Last week, our crew conducted two summer prescribed burns at the Platte River Prairies. One was around 45 acres and the other was about 15. Both burn units made up less than 10% of the total area of their respective prairies. Weather conditions were mild – temperatures in the high 70’s (Fahrenheit) with wind speeds of 5-10 miles per hour and relative humidity around 50%.

The objectives for both units were the same. Cody (Preserve Manager) wanted to shift grazing pressure to the new burns (and thus away from previously burned areas. He hoped the fire and grazing combination would create additional habitat heterogeneity and alter competition in the plant community to temporarily favor plant species that respond well to this kind of disturbance. Another objective was to continue learning about the impacts of various prairie management options, both for our own education and that of those who visit our sites and/or read this blog.

Whenever I post something about summer fire, I get lots of great questions, so I thought I’d try to anticipate some of those and answer them in the main feed so everyone can see both the questions and the answers. Here we go!

Question 1: Can you describe the two prairies you burned?

Answer: Yes. I’m very familiar with them.

Better Answer: The first site is the remnant described in the above photo caption. Cattle had access to the site (and watched us curiously during the fire) but hadn’t been grazing much because they were focused on a different part of the prairie that had been burned this spring.

The second site is a high-diversity (more than 200 spp in seed mix) restored prairie planted in 2000 with very nice plant diversity. It has been excluded from grazing this year and only lightly grazed the previous couple years, so it was getting dense and thatchy.

Question 2: How does a summer fire even burn? Everything looks so green!

Answer: Yeah, it’s pretty wild to watch. What actually carries the fire is the dead vegetation that has accumulated from previous years – especially the layer of thatch along the ground (see below photo). While much of the green vegetation is consumed, the dry thatch is what really makes it go. Summer fires tend to be slow and very smoky, but both of last week’s ended up consuming nearly 100 percent of the burn units.

Question 3: Isn’t it dangerous to work in that much smoke?

Answer: It’s always risky to work in and around smoke, but yes, summer fires need particular planning. We work extra hard to limit the amount of time people spend in the smoke during a summer burn. On the first burn unit, we made our downwind fire breaks extra wide and used a strong wet line (sprayed water in a strip along the edge of the burn before igniting). That gave us extra trust in those breaks to hold the fire. As a result, after igniting along that line, we could wait and let a lot of smoke dissipate before going in to make sure the line was holding. If it wasn’t, the wide breaks gave us plenty of time to respond and catch the fire while it was still within the mowed break. For the second unit, we used a gravel road as our downwind break, which meant we didn’t need to check that line at all.

Question 4: Aren’t there a lot of risks to animals from a summer fire?

Answer: Yes, but there are a lot of risks to animals with any fire, regardless of season. Dormant season fires consume lots of invertebrates, for example, that are overwintering in thatch or in the stems of plants. Any growing season fire can be dangerous for animals because more of them are active and aboveground than during the dormant season. However, many of those animals are mobile enough to escape the fire (as opposed to overwintering invertebrates – and vertebrates – in a dormant season burn).

Having said that, though, summer fires can obviously present significant hazards for animals. There are ways to help mitigate that. One is to burn only a small percentage of a total area. My personal perspective is that 10% seems about right, but that’s not based on any science.

The tactics used during a burn can also affect the ability of animals to escape. Burning a site gradually so that animals have time (and escape routes) can be better than quickly ringing a burn unit. On the flip side, of course, the longer a burn takes, the longer crew members are exposed to smoke and the more chances there are for something to go wrong, so there are tradeoffs!

Question 5: How does a summer fire affect the plant community?

Answer: It varies wildly, and depends upon a lot of factors – some of which we don’t yet understand very well. Every prairie is different, so it’s hard to predict how a particular plant community might respond to a summer burn. The follow-up management is also important. In our prairies, a summer fire is usually paired with grazing, so the impacts on the plant community are as much driven by the grazing as by the fire.

Without grazing, the effects of a summer fire (without grazing) can be similar to what you’d see from haying. While they’re not identical treatments, both fire and haying remove the vegetative growth plants have produced so far that season. Plants that have completed their life cycle before the event are interrupted in their growth and don’t have a chance to flower or store energy for next year. If the plants more significantly affected are normally dominant within the community, that can open up temporary opportunities for plant species that aren’t strong competitors.

