Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Wildlife Management Prescribed Fire

Over much of the Southern US fire has been critical for maintaining native habitat. Natural lightning strikes and Native Americans created millions of acres of burned ground that was beneficial to wildlife. The lack of fire leads to overgrown vegetation that eventually transitions to forest.

I wanted to show some of the prescribed fires we did last year at my parents property in NE Texas. I dont have any formal training but spent countless hours reading about prescribed fire, watching videos, going on burns at different properties so I feel like I have a decent understanding of the process. Started small last February with a 4 acre pasture burn. This area was thick with native broomsedge and non native Bermudagrass. The winds were light, the humidity was good, and the burn went extremely well.

Western U.S too, IIRC.

Well done, Chris.

Fire does so much for the health of grassland. My uncle claims before the Great Plains were settled that there was a fire on average every seven years.

I start burns every other year and I still am on pins and needles when I do it. The weather guessers are so wrong here we can't depend on them to get a wind direction or wind speed correct from morning to evening. let alone a day or two in advance. One 7 ac field has woods on the N, E and a partial woods on the W side. I back burn a 75' wide area around the perimeter on those 3 sides before torching the field. Even then, I have 60 gallons of water in a sprayer with a 75' hose, plus shovel and rake in the bucket of the tractor.

We are only 2 miles from Oklahoma and they have a great weather station network. There are three weather stations within 20-30 miles of us. They also have a prescribed fire planner where you can add your burn parameters and the closest weather station. It works great to be able to see if the weather will be good for a burn.

http://www.mesonet.org/index.php/okfire/fire_rx

You are lucky. Closest one is 40 miles away here.

Hat tip to those who do their own burn. I wouldn't be at all comfortable trying it at my place, if it got out of hand I don't think my insurance company would be pleased!

Congrats on a successful burn Chris!

The only time I have done it was when I was a kid with my parents and it didn't turn out well. lol

Its not as scary as you think. Before I had done a burn I thought it would be like a wildfire but you don't burn on days were it could get out of control. You burn against the wind until you get a good blackline and then burn with the wind to speed up the process. We disk around the burn area as well and also shred 10-15' inside the disked line so that tall fuels are not right next to the firebreaks.

I don't disk, (that would disturb the warm season grasses) but I DO back burn all the way to the woods. I shred with a brush hog on the perimeter of the back burn area (both sides of it) and I'm still on pins and needles until the back burn is completed. Shredding and back burning takes me all day for 7-8 acres. If it gets into the woods it could burn 200+ acres... Not good at all

Here you cannot rely on the weather forecast. I call them weather guessers because they cannot get it right even 24 hours in advance. One year I had the wind do a 180° switch, and their predicted 0-5 mph went to 15-20 after a field was lit. Luckily it had already burned a good 300 feet sway from the back burn before the wind switched but I still was watching embers flying through the air and landing on non-burned combustible material.

I had a pump up sprayer and shovel ready to chase after any sparks that turned into hotspots but that never happened.

I did some more burning this past weekend. This was a 9 acre growing season burn. Turned out really good. We are up to 53 acres burned this year with another 30-40 to go this winter.

Looks great Chris! I went and bought a drip torch a few years ago. That's the only way to get areas going fast.

Videos are a problem. E-mail Leighann.

I love burning. I was on a USFWS fire crew for five years many moons ago. Did a growing season burn on the stuff around my house this summer. I have my place broke up into "burn units". Here our native tallgrass prairie needs fire to remain vibrant.

We ran one drip torch and I think we were done in about 2 hours. If we had another torch we could have been done in half the time. We only had two first timers and myself on this burn so I was fine taking it slow.

There are places on our property where a fast, hot burn would be preferred to help kill the invasives.

I just can't do it though, the pucker factor is WAY too high when I have that kind of fire just roaring.

I do almost all slow burns now - most of the job performed by back burning. I won't start the head fire until the fire line is a long way from my fire breaks.

I've been involved in a few burns. Some intentional and some not. Learned a gentle breeze can turn into an inferno pretty fast when you dont want it to.

Want to do some burns. Just gotta get everything lined up - including the gumption to just do it. Worry some about it getting out of control and some about it damaging some white oaks that might be good lumber some day.

My advice would be to bush hog and then rake under the white oaks that you want to protect.

My fires through short cut dormant grass or light leaf litter just are not very hot at all. Those types of fires should move right past your oak trees and barely even scorch the exterior of the bark.

OTOH, my dead branch piles (that fall around my trunks after big ice or wind storms), my cedar trees planted by the birds, and my un-cut tall prairie grass (that may consist of several years of thatch) all burn VERY hot. I would not have any of that type of material within the circle of the tree canopy of any trees that I wanted to protect. Unless the lowest course of branches are pretty high in the air. A greened up tree in the spring can survive some branch scorching that you won't even be able to notice by the end of summer.

P.S. Another good rule for MY heart health during prescribed burns ... take the planned fire breaks and then double their width!

P.P.S. If you have never burned and don't have any experts on your burn crew, then you need to be extra careful and extra timid. I had an expert to consult that burns hundreds of acres each year about 12 miles from my farm. Even with that advice, I performed tiny "test burns" when I was starting out - just to get a feel for how the fire moved through various materials, and how much effort and water it took to extinguish the fire in those materials. I made some tiny square fire breaks and then lit 20'x20' patches to observe the course of the burn, and to practice putting out those burns before they hit a fire break.

Good luck on your burns. It is scary (and potentially dangerous) to perform burns, but my prairie species are all fire-adapted. You should see the difference in the spring between my burned and un-burned acres.