Photo Essay
Wildfire in the Llano Estacado
The Llano Estacado is an ecotone between the arid west and the humid east. Super-cell thunderstorms sweep across the land, sometimes only producing thousands of lightning strikes and no rain. The resulting grassfires have occurred with regularity for centuries. Wildfire helped shaped the landscape, and continues to shape it, although residents seek to extinguish them as soon as possible. For further information, click on the following:
- 2008 – the worst year ever for wildfires
- Fire as a determinant in aridlands ecology
- Wildfire is a part of the natural cycle
- Charlie Goodnight, Prairie Chickens, and Fire; It only could happen on the Llano Estacado
- What everybody ought to know about Mesquite
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From a distance, the smoke plume from a grass fire seems to be a small thing, something far away and of no concern. This fire was over 7 miles from the photographer.
The fireline moved over a mile during the five minutes that the photographer observed it from a parallel highway.
John Karges, the director of the West Texas office of the Texas Nature Conservancy, took this and some of the following photos during a controlled burn on the Diamond Y preserve near Fort Stockton. Even a controlled burn is an awesome sight, the air full of many shades of smoke, with hotspots flaring up with large flames, even on a still day. When the wind is blowing, the intensity of the flames and smoke exponentially increase.
Fire removes dead organic material and process it into nutrients that will reenter the soil with the next rain. Fire rejuvenates many species of grass and herbaceous perennials, creating better grazing for ruminants. When the smoke and flames are present, some hawks come to hunt the injured rodents, while the deer and other four-legged animals flee for their lives.
Even in a controlled burn a "fire-nado" formed. Intense fire sucks the oxygen out of the air, and as air rushes into replace it, the winds swirl. These fire-nados, in a wildfire, will bring embers high into the air, where the wind catches them and flings them in advance of the fire, causing the wildfire to spread even more rapidly.
Backfires are lit to control a burn, by burning areas in front of where the flames are headed, so the spreading embers will land on already burned soil. In the flat country of West Texas, bulldozers play an important role in some fires, by clearing large bare strips of land so the embers will not start new fires, and the fireline itself will burn out when it hits the bare soil.
Immediately after a fire, the landscape is black and white. Animal trails are easy to see.
Members of the 2008 class of the Master Naturalists ( Nina McCart, John and Barbara Drissel, and Leslie Harman) visited several wildfire sites for a few months after a burn to record what happened.
Immediately after the fire, this grass clump near an iron bar showed no green.
The fire burns some things, and not others. Why weren't the sawtooth daisy stalks burned, but all of the grass was? Did the pocket gophers increase their digging the night after the fire? They eat plant roots (and pull some of the green plant material down into their hole). Do they come above ground to search for exposed seeds?
A close examination of the ground reveals that not everything was burned. Sticks still spot the ground, and even a patch of long dead grass still lies flat on the ground. The white spot was where something large burned completely, after the fire line had passed.
The yucca on the right will send up fresh green leaves in the future, but the groundsel to the left might not, although it is a perennial plant.
Some yucca completely burned, except for the base of the leaves. Was it green before the fire, or had it been one killed by insect larvae in the ground? (Several species of beetle and a butterfly have larvae that eat yucca crowns.)
Wooden fence posts often are burnt during a wildfire, causing the landowner to have to spend thousands of dollars to fence his property again.
A little bit of green is left in this yucca, so maybe the yucca above was green before the fire!
A week after the fire, the grass clump next to the iron bar has several new blades of green poking up out of the blackened crown.
A new sprout of a ragweed popped up next a burnt cactus still struggling for survival. Insects will soon find the cactus, and rot will begin to occur as the larvae of the fruit flies, leaf-footed bugs, and other cactus loving insects begin their work.
A packrat did not survive the fire, and a predator or scavenger did not find it immediately.
In a charred packrat nest, the photographer found this peculiar object - at first it looked like a rat, but on close examination, it appeared to be plant material covered with skin!
Why did the lower part of the yucca not burn, but the top did? Did the bottom portion have more moisture?
One sprig of grass is visible, but most of the other clumps had not resprouted in the first week. It took the photographer a little time to figure out the circular bare spots on the ground - a good sized bunch grass had shaded out any other plants near its base.
The big white splotches are burnt cow paddies.
