Fire Brings New Life to the Katama Plain
The tree is a survivor.
Only minutes before, milky smoke rolled along the plains as thick and soft as clouds outside an airplane window. Beneath it, orange lizard tongues of fire leapt out of the earth and retreated. A patch of huckleberry caught fire and exploded into a tornado of oil — uncombusted fuel. Seen through the shimmer of heat, the whole landscape appeared miragelike.
And then, as quickly as the fire began, it was gone. The Nature Conservancy fire crew began to clean up.
“It’s deceiving because it looks so desolate,” said Tom Chase, The Nature Conservancy’s Island program director. “But it isn’t. Even though it’s black and there’s nothing out there, the hawks and the crows will soon be foraging like crazy. People think it’s destroyed, but this is life coming back. The benefits from the burn are almost immediate.”
To some, fire may seem an unlikely conservation tool. But in communities like Martha’s Vineyard, fire was a continual part of the ecological landscape until the early 19th century. Native Americans used fire to promote wildlife habitat and increase berry production, and European-American settlers later adopted some of these practices. Over time, certain plant and animal species became dependent on fire to survive.
When the use of fire was abandoned — largely because the population density of the Northeast made it too dangerous — fire-dependent communities living in New England’s rare sand plain grasslands struggled to survive. On Martha’s Vineyard, some of those communities — including the heath hen — didn’t survive. A rare, prairie-like grass once common to the vineyard has not been seen since 1962.
“Fire suppression activities are essential in a wildland-urban interface,” said Joel Carlson, The Nature Conservancy’s fire manager. “But these communities have changed radically over the last 100 years because of them. That’s where prescribed fire come in, because we’re able to pick and choose where we set a fire, when we set a fire and the boundaries of that fire. We’re able to reintroduce fire into an area where it would be unacceptable to let it burn freely.”
Fire was reintroduced to the Vineyard landscape in 1987 by a partnership of Island conservation organizations who later began what is known as the Sandplains Restoration Project. These organizations — which include The Trustees of Reservations and the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation — shared the vision of using fire to restore biodiversity. However, it is only within the past two years that that vision has become a reality.
“We have volunteers coming from off-Island and volunteers who take the day off from work to do this,” said Susan Arnold, The Nature Conservancy’s program coordinator. “The volunteers would get to the burn site in the morning, do all the preparation work and the wind would change, and the burn would have to be called off. It made it very difficult.”
All that changed when The Nature Conservancy hired Mr. Carlson as its full-time burn specialist. Mr. Carlson created an internship program that brings volunteers from around the country to the Vineyard for a three-month period beginning in March. The seven-person fire crew — the first ever in New England — is trained in fire behavior, fire control and prescribed burning techniques. Although The Nature Conservancy still needs all the volunteers it can get, now it has a core fire crew who are ready to burn at a moment’s notice.
“Fire management in the Northeast is becoming more and more popular,” said Jon Betrus, the fire crew leader. “Having the experience of doing it is going to be a plus.”
“I had a few courses in fire management in college,” said Andrew Gardner, who graduated in December. “It’s been great to apply all my knowledge from classes. But most of what I’ve learned has been through Joel. You only learn so much in the classroom.”
Last year The Nature Conservancy burned 300 acres of land — more than in the past 10 years combined. This yar, if weather conditions are right, The Nature Conservancy could burn as many as 400 acres — easily topping last year’s record. Already The Nature Conservancy has burned some 70 acres — 30 at the Katama airfield last Friday and another 40 at Priscilla Hancock and Wades Field over the weekend.
Right now, an aerial view of Katama would show a perfect rectangle etched into the landscape. But by summer, when the throngs of tourists are heading to South Beach, it will be hard to tell that the land was ever burned.
“What you will see is that everything will be green and more vibrant,” Mrs. Arnold said. “The grasses will be thick, the flowers will be more abundant. With more flowers there will be more butterflies. In Katama in particular, if you look at a burn unit and an unburnt unit side by side, you’ll see so much vitality in the area that’s been burned. The benefits start at the bottom with the extra nutrients in the soil and spread up through the food chain.”
The Nature Conservancy burned in a different part of Katama last year, Mrs. Arnold said, and a couple weeks after the burn, volunteers went and tossed blazing star seeds — an endangered species — into the bed of ash. That summer, The Nature Conservancy counted 154 blazing star plants in an area where there had only been 18 the summer before.
“Most of our plants here benefit from the black soil, which heats the ground up and gives a longer growing season,” Mr. Chase explained. “The burning also reduces competition for light by getting rid of the woody species.”
As the burning transforms the Vineyard landscape, it also transforms the lives of the interns and community volunteers who participate.
“I used to feel overwhelmed by the development and the big houses going in,” Mrs. Arnold said. “But doing this fire work, doing the prescribed burns has enabled me to see that we can still make the best of what we have. It’s important to keep working to save more land, but it’s also important to manage the land we have as best we can.”