At the Platte River Prairies, our results vary from year to year and site to site. Many opportunistic plant species, including annuals, biennials, and some perennials often flush in abundance for a year or so, but it can be hard to predict which ones will respond in a particular year. Species that may do well include black-eyed Susans, upright prairie coneflower, yarrow, hoary vervain, stiff goldenrod, purple and white prairie clovers, shell-leaf penstemon, and others.

There are a couple species that seem to respond consistently to the combination of summer fire and grazing at the Platte River Prairies. Wedgegrass (Sphenophilis obtusata) usually becomes much more common in our prairies during the year following a summer fire. I’ve only seen Carolina anemone (Anemone caroliniana) three times in one of our sand prairies, and two of those sightings came after a summer burn. Neither of those species depends on summer fire, but they seem to be examples of species that – at our sites – respond well.

Question 6: Why not just burn the same areas in the spring or fall?

Answer: We sure could have, though the results would have been different. In addition, recent springs have been really difficult for prescribed fire and that may be a trend for the future. We’ve had a tough time finding days with appropriate winds and other weather conditions during the spring, so we’ve tried harder to find other burning windows. That’s especially important for sites that are using fire to combat woody encroachment (not really an issue on either of the two units we burned last week). If you need to kill eastern redcedar trees, for example, and can’t get a spring burn done, burning in the summer or fall can still accomplish the same goals.

Additionally, one of our objectives at the prairies owned by The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska is to experiment and learn what we can about land management and restoration. We try lots of stewardship tactics, evaluate them, and have them available for others to come look at during our field days, workshops, etc. There’s still a lot to learn about summer fire, so each one is another opportunity to learn.

Question 7: Will conducting summer fires make me popular with other prairie people?

Answer: Not universally, apparently. I had someone on Instagram respond to a post on last week’s summer fire by calling me foolish and arrogant. Of course, he also said prairies aren’t disturbance-dependent systems, which I would strongly disagree with. Interestingly, he seemed to be in favor of winter burns and periodic haying, both of which I would categorize as ‘disturbances’.

Many people opposed to growing season burns are concerned about changes in the relative abundance of plant species. That’s obviously one important factor, though I have frequently argued that it’s important to manage for a broader set of objectives than just the plant community. If your prairie has rare plant species, however, it’s entirely fair to slant your management toward helping those plants thrive. (On the other hand, if the same prairie also has rare insects with management needs that conflict with those of the rare plants, you’re in a pickle, aren’t you? Prairie stewardship is complicated and hard!)

Regardless, there are certainly people with strong objections to summer fires. There are reasons to be skeptical of summer burning, of course – including some I’ve mentioned above. It’s certainly not something I think should be done regularly or at large scales in most places, but I also think it’s an option worth considering, depending upon your site and objectives. I don’t think a single summer fire on a small portion of a prairie is going to be catastrophic, and it will almost certainly be an opportunity to learn something helpful. A few people might be snarky about it, though.

Question 8: What’s the best time of year to burn a prairie?

Answer: That’s a trick question. It depends upon your objectives, how your particular prairie responds to fire, and whether you’re combining fire with other management like grazing or spot-herbicide-treatment of shrubs afterward. Fire is just one of many options for managing prairies and it should be used intentionally and thoughtfully, especially because it comes with significant risks – for both prairie species and fire crew members.

.

Question 9: Do you think prairies are important enough to warrant continued experimentation, especially in the face of rapid climate change, woody encroachment, high rates of nitrogen deposition, invasive species, and other threats?

Answer: Yes.

It’s an injustice. And it’s lazy. Is it the biggest issue facing society today? Nope. But it’s one we can take care of quickly and easily. Join me – it’ll be fun.

For some reason, biologists sometimes name plants, animals, and other organisms because they bear resemblance to something they already knew. Whomever came up with the name for false boneset thought it looked kind of like boneset plants. Instead of coming up with a cool name that was descriptive of the new plant itself, they just called it “false boneset” and moved on with their life.

An even bigger travesty exists with another plant and the insect that relies on it. I don’t know which was named first, but both were maladroitly named and we need to do something about it. I’m talking, of course, about the plant currently known as “false sunflower” and the insect named the “false milkweed bug.”

