Florida: The Fire State By Judith Buhrman Adapted from an article in The Understory, June/July 1996 Teach a parrot to say "Growing season burn!" and you've got a Florida ecologist, or at least half of one. Add "Sheet flow of water," and you've got the whole beast. Well, no. If only it were that simple. Before the European occupation of Florida, the annual rhythm of fire and flood was an ecological constant, punctuated by larger cycles of drought, deluge, and freeze. The higher and drier, the less frequent the cleansing flames of seasonal fire, but virtually no plant community was exempt, and most required fire to survive, at intervals from one to twenty-five or more years. Seldom would natural conditions conspire to utterly destroy an entire community. The usual arrangement of tree canopy ranged from absent to partial in nearly all cases, and the frequent natural burns proceeded in a rather stately fashion through the ground cover, deprived of access to the canopy now furnished by overgrown woody shrubs and vines. Thus did affairs tick along for millennia, honing plants and animals in the crucible of natural disturbance. Grasses and forbs that arranged their blooming and seed-setting to occur well after fire season were favored. Woody species "learned to store most of their living matter (biomass) underground as well as adjust their flower and seed setting schedules, so a wildfire had no more effect than a severe pruning. Longleaf pine, and to some extent, south Florida slash pine, selected the strategy of staying low and defended as seedlings, then zooming up and out of the way of the frequent, low-intensity fires ignited by lightning. Plants that bloomed before fire season and set seed in a hurry, many of them in the lily family, prospered as well. Then, there's wire grass. Wire grass, the signature groundcover of the southeastern pine forests and Florida dry prairies, loves fire, needs fire, carries fire--even over two inches of standing water, handing it off like an Olympic torch to its herbaceous neighbors. We wonder half-seriously if this Phoenix plant might, given time, figure how to self-ignite, thereby freeing itself from the uncertainties of fickle lightning, or the damnable habit of winter burning, adopted by the new dominant life form. Native fauna adapted to the leisurely pace of the usual natural conflagration. Rattlesnakes, eastern indigo snakes, rabbits, mice, bobwhite quail, gopher frogs, and a host of other mobile creatures knew exactly the location of the nearest gopher tortoise burrow or pothole marsh to shelter in. round nesting birds simply went elsewhere to start over should their nest be destroyed. Sandhill cranes flew in to forage amid still-smoking stumps and tussocks in open burn sites. For all the square miles of landscape that would burn in any one event, patches would escape the flames, as wetlands provided fire-shadows or winds changed direction, leaving pockets of untouched habitat, giving refuge to temporarily displaced animals. As well, while most natural fires would occur at the beginning of the thunderstorm season, they might occur at any time, injecting some ecologically valuable randomness into the system. A few systems, sand pine being one, burned infrequently, but most burned as soon as just enough fuel accumulated on the ground, the fire moving much as the sheet flow of water on this flat and subtle land-form: slow and easy-does-it. Few of us have ever seen a healthy pyrophilic (fire-loving) community because of long-term policies of fire exclusion or winter burning, which favor woody plants and hardwood trees. Lush looking pine woods with abundant shrubs are catastrophic fires waiting to happen. Low in plant diversity, they are degraded or useless as habitat for many animal species. In no communities is the difference between ecological fire and winter or single-species management burning more apparent than dry prairie and pine woods. Dry prairie managed by nature is tall-grass prairie, a delight of diversity. Unburned or winter-burned, it is saw palmetto prairie, with the grasses and forbs clinging to the edges of wetlands, roads, and trails. True pine woods are the same, in health open and park-like, otherwise overgrown and species impoverished. You will know a true Florida place if you see one, your eyes and heart will tell you. I promise.