Hunt2Prove
On the Hunt for a Better Version of Ourselves, the Forests We Steward, & the Wildlife we Love!
Prescribed Fire Awareness
Headed home from a burn in the northern reaches of our state I found myself in a sea of red and white and all of the other colors that can come with highway driving beneath the stars. Some headed north, others south like me, I wondered how many knew or even cared to know what Prescribed Fire actually is. Like a line of fire sizzling up a broomesedge slope, my thoughts rapidly expanded to cover the entirety of our great country and even the rest of the world – how many know what good fires do? How many exhibit prescribed fire awareness?
My Path to Awareness
As a kid my nanny would rake leaves in her yard every Fall. The piles would be just big enough for a 5 or 6 year old to hide in but not quite big enough to buffer the pain of your knees hitting hard, rocky georgeville gravelly loam. Soon the smell of Fall literally burning into existence would fill the air around us. These represent my first memories of any sort of “prescribed fire” and, if I close my eyes and look back hard enough into the 1980s I can still see my nanny standing there with a rake in one hand and a Virginia Slim in the other, the smoke of two varieties filling the air around her.
Today Prescribed Fire has taken on a whole new meaning for me. Each year we try to burn as many acres as we possibly can to improve the flora and fauna of the North Carolina forests we’re fortunate to steward. A byproduct of our efforts, especially after multiple burns over a period of years, is a land protected from the ravaging rage of wildfire. By speeding up the decomposition of downed woody debris, and keeping finer fuels in check, the lands we steward are safer, and teeming with wild things!
At age 28, at a land management convention in Nashville, TN, I was privileged to hear Dr. Craig Harper and others rave on the benefits of controlled woods burning to improve wildlife habitat. A few months later, in 2013, I’d find myself at Montgomery Community College in Troy, NC participating in the Certified Burner Course. I was doing what I could to improve my own “Prescribed Fire Awareness”. I went into that course with almost zero knowledge of what it takes to conduct a prescribed burn. And, while I surely learned some things and passed the quiz at the end, I’d be lying if I told you that I was anywhere near ready to go out and put fire on the ground in any capacity. Over the next 3 years I bought and read books like “Conducting Prescribed Fires: A Comprehensive Manual” by John Weir. I scoured the internet and watched videos online. But, none of that compares to actual experience in the field and having a great mentor! Reading and watching is one thing, applying is another.
Prescribed Fire Awareness isn’t necessarily becoming a certified burner, burn boss, or even an extra hand on burn day. It doesn’t mean that you have to take the same class I did, read the same books, or help your nanny burn leaves as a kid. It might be taking the time to study the benefits of good fire; asking questions, voicing ideas, or being supportive in some capacity. At the end of the day, your own awareness, knowledge, and perception of prescribed fire may very well light the path to the awareness, knowledge, or perception of another. Whether good or bad, other people absorb what you spew out, just as readily as dry pine needles absorb the flaming diesel and gas mixture dripping from the end of a torch. So, best make it positive and focus on ideas every chance you get.
Two different paths, same destination!
While your own path to awareness will likely be different than mine, it may very well be because we love and appreciate some of the same things – Whitetail Deer, Wild Turkey, Bobwhite Quail, Songbirds, Red-Cockaded Woodpeckers, Wildflowers, Pollinators, Native Grasses & Forbs, Longleaf Pine Ecosystems, Hardwood Savannas and so much more. Or, it might be because you just want to protect yourself and others from some of the deadly conflagrations you’ve read about or watched unfold on the news – disastrous wildfires that might very well be avoided with more of the prescribed variety. Good Fire is a rejuvenating force; it is a wall upon which wildfire crashes and burns out of fuel. Like burning leaves and cigarettes, wildfires and prescribed fires emit smoke of two varieties – one much more harmful than the other. Where wildfires can be hell bent on absolute destruction, gluttonously devouring homes, towns, wildlife, and even people, prescribed fires have been and always will be our best tool to combat them. What we burn on our terms today, can’t burn on nature’s terms tomorrow.