Ridiculous.

Let’s start with the plant. It sure does look like a sunflower, but it’s apparently not enough of a sunflower for taxonomists to lump it in that austere group. As a result, it ended up in the genus Heliopsis, along with 17 or so other similar species.

I don’t really have a problem with that. What I don’t like is that the given Latin name for the species is (Heliopsis helianthoides). The suffix -oides means ‘resembling’. Because of that, it was given the common name, “False Sunflower”.

Totally uncalled for.

(False boneset, by the way, is Brickellia eupatoroides because Eupatorium is the genus for boneset plants.)

Fortunately, for those of us willing to take up the cause of this plant, it has a second common name, which has been given to most (all?) of the other species in the Heliopsis genus. That name is ‘oxeye’. It’s a little weird, but it’s at least distinctive, and not just a name that compares it unfavorably to something else. So we have a starting point. Can we all agree to stop calling the poor plant false sunflower and make sure we call it oxeye?

Of course, oxeye is tricky because there are 17 other species also called that, so we should make the name a little more specific. Some have tried. Unfortunately, the common names for this plant include both “smooth oxeye” and “rough oxeye”, according to the premiere source for plant taxonomy information (Wikipedia). Which is it? Is it smooth or rough? No one knows, apparently.

Given what this poor plant has lived through with its nomenclature history, I propose a different adjective for its first name. How about “fabulous”? It think it looks pretty dang fabulous. Who’s with me?

Great. “Fabulous oxeye” it is. Or, just to have fun, the alternative, “Fabulous ox-eye” because no one can seem to agree about when to put a hyphen in the common names for plants. Or maybe “Fab-u-lous ox-eye” for extra emphasis and to compete for a new record for hyphen use. If you like, you can snap your fingers between each syllable.

Well, then. We’ve settled the first half of my cause.

Now let’s address the poor false milkweed bug.

The small milkweed bug, shown below, is a charming little insect that feeds on milkweed plants. It’s called the small milkweed bug because there’s another milkweed bug called the “large milkweed bug” (seriously, who gave these people the responsibility of naming organisms??). The large milkweed bug is in a completely different genus (Oncopeltus) but is at least in the same family as the small milkweed bug and does look sort of like it. But bigger.

The so-called false milkweed bug is in the same genus as the milkweed bug, but it doesn’t feed on milkweed. It feeds on fab-u-lous ox-eye, previously known as false sunflower. You’d think they could have gone with “false sunflower bug”, except that then people would think it was an insect that resembled a sunflower bug, which – as far as I know – isn’t an actual kind of bug.

So maybe they could have called it “real false sunflower bug” to clarify it.

Ok, probably not.

Alternatively, and stick with me here, they could have called it ANYTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD. They could have called it a skunk if they’d hurried. Then some poor slob would have had to come up with a different name for skunks when they discovered them. I shudder to think what they might have come up with. Probably something appalling like “stink weasel” or “false polecat”.

Now that we’ve come up with the updated name for the plant it depends upon, we could call the previously-named “false milkweed bug” the “fab-u-lous ox-eye bug”. But it’s a little long. Plus, what if the bug doesn’t want to be named for what it eats? I bet biologists wouldn’t like being called “fry folks” just because they like eating fast food.

I think we can challenge ourselves to come up with something unique and better. I’ll throw out a few ideas and then you can join in.

It’s a seed bug that with a distinctive orange and black pattern. The gives us a few things to work with. Also, “turcicus”, its specific epithet (second part of its scientific name) apparently means “from Turkey” in Latin.

So the default name might be “Turkish seed bug”. We’d already better off than we were, but it seems unfair to give one country all the credit. Canada geese, for example, don’t all belong to the perfectly-nice country of Canada. Canada didn’t invent that particular brand of goose, as far as I know. (Did they?)

What do you think about “spark bug”? It’s orange-colored, after all, which connotes flames or sparks. I kinda like it. It’s succinct, snappy, and memorable.

Yes? No? What are your suggestions?

Thank you for your attention to this important matter. Together, we can make a difference. If we all band together, the spark bug and its fab-u-lous ox-eye host plant will get the names they deserve!