The fire spreads in the direction the wind is headed. At the edge of the fire, the wind currents prevent the fire from spreading further out (in places - for it depends on how much the wind is swirling in toward the fire to feed it.)
The fire traveled through a mimosa catclaw clump so fast that the bark of the bush did not even char (except close to the ground.) A surprising amount of leaf litter did not catch fire, either.
On the ground, grass is resprouting, but the mesquite above only has blackened buds.
Earthworms came to the surface a week after the fire, after a brief rain, leaving an unusual arrangement of its castings. The new growth of a coppermallow seems more succulent than usual - do some species of plants have different forms to their new leaves after a fire? And if so, why?
A clump of grass a week after the fire is not as green...
...as the same clump three weeks after the fire. If more rain had fallen, the rate of growth would have been much greater.
The Master Naturalists wondered if different species of grass had different recovery rates - this clump was photographed at the same time as the one above.
A day after the fire this hackberry clump had no green anywhere. In the foreground, entry holes to a packrat nest lead under hillocks of soil. All of the sticks brought to make the nest were completely burned.
Ten days later at the same location, the ground had begun to have a delicate carpet of green in some areas.
Another packrat nest was completely burned up, revealing the soil part of a tunnel in the depth of the nest. Why was there such a small stem leading from the large root exposed on the ground to the right side of the tunnel? Had the packrat kept gnawing most of the bushes sprouts down while it lived there. Did the fact there was one sprout indicate that the packrat nest had not been occupied at the time of the fire, or even in the last year (since it was an April fire, the sprout would have had to date from a year before.)
The three green sprouts in this photo appear to be wild onions shooting up.
Did the dead twigs laying on the ground fall during the fire, or did strong winds knock down stalks that had been upright after the fire? The photographer wanted to believe that it was after the fire, for many of the sticks seemed to have been aligned in one direction.
Most of this mesquite eventually sprouted again at the base. The dead branches will take a year or two to fall, and some of the largest even longer.
Two weeks after the fire, most of the ash had been blown away, and only heavier pieces of charcoal remained on the ground, along with some of the dead branches of the mesquite.
Two weeks after the fire, packrats and cotton rats that survived had to begin to gnaw on the bark of mesquite to survive in the barren landscape.
Five weeks after the fire, and after a good rain, the buffalo grass was beginning to grow rapidly. Notice how the charcoal on the landscape was floated along the ground in the "sheetwash" and then deposited among the clumps of buffalo grass.
In the foreground, a trompillo (purple nightshade) had regrown almost a foot five weeks after the fire. The catclaw mimosa had over a foot of new growth tangled at the base of the dead branches.
Chocolate daisy was in full bloom again - and again notice the "mulch" carried by the rains to fill in low spots on the landscape - the chocolate daisy will benefit from that mulch for years!
In the gentle breaks along the north Concho River, a fire burned many square miles. Miles of fence were destroyed. The junipers appeared dead, but six months later, new growth had appeared on many.
Much of the prickly pear also appeared to be dead, but on closer examination, many of the clumps would have at least one partially green pad, and six months later, a fair amount of prickly pear had begun to grow again. The photographer wondered if different species of prickly pear had different survival rates after a fire - did the species with the most dense spines (and that grows close to the ground) survive more than the large padded species that grows taller?
A handful of the mesquite in the draw were able to resprout leaves high on the bush a month after the fire, but most had not. If there had been a fence in place, the rancher might have turned out a herd of sheep to gorge on all of the new grass.
Notice how thick the green grass is in the lower areas, and how sparse it is on the slopes - in fact, much of the vegetation on the slopes were perennial forbs, and not grass!
Fifteen photographs before this one, two photographs were taken of a hackberry clump a couple of weeks apart. This is the same clump, two months later.
This scene is a year after a fire that occurred in 2007. Wildflowers carpeted the ground.
This fire occurred in somewhat shallow soil, and it appears that the mesquite did not recover from the fire, for even a year, no new growth is visible.
Over 40 species of wildflowers were in bloom in an area about the size of a football field.
After June 2008 rains, the wildflower scene became a sea of grass.
Wildflowers first (an earlier stage of succession)...
Then grass... a number of ranchers have done controlled burns, hoping to improve their forage for their livestock, but not everyone does it, for a controlled fire can become a wildfire very, very quickly, even when people trained in managing controlled burns are in charge.