Burn/range management season

Yeah, just think of the money we could save if we could eliminate the negative exotics that we're fighting every year! Here are some 4 day after pics of the burn from last Thursday. These Siberian Elms and cedars are a problem on the area. Even though the fire didn't consume these, they have still turned brown and the cedars will be dead. The elms could resprout, hopefully they will not. The up to 4 inches of new growth is obvious on some of the NWSG





 
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My firebreaks are mowed 25 feet wide with 16 feet disked. We can light away from the fire break because we have it mowed and the flame height will be low in that 9 feet that is mowed. Prescribed burning has a lot of "feel" to it. In two different days you would light the exact same patch differently. You need to be able to read the conditions and adjust as you go. We burned wheat stubble Friday and even though the forecast said SE wind, the E was overriding the S. I let the help light so learn and he lit with the lesser component not the dominant wind component. With the fuel type we had it didn't matter. With heavier fuel it would have. The general rule is that you need a fire break 10X wider than the height of your fuel. We light the first pass and successive passes usually double the existing fire break until we feel it is wide enough to either strip head or head the entire patch. With cedar rows out in the patch, we often strip head fire instead of using a circle fire. When lighting the headfire, you want to have as straight and contiguous a fire line as possible. Leaving gaps or jagged lines leads to a less predictable advance and can create vortecs that can lift brands and throw them across the fire break for some distance down wind.

Brown dogs, we use a drip torch to light fire. It has a mix of 1/3 gas to 2/3 diesel in the tank. You want the fuel to burn somewhat slower than straight gas because it ignites better. Kerosene would work similarly. The torch I like (Panama) has 2 valves, one for fuel flow and another that is a breather. The forestry torches just have a breather and tend to use more fuel.

Uguide, there is a basic prescribed fire course online at the Oklahoma State University site. It will answer a lot of questions. They also have DVD's on prescribed fire.
 
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There's no further cost for going ahead and clipping another 10 feet since you're going by it anyway. It won't change the effects of the fire, just the height next to the break. Anything that speeds up the process and makes it safer is a good thing. I'm pretty sure it's a free training link. If I can find the direct link, I'll get it to you. I have a card on it somewhere in my stacks.
 
Here it is. Go to campus.extension.org, click on Energy & Environment, in the sub-categories box click on Rangelands, click on basic prescribed fire training, click continue, create a new account and start.
 
End of season

I slipped by some of this year's burns today and took some pics. They are all retakes of pictures shown earlier in the thread. They are in pairs with one a closer shot and the other further. The first pair are of a spring burn in a patch burn/patch graze pasture. The second pair are of a summer burn in a patch burn/patch graze pasture (where the ATV was). The third pair was a spring burn that was ungrazed after the burn. As you can see in the first 4 pics, the goal of patch burn/patch graze is to set back grassland plant succession from a community dominated by NWSG and boost the forb component and that seems to have been met in these two tracts. The benefits from this management will be realized in the next growing season, not the current one. The benefits from burning alone are less visible in the last two pics. Forbs are hard to pick out and there has been significant grass growth. This site will provide great winter cover, but may well not be the best brood-rearing cover with another years' growth.










 
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UGUIDE said:
Troy, I gotta say the ungrazed stuff looks like better habitat to me.
Click to expand...

Gotta look at the big picture. These patch grazed units are a mosaic of plant successional stages. In the Patch Burn pastures, I have 8 tracts that range in density from much denser than that ungrazed tract to the latest summer burn where we have 4-8 inches of grass regrowth. The goal is to have every stage of habitat needed to support a quality upland bird population. It allows us to manage these grasslands in sizes that are easier to manage and are in proximity of other successional stages where our game species can move from one unit to the other as their needs change with the seasons and their life stage. Having everything in 1 stage will almost always be deficient for one or more life stages of these animals. Habitat does not stay static. Change is always going on, usually toward higher successional levels. With an animal like bobwhite that has a narrow adaptive niche, we must continually set back succession to keep the habitat useable.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that you cannot manage everything to be winter cover and expect to produce and maintain a population. That is one of the problems a lot of land managers have. You have to nest them, hatch them, and recruit them before that winter cover becomes useful. The same applies to food plots. They're not a lot of good until those birds are adults and winter weather puts thermal pressures on the birds. In most places, nesting and brood-rearing cover is the limiting factor, not winter cover. Much of that winter cover is not useable as nesting or brood-rearing cover. You have to have all of these covers in sufficient amounts in order to fill the habitat with birds.
 
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