Tell me you have never carried a drip torch or burned the woods without saying you have never carried a driptorch.

I have a degree in Forestry and I'm a certified burn manager.....so yes I've carried a drip torch. Good luck with your burn today.

I was using the actual definition of winter, which is about Dec 20 to March 20. I don't remember which one of the writers said that he was amazed at how all the Creeks seemed to know the right days to burn. I think it might have been David Tate, but it would be hard to search for it. Point I was making was that they were not burning in mid summer. The Creeks no doubt helped the great longleaf forest continue to look the way it did when European settlers started moving in, but they wouldn't have had anything to do with creating it. Their oral history said that they didn't arrive in AL until after DeSoto went through. Gobbler, I haven't read much about the western tribes using fire and don't know anything about that. But there is no doubt that the Creeks used fire in AL, as I'm sure you already know.

CNC, I think your idea to go back to replicating the natural world is admirable, but also impossible. There is no going back to the way it used to be. I'm not sure how much we should try. We can't replicate the conditions in 1400, and wouldn't be able to tolerate things like thousands of free ranging buffalo. We can try to create something similar to what used to be, but without all the elements of the old ecosystem, it isn't going to work the same. We have got to do things differently to make it even similar.

The guy who said 10% of the hunters were killing 90% of the turkeys was using hyperbole. I don't believe he could have possibly meant that literally. The figures posted here from GC don't come anywhere close to supporting that .

>>>So where is the turkey issue occurring then if its not in the red/grey counties that arent reporting as many gobblers killed??..... If you say the reason those red and grey counties arent reporting as many is because hunter density is just low and they have a bunch of left over gobblers that arent being killed, then why is the bag limit being reduced? Who is this for? Is it for the green counties that are killing the most birds?? Help me understand who these changes are for.<<<

And that CNC quote sums up the issue very well and explains why so many of us have a problem with the changes. They are not accomplishing anything, and will hurt the population in the long run. There are more turkeys than there have ever been before in my lifetime around my place. We don't need a solution to the problem because there is no problem. There will be eventually.

I think we may be looking at this backwards in a sense…..We are all focusing on “when would it have burned”…….but which is more important when we’re conducting a controlled burn…..lighting it?......or being able to put it out???

If we step back for a minute and look at this as a “design” and put ourselves in the designer's shoes…..What we have is a situation where we want to burn the land off annually and we use lightning strikes to randomly set spot fires. With no rain fires would be set from March-October and never go out……Fires would burn for months with no end….Your ground nesters would never stand a chance…..So what would we need to do to the design if we wanted to insure that this fire got suppressed for a 4-8 week time frame in order for the ground nesters to do their thing???.......We would need to apply water, correct??

When you look at the average monthly rain totals this design sticks out in my opinion…….You have the late summer thunderstorms that have the potential to get fire started and then burn well into the fall through our driest months if no rain comes…..However, as we progress through winter it gets wetter and wetter leading up to the two wettest months of the year which I believe are meant to insure any dry season fires get suppressed before nesting season begins again…….Things begin to dry out in late spring and the potential for some smaller scale sporadic fire returns……The reason July is neck and neck for the second wettest is because that’s when we need to insure another pause in the fire for quail.

Month Precipitation

Jan 5.04in.
Feb 5.45in.
Mar 6.39in.
Apr 4.38in.
May 4.14in.
Jun 4.13in.
Jul 5.31in.
Aug 3.63in.
Sept 4.22in.
Oct 2.58in.
Nov 4.53in.
Dec 4.97in.

I’ve been doing some more reading about the Indians PCP and it sounds like to me that they used fire for all kinds of things over the centuries. If I were them I would have used it for hunting and that’s exactly what they did it sounds like. They also used it for clearing land……for helping to manage wildlife……helping to manage vegetation like cane…..It was definitely a multi-use type tool. In reading about how many different reasons they had for using it I kinda thought to myself that it would make it hard to narrow down why they may have been setting any one given fire you read about no matter what time of the year especially if we’re talking about Indians in North Carolina in one story and Indians in South Alabama in the next.

What I think is the most important thing to try to understand are the cues from nature on when and how to do things that they saw…..I appreciate the kind words but I’m not on an admirable mission to save the whales or bring back the buffalo herds as y’all sometimes make it sound…… What I am trying to do is to better understand the concepts and principles of how the natural cycles were designed to function on their own so that we can apply the same principles in whatever manner best suites our situation……If we are burning out of synch with the natural timing of things then it would be foolish and just plain stubborn to say there’s nothing we can do about it. Read my sig line below…….

I'll admit I haven't had much time to read this week and haven't read everything in the thread, but I don't understand if we are really disagreeing. I don't think there is much question that the Creeks burned their part of AL in late winter, the same as most people do now. Do you not agree with that?

I don't think a very high % of what is burned is done during the growing season, and most of that is done by professionals like gobbler, and that is mostly for a specific purpose on a specific property. So what is the argument?

On my place, I burn when it's dry enough to burn. 2 years ago that was May 4th. IMO the positives of burning outweigh the late timing. We saw more turkeys this past year than the previous 5 years combined. I was hoping to burn earlier this year, but the heavy rains we've had this week will probably push it back again. Right now I'm planning on April 1st timeframe, but we'll have to see what Mother Nature has in mind.

My point about the Indians is that they likely recognized that natural fires could start up in late summer/early fall and burn for weeks if no rain came…..so there was a large window of time within which to get it done.... I also imagine that these areas that they burned during this fall and winter time period revolved around numerous planned hunts…..So the fact that they may be burning late winter in some story was likely a two fold purpose.

