During the spring and early summer, wood smoke hangs over the piney woods of central and north Florida. This is the time of year when land managers burn many of Florida’s pinelands, using fire to ensure the health of the forest and the wildlife that lives there.
For many years, farmers burned pinelands during the winter. When my granddaddy was raising cattle and cotton in the piney woods of Madison County a hundred years ago, he burned the woods every year. His neighbors did the same. They knew that putting a fire through piney woods kills brushy hardwoods and makes the native grasses and other plants put out new growth that cattle love.
In those days much of Florida was open range, and cattle farmers burned large tracts of land each year to provide good forage for their animals. Then along came new forestry practices. By the early 1900s, the timber industry had cleared more than 80 percent of old-growth pine forests in the Southeast. The timber industry, which relied heavily on Southeastern pine forests, saw fire as a threat to the regrowth of young pines. The US Forest Service was charged with suppressing fires so pines could grow.
This didn’t have the desired effect. The removal of fire from the woods resulted in the growth of thick hardwood forests, not the pines that forest managers hoped to see. Native grasses and other plant species endemic to pine forests vanished, along with wildlife species that depend on open pine woods.
Large landowners in the northern Florida and southern Georgia became concerned about the loss of one particular species, the bobwhite quail. Northerners who had purchased old cotton plantations counted quail hunting as one of the great assets of the plantations, and the disappearance of the birds alarmed them. They engaged the services of biologist Herbert Stoddard to find out what was happening to the quail. His work showed clearly that when the piney woods are allowed to grow up in with a brushy understory, quail populations suffer. Stoddard’s work eventually led to the establishment of Tall Timbers Research Station north of Tallahassee.
Stoddard’s work, which flew in the face of established US Forest Service policy, took a while to catch on. But in 1943, The US Forest Service conducted the first official prescribed burn in the Ocala National Forest. The first prescribed burn in a national park took place in 1958, in Everglades National Park. By the 1970s, the Florida Park Service was conducting prescribed burns in many of our state parks.
Then in 1990, the Florida Legislature passed the Prescribed Burning Act. This promoted prescribed burning as a forest management tool and further increased the use of prescribed burning. The state revised its fire management program in 1998, following wildfires that burned 500,000 acres in Volusia and Flagler counties and destroyed hundreds of homes.
By the 1990s, researchers were taking another look at the timing of fire in the forest. Since then, the timing of prescribed burns has changed from winter dormant season burns to spring and summer burns. This is consistent with the historical timing of fires in the pine woods landscape, since most natural fires were started by lightning strikes during the spring and summer. This has resulted in better control of hardwoods, an increase in flowering and fruiting plants, and improved wildlife habitat.
Although fire may seem dangerous, it’s essential to the health of many of Florida’s ecosystems. Controlled fires reduce the risk of wildfires, maintain the health of pine forests, and allows rare and endangered species to flourish.
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