10 years into soaking up all I can about RxFire and 7 years into actually putting fire on the ground, I don’t plan on stopping. For me, it’s a soul stirring moment – Every time I carry a torch, watch embers from a snag dance in the night, or smell the heartwood of an old pine burning back into the earth from whence it came, I am both here and there at the same time. Here in the present and there with all of those before me who prescriptively set the woods ablaze for the many of the same reasons that I do today. To see the explosion of life in a woodland where sunlight and fire work in tandem to create it, is a defining moment of stewardship. Much has changed in the decades since my childhood in the small town of Robbins, NC. My Nanny has now been burning the leaves of heaven since October 2018 – no doubt with the same grit and fiery nature that she helped instill in me to fight for and protect the things you love and believe in. Kim and I have four beautiful kids that we’re doing our best to raise among the wilder things in life – among Sycamore roots exposed by a cascade of water; among briars, brambles, and birds of fire; among brownstone outcrops and thundering gobbles; immersed in a wild life manipulated by good fire – fully aware of its purpose in safeguarding all that we love.
Bobwhite Quail, Wild Turkeys, & Insects
There was a time when Bobwhite Quail, Wild Turkeys, & Insects were not three things that I’d put together in a sentence. Yet, as I grow older, my thirst for knowledge seems to grow more and more, driven by my desire to fully understand the things I value and to share that understanding with others. Somewhere between Herbert Stoddard and Aldo Leopold the fact was born and put into words that to manage a property, maximizing the 
health and abundance of one species would be to the neglect of others. This is true. Different wildlife take different habitat requirements. To manage a property with the goal of maximizing the health and abundance of white-tailed deer, for instance, wouldn’t require the thought of insect availability. To manage a property for wild turkey or quail, however, most certainly does.
For a lot of us, “managing habitat” is defined by what it takes to make the most favorable environment or set of conditions for the game species we love to hunt. If I were forced to rank the game species that I value from first to last, Wild Turkey would top the list; Deer would be second; Rabbits and Squirrels, third; and Bob-white Quail would bring up the rear. If I lived in the midwest or an area of the country that harbored Elk, Antelope, Mule Deer, & other Big Game Species, my personal ranking may be tweaked just a bit. It might also include pheasant, grouse, & others still. A Turkey’s gobble thundering through the spring woods and their unmatched display of colors will always be tough to top. Rankings, though, can be misleading. It might steer one to believe that I’d be content having one expanse of field and forest that had only the most vocal, iridescent gobblers you’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t be. For me, that would be like reading a newspaper that only the same woodsy article every time. If it were like the Newspapers that Leon Neel used to read with his father as a little boy, it would only include one set of the same animal tracks each and every edition (Sutter & Way, 2012). For most land managers, regardless of how we might rank our favorite game species, we appreciate and value others to the point that we want to keep them around. The point is, that while I might be a turkey guy, the similarities between young quail and turkey poults dietary requirements is worthy of understanding. Although I might not yet hunt quail or hold them to the same esteem that I hold turkeys, I value their presence on the lands I am privileged to steward; and, if forced to choose, would seek to have less numbers of any and all game species so that I could walk amongst them all.
Wild turkey poults, just after they crack through the membrane of the egg and say hello to the world, could fit inside of a baseball 2 at a time. 2 Quail chicks, on the other hand, could fit inside of a ping pong ball pretty easily. The survival of both of these ground nesting birds is directly linked to the availability of food within a certain proximity to the nest in the days and weeks post-hatch. Not only that, but a certain type of food – Insects! In 1931, C.O Handley in Food of the Young found in Herbert Stoddard’s the “Bobwhite Quail: Its Habit, Preservation, & Increase”, estimated that, “of the food of 20 chicks under two weeks of age, 83.7 % consisted of animal matter.” 54 years later, William Healy would publish data on the feeding habitats of wild turkey poults 1-4 weeks of age. When we average the percentage of animal matter in the poults’ diets across the six different habitat types in Mr. Healy’s study, 83.9% is the result (Healy, 1985). Whereas the management of land for Bobwhite Quail and Wild Turkey might differ slightly, one thing is obvious – any management strategy better include the thought of insects and their availability.
