The practice of burning the pinewoods of the South long predates the arrival of the white man, and by the time the explorers Cabeza de Vaca in 1528 and de Soto a decade later brutalized their way up Florida and southern Georgia, they reported large parklike meadows with widely separated trees, tremendous herds of deer, and rafters of turkey. Those forests had been burned by the natives as far back as 1000 B.C., by Indians of the woodland tradition, and probably by the archaic Indians (8000 B.C.) before them. Fire had been used as a means of opening the woods for travel, of herding and concentrating deer by creating grazing land, of exposing food in the form of acorns and chestnuts to turkeys, and of readying fields for the annual sowing of corn and squash, beans, gourds, and melons.
Francis Willoughby wrote in 1676, “They are like the Spanish Quail, very good and pleasant meat, provided you kill them two or three days before they be rosted and served up. Physicians allow sick persons to eat of their flesh: Neither is there any Fowl among the Indians, next to tame Poultry, whose flesh is to be preferred before it, either for wholsomness or taste.… They are kept in Coops, and fed with Indian Wheat and are common in many parts of this Country.” A turgid tongue-twister bearing a certain historical weight.
When a Southern hardwood canopy closes, the world below turns dank, the food source changes, and the trees struggle and stretch for the sun’s favors, the survivors displaying their resolve with misshapen limbs. In the fall and early winter deer and quail shop in this underworld for acorns. Turkeys, by nature more opportunistic, add crawfish and lizards to the list. In general, bobwhites prefer habitat photosynthetically fertilized by the sun, with trees far enough apart to cast individual shadows on a floor where the ground cover grows like a quilt: dense in some places and thin in others. Bobwhites like to feel dirt between their toes and are not equipped to scratch under matted cover for food. They relish pine seed, berries from dogwood trees, crab apples, and the odd acorn. By the end of winter, when the hard seeds, green growth, and mast have been gleaned, fire magically opens a new, snug reserve of food that for months had been sifting through pine needles and dying grasses to the forest floor; roasted treasures immediately accessible to all grain-eating birds, squirrels, and deer. Heat blisters the hard-shelled seeds of legumes such as partridge peas, beggarweed, and lespedeza, which until then were hibernating underground. Scarified back to life, these seeds resume their genetic aspiration to grow and multiply, and, in the case of legumes, develop into prime sources of food, cover, and bugging grounds for quail and turkey alike.
In 1931, when both governmental agencies and privately employed foresters totally excluded the use of fire in the woods, a nucleus of biologists, funded by a group of industrialists and wealthy southern Georgia and northern Florida landowners headed by Herbert L. Stoddard, published The Bobwhite Quail: Its Habits, Preservation and Increase, a book that anyone even vaguely interested in bobwhite quail should own because it is still, and always will be, the Gideon Bible of quail management.
Stoddard’s five-year study included the use of fire both as a means of improving the habitat—hence increasing the quail population—and as a method of improving the commercial production of timber. It is said that foresters were so set against fire that the first time Stoddard publicly praised its benefits he was booed off the stage by his peers. Nevertheless, Stoddard’s research and application of fire in the Southern woods eventually convinced the timber industry that burning every fourth or fifth year, a decade or so after the pine saplings were planted, reduced the hazard of wildfires, notorious for terminating thirty-year investments in minutes.
The application of a hot summer sun on a pine-forest floor provokes a growth reaction unique to the Southeast. No other forest in the country is blessed with such a rich, diversified, and permanent undergrowth, perfectly located and adapted to overwinter migratory birds. The downside to this lush evolution is that, left unchecked for five years, the under-story grows into grasses, vines, and pine straw tangles, walls of dead vegetation so dense and constricting that they are unfit for all but a handful of species. The slow progression from fields to pine trees to an eventual climax hardwood forest promotes a steady ground-floor progression from grass and weed to an impenetrable deciduous jungle.
From a wildlife-management point of view, fire cleans and retards the growth of ground litter and hardwood saplings. From a forestry point of view, controlled burns control a dry, overgrown source of fuel yearning for a match.
Those who do not want nature modified in any way, particularly not for the benefit of specific species, feel that the biological development of the planet is a continuous mutation of life, encouraged by natural occurrences as tedious as the advance and retreat of glaciers and as rapid as the eruption of a volcano. Species that do not adapt to one ecosystem adapt to another or disappear. They are right, but the questions arise: What do you want and what are you willing to give up? No management program can serve all needs, much less all species. Without fire the pine forests of the Southeast would revert to hardwoods. So, if we are to return to nature, how far back do we go? This specific ecosystem was historically groomed through the propagation of wildfires, first from lightning and later by the Indians. In this day and age, wildfires present unacceptable dangers to human and animal life and, more pragmatically, unacceptable losses to the timber industry. Since we have physically altered the geography of nature by moving hundreds of millions of our own species into a system finely tuned to celestial tides and the whims of physics but impotent in the face of man’s insults and relentless desecration, it would seem appropriate that we manage what we have altered and clean up what we have soiled. We cannot buy plywood without cutting trees any more than we can delight in nature without giving something back.
In this case, the opposition surrounding controlled burning stems first and foremost from man’s primeval terror of fire and secondly from the fact that smoke is a pollutant—regardless that it is a natural phenomenon and, compared quantitatively to what rises from our cities daily, a nonissue. A more practical reason for opposing controlled burning comes not from the radical right or left but from the ornithological community, where there is mounting concern that extensive pine management will affect the lives of millions of new tropical songbirds that migrate up from the rain forests of Central America looking for the junglelike habitat we work so diligently to clear.
All these issues warrant a great deal of thought by both interested and uninterested parties. Population volatility and the shift from rural to city life disallow absolute solutions to the interaction between humans and nature. Those whose livelihoods depend on timber are going to side with those who own the timber. Those who love nature for its own sake are unswayed by scientific rhetoric. That leaves the majority of mankind, which doesn’t give a damn one way or the other, a handful of professionals who care, and a minority of amateurs like me.
Climax grasses, such as broom sedge, spread quickly and choke fallow fields in a few years, surrendering them to cotton rats, which relish the density. The rats in residence are overseen by battalions of predators that would just as soon eat a quail as a rodent. Fire opens that overgrowth just as it opens the floor of the forest, allowing bobwhites to travel the edges and use what second-year broom sedge escaped the fire as nesting cover. A percentage of what is burned is harrowed in the late spring, giving the sun a clean place to rest and renew the vegetative process. In June, year-old corn stalks, sorghum, and innumerable islands of unburned grass still totter in the breeze, a force to be reckoned with and a fine place for a quail to lay an egg. It seems that old grass, like old people, takes a long time to die.