I believe that nature meant for there to be pauses in the burning regime to allow ground nesters to reproduce. I think there is likely a critical time period for turkeys of something like 6-7 weeks when fire is meant to be suppressed….. I think due to the turkeys breeding earlier and deer season being pushed back into Feb we have gone from barely bumping up against this critical threshold to likely burning thousands of acres right in the middle of it. I think its likely these heavy burn counties in the southern part of the state where most of the perceived decline is happening. I bet there is a survey somewhere asking this

I’ll add this too just for fun but I grew up as a kid hunting in Paint Rock Valley in Jackson Co in the late 80’s and early 90’s…….I get it and understand what “a lot of turkeys” looks like. It was nothing back then to head up through the valley toward Hollytree and Estillfork and look out into the fields and see groups of 50…..75…..sometimes 100+ turkeys. We didn’t really have a ton of deer but there were damn turkeys all over the place. It was just a normal thing to see a group of a dozen gobblers or twenty/thirty hens coming off the river into the big crop fields while you were deer hunting. I wish I could go back now to be able and appreciate some of those turkey hunts better…..I remember one morning specifically when I was about 13 hunting with my uncle down in the bottoms along the Paint Rock River. As it started breaking daylight you could hear turkeys gobbling EVERYWHERE!!!!….. They were all over the sides of both mountains and along the creek…. with gobbles echoing up and down the valley all around you….. ….it was nuts…..I’ve never experienced anything like that since those days…..


I live in Macon Co now in amongst all of this big wig plantation land and have for the last 16 years…..I drive these roads all the time and I spend the majority of hunting season tracking deer and riding buggies in and out of all the very same properties around here Gobbler is talking about when he quoted those 130,000 acres …There's very few I havent been on......I’ve gotten to know some of the landowners well and have seen what folks consider good and bad around here….I’m not giving these opinions as someone who has never set foot on any of it …..Yeah, sure there’s turkeys here and there and in some years I’m sure its above average…….. but it aint nothing like what “a lot of turkeys” looks like in comparison to some other places and they sure aint just running around everywhere out here. ….For there to be a huge chunk of prime habitat in this area being burned in the neighborhood of several hundred thousand acres…….the fields sure aint just overflowing with turkeys. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I saw a really big drove in a field of 25-30 turkeys and I’ve never seen anything like the droves I saw growing up in Jackson Co.

That is why I brought up the "what is natural" question earlier. You can't remove the impact of humans on the landscape. When lookig at fire history using dendrochonalogy is isnt always evident what fires were anthropogenic fires. Furthermore, some evidence suggests that the Americas as settlers first saw it may not have been what previously had been because of the downfall of indiginous societies a few hundred years prior.


If you want to look at more:
Guyette and Stambaugh (missouri tree ring lab) are a couple of reseachers (that I know of) that have looked at this question. Guyette, muzika, and dey had a paper that if you read the discussion I think could help you out.

If I remember correctly, Thomas Swetnam (Arizona Dendrochronolgoy lab) has several Landscape Ecology papers looking at this issue and I would bet OK state and Texas Tech's rangeland management programs have dug into it as well.

Delcourt and Delcourt (a 90's paper) looked at the Southern App Mountains and indiginous fire.

But that is all I remember off the top of my head (If those are right). I researched floodplain disturbance not fire.

Amen

Excellent! So since you are well educated, you can explain why you continuously disregard the difference in fuel volatility between March and August. Right now fuels are dead, dry, cured and ready to burn, even 12 hours after a rain.. Humidities are low and winds, generally are higher. In August, fuels are live, green, leaves are on the trees providing shade, humidities are ASTRONOMICALLY higher and winds are lower. It simply is MUCH harder to light a fire in August than March. Explain these - 1/2 inch of rain at 5 pm (after all day rain earlier) and we started this fire less than 20 hrs later with virtually no wind and over 50% humidity. Again I say, you can't do that in August.









I would suspect it is still burning now.

Nice pictures, gobbler.

I’m thinking about replanting my new place in Longleaf just so I can burn more frequently.

All I know is next week I'm not going to be able to hunt any with my son, spring break and season isn't open. Although our DNCR has been busy installing nest boxes for predators of some sort of hawk. Anyways carry on.

I’ve added a line onto the graph for lightening strikes to try and help splain it better. Lightening season simply begins in early spring and the frequency of it ramps up more and more as we heat up. Remember all of this is giving us percentages or a “probability” of ignition…..If the probability of lightening is low then so is the probability of getting a fire started. The more the frequency increases then the more the probability goes up. Its also important to keep in mind that we're not talking about one single fire being lit but rather a rate or frequency at which multiple spots fires are being lit across the landscape as you move forward in time.

Also, like I stated before…..with the addition of the grazing herds to the natural system that we lack in these stands today as well as the addition of fall dry season burns….there would have not been nearly as much fine fuel load like you're burning in the pics to spark and carry fire as easily….. Therefore I believe that any spring fires that occurred most likley did so at the tail end of turkey nesting and they were simple low intensity burns that released a bunch of mice to temporarily overwhelm predators and give the poults a better chance to make it through their two week critical period before they can fly.

Nice burn pics and great point made.

Same chart now with the monthly rainfall totals added........

How about now??

Here is one and it indicates that April May and June are the greatest probability of a lightning strike set fire.

a study I found for forestland wildfires in Mississippi indicated not only did Feb-April have the most incidence of wildfires but also the largest acreage burned per wildfire 1990-2006

Please cite some studies or ANY information backing up your theories.



Since we have established above that the probability of a lightning set fire is best in Apr-June, when is best? Seems like Jan - May would be least "damaging"

That's great info......I adjusted my squiggly lines....The fire peaks would have been opposite. I think you answered your own question with the last one Gobbler.....May and June would be the best time to burn a portion of it with secondary burns during the true dormant season.....I think we make the wrong assumption that this is bad for the young turkeys.....Again though we're talking about slow low intensity burns and not big grass head fires.