a whole lot of life out there," he said.
"It wasn't the biological desert we were told it would be."
Hutto, like most of America, "was raised to believe all fires are bad."
The
problem, he said, is that science and society never made the
distinction between a fire that claims lives and property and a fire
that burns across the West's wild landscapes.
"We use the same language for both," he said, and generally it's the language of the negative - fire as foe, not friend.
But
it didn't take long for Hutto to find 100 separate species booming the
year after the burn. Surprisingly, many of those were found only in
severely burned forests - the blacker the better.
He focused his work on black-backed woodpeckers, birds that seemed to flock to fire like moths to the flame.
"I'd
never seen them anywhere else, essentially," said Hutto, a professor of
fire ecology and ornithology at the University of Montana.
And
so for the next 15 years, he tracked the birds through forests - and
through the scientific literature. He pored over studies of vegetation
types, looking for lists of birds that appeared frequently in certain
sorts of habitats. In all, he found 15 avian species that seemed to
prefer recent burns to all other forest types.
But again, the most extreme was the black-backed woodpecker, "which actually seemed to require burned areas," Hutto said.
All the studies were anecdotal, though. What he needed was hard evidence.
For
a decade and then some, Hutto helped craft and conduct systematic bird
surveys on Forest Service lands, "in every kind of vegetative type out
there."
The results supported his suspicions: Black-backed woodpeckers only gather in substantial numbers in areas hit hard by wildfire.
The
next step, he said, was to figure out what sort of burn the birds need.
He considered what sort of forest was on the ground before the burn,
computed the severity of the fire, crunched data on whether the land
was logged or left to nature after the burn.
Again, he was surprised.
"We
found the severity issue is really interesting," Hutto said. "Severity
is a big, big deal. A fire is not a fire is not a fire. There are
species that are very particular about what kind of fire they like."
Western
tanagers, for instance, thrive in low-severity fires. Juncos prefer
medium-severity burns. Black-backed woodpeckers, mountain bluebirds and
olive-sided flycatchers like their forests well done. And the
woodpeckers generally prefer thick-barked trees, ponderosa pine and
Douglas fir, trees that withstand all but the hottest fires.
Perhaps
not surprisingly, the species that really like severely burned forests
tend to be species that are tough to find, species whose populations
are not what you'd call robust.
Hutto suspects that might have
something to do with national wildfire policy, beginning with the big
burns of 1910. Some three million acres went up in smoke that year
throughout Montana and Idaho, prompting an aggressive firefighting
policy aimed at snuffing every blaze.
Species that for millennia
had evolved with fire, were actually dependent upon fire, did not fare
so well under the post-1910 policy, Hutto suspects. It's tough enough
to live in a narrow niche. It's even tougher when forest management
eliminates that niche.
It wasn't until about the time that Hutto
first started asking questions about fire and ecology that the
scientific community was willing to give fire its due. It was, they
concluded, a natural force that could be used as a tool for managing
forests on the landscape level.
In 1983, the first fire was
quietly left to burn in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, a lightning strike
that grew finally to 230 acres.
"It was a huge moment for people
who had been taught for decades that all fires are bad and should be
put out immediately," Dale Luhman told the Missoulian last year. Luhman
is resource assistant for the Forest Service. "But it came as part of a
professional recognition that sometimes fire is good, that it's a
necessary and natural process in healthy forests."
Most folk
know about lodgepole pine and their serotinous cones that open only
under the heat of wildfire. But beyond the lodgepole, almost all
Western landscapes are fire-adapted to some degree, from the soil
beneath to the plants and animals above.
Western larch, for
instance, hate the shade. They need a fire to create a clearing, and
then they have about three to five years to take root before the window
of opportunity is shaded over by competitors.
Fire is also
critical for red-stemmed ceanothus, a plant whose seeds can lay dormant
for centuries while waiting for the flames. It's a favorite of deer and
elk and moose, popular big-game species that gobble it down like so
much leafy ice cream.
Spirea loves fire, as does fireweed and
arnica and dragontail mint and pine grass. Bicknell's geranium, like
ceanothus, only appears in burns.
Then there's the mysterious
boreal toad, which some scientists believe might be another in the
growing list of known fire-dependent species. Turns out, the toads like
to bask in the sun and tend to produce bumper crops of tadpoles once
the canopy is burned away.
Researchers studying the toads think
that fire suppression might be a major cause of the toad's decline in
recent decades. It is an argument not lost on Hutto, who believes his
woodpeckers and other species might be few and far between in part
because their blackened habitat has been greatly diminished by way of
fire suppression.
For the black-backed woodpecker, Hutto figures
it all comes down to beetles, particularly beetles that specialize in
burned areas.
"Their biology is amazing," he said. Some bugs
have infrared detectors built into their thorax, detecting the heat of
a wildfire from 100 miles away. Others have antennae that can sniff out
smoke.
"They evolved that way because fire has been a natural
part of the process for so long," he said. "The world is built around
these big fires. The diversity of life needs wildfire."
The beetles generally move into trees killed or weakened by the blaze, and the birds move in to eat the beetles.
Some
bugs, like some birds, prefer low-intensity fires. Others want a more
charred wood. It means all the fire types are important, Hutto said,
including the red-hot, high-intensity burns that run fast across the
forest, scorching everything in their path.
"The birds," he
said, "that's just scratching the surface. If the public knew how
special these burned areas are, our perception might change. We might
change the way we think about fire."
Hutto's been convinced by
the "big mixed flocks of woodpeckers you see in the winter. You only
see that after a fire. We still have no idea how important these areas
are for supporting the wintering population."
He figures they're
migrating to the wildland fires even as the flames create their future
habitat, drawn by the towering columns of smoke that can spiral 30,000
feet into the sky. They work the bugs for a few years, until another
smoke column appears on the horizon, following the flames like so many
morel mushroom pickers.
To help pin down where they live when
fire is absent, other scientists are sampling blood from black-backed
woodpeckers, hoping to map the birds' genetic distribution by way of
DNA analysis.
"We know they're semi-nomadic, in a sense," Hutto
said, "but we don't really know how far they range or how much overlap
there is between populations."
The more he understands the
woodpeckers, he said, the more science will understand the role of
fire. His woodpeckers are a tool, he said, a way to tease out the
mysteries of habitat and life cycles.
Hutto hopes the answers to
his questions might someday inform the way we log burned areas after a
fire - the way we value a burned landscape. It is no less fragile a
habitat type than is a wetland, he said.
"Personally, I've come
to think we need to change our thinking on salvage logging," he said.
"There are other values in the forest. In fact, a burned area is
probably the most sensitive place you could be working in."
And yet current forest policies often exempt fire salvage logging from rigorous environmental review.
"The
public really hasn't caught on to this yet," Hutto said. "People still
want to get the cut, get the trees they see as wasting away. They want
the economic value."
But there are values, he said, far older and more fundamental that are too often ignored.
"We
talk about forest restoration after a fire," he said, "but it just got
restored. That's what fire does. We know that, but we can't seem to get
the message out.
"Until you start thinking like a black-backed woodpecker, you just ain't going to get it."
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.
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