Originally Posted by gobbler


First off, in the southeast, historically, burns happened for days, weeks, sometimes months since there were no firelanes except water. Also from east Texas to North Carolina and the Gulf of Mexico to the Appalachians was dominated by the Longleaf pine or mixed longleaf forest - a highly pyric community. If you go out right now and look in a broomstraw piney woods (basically what the early settlers described) you will find very dry, cured grass fuel ready to burn with very low "point of ignition" numbers on many days. You should have tried to burn last Fri/Sat in 17-18% humidity with 20 mph gusts. Any spark would set a fire (and did on ours). Combined with higher winds, it was a very "burnable" couple days. The woods are ready to burn right now and you can't tell me that if the conditions were right that either a native set (or accidental) fire or a lightning set (we had a lightning storm here a week ago) and smoldering snag (mostly lighter wood back then) wouldn't and couldn't set the woods on fire on March 3 or 4. These fires could cover a lot of ground and, I am sure, did. June and July may have more lightning storms but the fuel is green, humidities are high and winds are lower. I understand that research in the coastal plain indicates that the majority of fires were, historically, in the growing season, that area also had wiregrass, another highly pyric plant that burns well even when green. We don't have it up here. So, I would say that there were plenty of spring fires to go along with plenty of growing season fires. We would have to go back a few hundred years to prove it though,



I think if you are gonna look at this situation objectively….meaning without bias…..then you would look at the frequency of lightening strikes and the frequency of dry conditions and you would look to see where and how often those variables overlapped and that would give you something like a “probability of ignition” for different times of the year…..I think what you would find is that the probability for ignition would be much higher from July-November when conditions are the most dry and we have the most lightening strikes as compared to the POI for Feb-March……This would in turn give you a fire frequency interval that would probably look something like every 3-5 years for a July-November burn and every 20-25 years for one in Feb-March……or something to this effect. I don’t think this is a valid justification for why we do most of the burning every year in Feb-March. Its done mostly around convenience and deer season with the assumption that it has no impact on nesting success.

Last edited by CNC; 03/12/22 11:33 AM.
We don't rent pigs