Food Availability
Food availability for these youngsters comes in two parts: 1) The actual presence of the necessary foods they need on a specific site and 2) Their ability to get to it, i.e. is it within reach? Further extrapolating that thought, are the insects closer to the ground and within a certain distance from the nest site? After all, birds that are smaller than a baseball and ping pong ball at birth, can only do so much traveling before depleting their energy reserves. To quote Chamberlain and others in “Behavior and Movement of Wild Turkey Broods”, “Wild Turkey Poults and similar precocial hatchlings require consistent forage intake with minimal energy expenditure for days after hatching; hence it is logical that stressors associated with increased daily movements within 3 days of hatching would negatively influence brood survival.” Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that excess movements makes both wild turkey poults and young bobwhite more susceptible to predation and death by different means, like hypothermia in wet, cooler times.
The “within reach” portion of this discussion on food availability is also important. Like many of you, I have stands of lush clover that can be filled with a horde of bugs at times – crickets, grasshoppers, bees, you name it. And too, I’ve examined the crops of several turkeys I’ve been fortunate to kill – they’ll nip the heads off of clover stolons quite readily. But, due to the density of the these clover stands at ground level, wild turkey poults and quail chicks are unable to use these these plots safely and efficiently like they can other open areas. If forced to use these areas shortly after hatching, broods could become even more susceptible to episodes of cold and wet induced fatigue, which can certainly lead to increased predation and natural mortality. If you’ve ever walked through a dense strand of clover or other vegetation early in the morning or following a rain, you understand. The same lack of availability can also be true for other food plots that we may plant for other wild things, like white-tailed deer. It’s not necessarily because the bugs aren’t there, it’s that young birds just can’t access them.
When it comes to the increased use of open areas and their respective insect availability, compared to forested land-types, I hypothesize this is due to the fact that young birds are able to find insects in areas of early succession more readily because they are concentrated closer to the ground and not hidden by layers of leaf litter. Leaf litter can also suppress grasses and forbs that might otherwise be hospitable to insects in the optimal zone of 0-8 inches above the ground (Hurst, 1972). This would go hand in hand with the fact that use of forested landscapes increases as birds age – at that point they are able to scratch through the fine forest fuels as we’ve all seen.
What is the travel threshold?
The distance from nest site to a bug-filled paradise for wild turkey broods should be +- 875 yards (Chamberlain et. al, 2020). To put this differently, a circle with a radius of 875 yards is comprised of approximately 495 +- Acres. So, if you’re a hunter or landowner with 500 acres that is otherwise hospitable to wild turkeys, having centrally located brood habitat could certainly aid in increasing poult recruitment or survival to adulthood. For Bobwhites, who’s home ranges average 40-200 acres, the maximum radius or distance from the nest site that young Bobwhite would need to travel is 556 +- Yards, assuming less than optimal habitat quality. For quail, having good bugging grounds centrally located across 200 +- acres could theoretically lead to increased populations on your property.
What is good bugging ground?
Going back to Healy’s 1985 publication, “Turkey Poult Feeding Activity, Invertebrate Abundance, and Vegetation Structure”, we can infer that the best bugging grounds were “open, grass” and “open, grass/forb” communities. Numerous researches before and after have noted the same – It is imperative to have open areas of early succession plant communities situated within close proximity of nesting cover. However, having open, field-like areas or canopy gaps is not enough. Disturbance of these areas on a periodic rotation is absolutely crucial to their diversity and open nature. In other words, you won’t have open areas long if you don’t do what is necessary to keep them that way.
Studies have shown that there is a direct correlation between the use of prescribed fire and insect abundance and availability (Hurst, 1972). In addition to diversifying the flora and fauna that might inhabit a given location over time, fire does much to create the necessary bare-ground thoroughfares that chicks and poults need to access insects and seeds without over-exerting themselves.
