A Hot Time at Cold Spring

This is the 23d in a series of articles by Emile DeVito, Ph.D., NJCF’s director of conservation biology, designed to help our readers learn about the natural world.

April is fire-danger month in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. This spring, a wind-whipped fire, possibly set by arsonists, roared across 20,000 acres, blackening public and private land in the Forked River Mountains.

Was there significant harm to the natural resource base? Some Atlantic white cedar was burned, so future timber was lost. Lately, cedar is uncommon due to past resource abuse and mismanagement, not fires. Not counting cedar inventory, nothing better than fire can happen in the Pine Barrens! Blazing fires give rebirth to the Pine Barrens.

Pitch pine (Pinus rigida) is the single most fire-adapted tree species in the world! Pitch pines:

1. bury buds below the soil, creating a lifelong insurance policy against fire;

2. have buds beneath scaly, fire-resistant bark, which sprout from trunks and branches after a hot fire;

3. develop a high percentage of serotinous cones, which remain on the tree, unopened, for years. When heated by fire, the cone’s scales retract, scattering fresh seeds onto the ashes only hours after the pass ing wall of flames, and

4. store carbohydrates in their roots, where the fire has no impact, providing food for a quick recovery.

Hot Fires can sometimes kill the trunk of a pitch pine, so that the standing charred remains won’t resprout, but almost every rootstock will rocket new shoots skyward by the Fourth of July.

But why is it better to have the Pine Barrens ecosys tem “reset” by fire? Why are charred rootsprouts better than nice big pine trees? Because without regular fires, the pines would eventually lose out. Pine seedlings need full sunlight and bare soil. Without fires, pine reproduction would fail and the various species of oak trees common to southern New Jersey would dominate the landscape. Oaks have taken over where fires have been prevented for many years.

An oak forest here or there adds biodiversity to the Pine Barrens, but most of the signature species of plants and animals in the Pines depend upon the pitch pine forest and its intrinsic cycle of fire.

At Cold Spring, a crystal-clear tributary of Oyster Creek, the fire screamed across the landscape, bearing down on an island of majestic Atlantic white cedar. Flames torched tinder-dry sheep laurel and inkberry in the surrounding pitch pine lowlands, but died as they encountered the wet sphagnum moss at the edge of the dark, humid swamp. The fire burned ’round this emerald island of cedars, but the home of boreal redback voles, saw-whet owls, golden Harris’ threespot moths and black- throated green warblers was spared! Just luck? No, the turkey-beards tell us that it usually happens this way!

Turkey beard (Xerophyllum asphodeloides) is a lily. A dry (Xero) tuft of grasslike leaves (phyllum) disguises the plant’s intention of sending forth a tall, creamy white, foam-like cluster (asphodeloides) of tiny lilies. Colonies of turkey beard are found in wetland “pitch pine lowlands,” where seasonal high water is Just below the soil surface. Since you seldom get your boots wet in pitch pine lowlands, they don’t qualify as Dan Quayle wetlands! But wet they are, containing signature wetland species beneath spindly, slow-growing pitch pines whose roots are submerged.

Colonies of turkey beard fringe cedar swamps or bogs and contain little sphagnum moss. Without a thick, wet insulator like sphagnum, pitch pine lowlands catch fire during droughts like a fuel spill at a fireworks festival. Hot fires give life to turkey beard.

Now that fire has encircled Cold Spring, the pitch pine blanket has been whisked away, evealing singed tufts of thousands of turkey beards. The dry, grasslike leaves are packed as tightly as rolled newspaper; new flower buds were protected from the fire’s quick-passing heat. By Flag Day, this ashy meadow will be aglow with creamy flower spikes of turkey beard, as if moonbeams were emanating from the green backdrop of the cedars of Cold Spring. Witness this ecological spectacle, and you’ll understand why hot fires are needed in the Pine Barrens.

The rare plants and animals of the ecological communities which define our New Jersey Pine Barrens have evolved among repeated fires for thousands of years. The Pine Barrens are not simply tolerant of fire, they need fire—big, hot fires that remove the canopy trees and open the ashes and sands to the sun.

No one wants to see a fire damage structures or threaten lives. Cold control burns and intense forestry practices need to be performed around inhabited areas. Cold control burns safely remove the potential fuel for a hot fire, but they result in biological wastelands. They eliminate diversity, favoring only a few species of herbs and shrubs. They destroy the suitability of nesting habitat for birds, mammals and invertebrates, and they alter the nutrient cycles and fungal composition of the sandy soil.

Cold control burns should be done ONLY where it is essential to safety-proof areas of human occupation. Hot burns, which more closely imitate natural fires, need to be intensely studied and developed for use in more remote areas of the Pines. The good intentions of the Forest Fire Service need to be redirected. Spend more time protecting villages, and less time turning vast, remote public lands to biologically impoverished syvicultural stands of pine and lowbush blueberry. Inhabited areas should be few but well protected, so that when a hot fire roars deep in the Barrens, the headlines read:

“MAGNIFICENT FIRE RESTORES COMPLEXITY TO NEW JERSEY’S PINE BARRENS, NO HOMES OR LIVES THREATENED.”

Note: Cold Spring is an HJCF preserve. To uisit, call 201-539-7540 for information.

Editors note: Permission to reprint this article was obtained by Bob Moyer.