08/20/2006

Jack pines are both a haven and a hazard

Warbler thrives in combustible, scrubby habitat

By
Record-Eagle staff writer

Record-Eagle/Sheri McWhirter
Mike DeCapita and Phil Huber, federal wildlife biologists, discuss with journalists the role of wildfires in ecosystems while standing in a burned area of Oscoda County.

MIO — Heat and humidity hung low across the jack pine forest on a July morning in northern Michigan.

Rays of sunshine broke through cloud-strewn skies upon scrubby trees grown to shoulder's height. Two months earlier, this picturesque landscape was among the most dangerous places in the state.

Jack pine ecosystems in northern Lower Michigan are famed as nesting grounds of the endangered Kirtland's warbler, but earn infamy as wicked wildfire territory during the annual spring thaw and temperature climb.

"We have some forest systems that are as deadly and dangerous as anywhere in the United States," said Dave Cleland, a landscape ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service.

About 2.5 million acres of fire-prone forests exist in Michigan, most of that owned by federal and state governments.

"In those places where we have great fire risk here in the East, we also have high (human) populations," Cleland said.

The technical term is wildland-urban interface: where human development intermingles with wildlife habitat and otherwise undisturbed land.

Lightning-sparked wildfires that in the spring traditionally ripped across the area's tinder-dry jack pine forests are now controlled to protect human life and property, said Phil Huber, a wildlife biologist with the Huron-Manistee National Forests.

But wildfires in recent decades, even those caused by humans, have allowed natural regeneration of sensitive woodland areas. The intense heat of fire is needed to open the cones of jack pine trees and allow seeds to drop on the scorched forest floor.

Huber said much of the Kirtland's warbler population increase in the early 1990s can be attributed to excellent habitat created by the 1980 Mack Lake Fire in Oscoda County. It was a federal prescribed burn that grew out of control with high winds and became an enormous, 25,000-acre fire that killed one firefighter and destroyed 50 homes southeast of Mio.

Cleland said the Grayling sands that stretch across the region are part of the glacial out-wash plain, where only the most coarse sands were dropped. Wildfires are part of the evolutionary system of forest regeneration here, so now other, less dangerous forest management methods are used to mimic the effect of fires.

Paul Call, forestry services manager for Weyerhaeuser Corp., said pine comprises 10-percent of the wood processed into oriented-strand board at the mill in Grayling. The company uses some of the jack pine timber from local clear-cuts, but much more of it formerly went to Gaylord's Georgia-Pacific particle board factory that closed this year.

Call said a major jack pine market is now pulpwood, with about half of the former value.

"So that will decrease money available for Kirtland's warbler programs," Huber said. That includes annually trapping about 4,000 parasitic cowbirds within designated habitat areas.

Sierra Club volunteer Tim Flynn said as public forests, the land should carry worth beyond the lumber industry and much more of it should be left alone to become older growth areas.