Brood Habitat in Moore County, NC managed with Rx Fire & Strip DiskingConcluding Remarks
As mentioned earlier, if you’re managing a property specifically for the abundance and health of white-tailed deer, rabbits, or even antelope, insect abundance and availability doesn’t have to be at the forefront of your mind. For quail and turkey, though, insects are key to their survival. If this isn’t something you’ve always considered when implementing strategies to improve your hunting grounds and their ability to draw and hold quail or turkey, don’t beat yourself up. Nobody wakes up one morning and suddenly has all of the answers. Life, like the best quail and turkey grounds, is a product of trial and error, what works and what doesn’t.
Early Succession canopy gaps & old fields, managed with prescribed fire and strip disking, work to make insects more abundant and available. In addition, prescribed fire in woodlands with more optimum basal areas can also increase species richness and diversity from both a floral and faunal standpoint. Such a management initiative, it is reasonable to believe, would lead to an increase in insect abundance and availability at the ground level just as it does in an open, old field type environment. Fire & Disking, aside from acting as a stimulate for new plant growth while eating up plant debris, serve to create the necessary bare-ground corridors that safely connect broods to the insects and seeds they need. In my personal opinion, even food plots planted specifically for other species can and should include strip disking to ensure that young broods are able to use these areas, especially if you have significant acreage farmed by refined means, i.e. with the no-till-drill. While good in its own right and for its specific purpose of row-crop agriculture, the no-till drill can have und
esirable effects over time. That same accumulation of old plant material that helps to suppress weeds and improve water retention can also be a hindrance to the movement of young quail and turkey.
Another important characteristic of the use of prescribed fire is plant species diversity. A study conducted by Oklahoma State University over a 17-Year Period, with a 2-Year fire return interval, produced 117 broadleaf flowering species that aside from attracting pollinators and other insects, also significantly enhances land aesthetics. Hurst also noted the use of fire as it pertains to increased seed production. As both quail and turkey broods mature, seeds become prevalent in their diets. A 4 and 6 day old quail chick in the 1972 Hurst study, consumed 165 and 240 panic grass seeds, respectively. A 1998 study on the effects of burning at different times of the year showed that burning in the dormant season led to an increase in panicum species (Sparks et. al, 1998). That same study concluded that growing season burns were more effective at reducing woody stems and promoting flowering plants. As land managers, our goal should be diversity. To accomplish a diverse floral landscape begins with a mosaic-type fire pattern that is as simple as making smaller burn units and rotating dormant and growing season burns. In the process of breaking up larger compartments of a woodland into smaller burn or management units, literally by installing interior firebreaks, you are also creating additional edge habitat and bare-ground opportunities that can aid in quail and turkey survival as long as insect and seed abundance continue to be perpetuated by fire.
As a land manager I do not have all of the right answers. What I do have is access to information that can help, thanks to land managers before me – what works, what doesn’t, when, where, etc. Sometimes, though, the right answers are still being formulated, the trial and error process of getting things right still stirring up change. Regardless of what we may do to help ourselves or others on the lands we steward, there will always be circumstances beyond our control that can put a hitch in things. Some years, no matter how much cover you have in all of the right places, the hawk will win. Other years, they just won’t be able to out-smart their prey. The literature listed below helped me to generate this writing and satisfy my desire to know more. Personal experiences helped to fill in the gaps. Hopefully, in combining the two, I have helped you somehow.
Literature Cited
Chamberlain et.al. 2020. Behavior and Movement of Wild Turkey Broods. The Journal of Wildlife Management 1-14.
Handley, C.O. 1931. Food of the Young, page 160. Stoddard, H.L. The Bobwhite Quail: Its Habits, Preservation, & Increase.
Healy, W. M. 1985. Turkey poult feeding activity, invertebrate abundance, and vegetation structure. Journal of Wildlife Management 49: 466–472.
Hurst, G. A., and B. D. Stringer. 1975. Food habits of wild turkey poults in Mississippi. National Quail Symposium 1: 65-82.
Sparks et. al. 1998. Effects of Late Growing Season and Late Dormant Season Prescribed Fire on Herbaceous Vegetation in Restored Pine-Grassland Communities. The Journal of Vegetation Science, Feb., 1998 Vol. 9 No. 1 pp. 133-142.
Sutter, Paul S. and Way, Albert G. 2010. The Art of Managing Longleaf: 50.
Photos from the Wilder side of Life!
