Fire in the Pines: New England’s Forgotten Fire Story
By Valentin Kostelnik
Drifting on a warm breeze, a light blue butterfly flutters down to a similarly-colored flower in a grassy field in New York. The butterfly delicately lands on a lupine, extends its proboscis into the nectar, and takes a draught of much-needed sustenance. Around them is a wide grassland dotted with scrub oak and pitch pine woodlands, and parts of the open landscape are charred with ash from a recent fire.
In Northern California where I grew up, fire is the object of much fascination, anxiety, and conversation. The summer months now bring regular megafires that turn each day into one long, orange twilight. In the ever-shrinking intermissions between fire seasons, everyone eyes the rain forecast obsessively, wondering how bad the following year will be. Everyone in fire country has an opinion on prescribed burns too, a hopeful solution to our current crisis. As someone aiming for a career in fire, I sometimes wonder what I’m doing in New England, one of the only regions in the country that never burns. Being from California, I have been familiar only with cataclysmic megafires that should be feared, and prescribed burns that need to be expanded to a landscape scale. Both of these versions of fire exist only in the West and parts of the Southeast, and neither exist anymore in New England.
I staffed a student welcome day back in November with Cathy Shiga-Gattullo, who had a fire-scarred oak round on display to catch the eye of passing families. I asked her where the tree was from. “Colorado? California?”
“Poughkeepsie!”
Poughkeepsie? There are no fires in New York. What is a fire-adapted oak doing in Poughkeepsie? Cathy patiently explained that the round was from the Mohonk Preserve, where managers are trying to restore a fire regime to an oak woodland. She gave me the contact information of a few New York fire managers, and advised that I learn about the forgotten role of fire in New England’s ecology, both past and present.
Unlike Western states, New England would have few fires under natural conditions, if any. The region lacks a rhythmic wet-dry cycle, so the forest fuels never become combustible on a large scale, and lightning is always accompanied by rain, leaving no natural source of ignition. As Mark Twain famously observed, “If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait 15 minutes.” While out West, vegetation has months of hot, dry weather to become combustible, New England vegetation has a few weeks at most. You can imagine trying to light a fire in the damp litter layer under a northern hardwood forest; it won’t work.
In California things are less picky. In my hometown, it stops raining around April, and we might not see a drop of rain until November. Entire forests are turned into tinderboxes on an annual basis, and a single lightning strike can burn hundreds of thousands of acres. Even without human interference, landscape-scale fires are frequent.
Compared to the West, wildfire in New England is incredibly rare under natural conditions. This is why most people today believe it to be nonexistent in the region, and why I was so surprised to learn that fire was once a common occurrence here when Native Americans managed the land. But because fire is so naturally rare, the role it plays in New England has always been closely controlled by humans and reflected their land-use values.
Bill Patterson, one of New England’s foremost fire scientists, told me, “I devoted my career to finding out a fraction of what the indigenous people in New England knew about fire.” Prescribed burning in New England is difficult and requires intimate knowledge of habitat structure, weather patterns, and many other factors, but can be an incredibly valuable ecological tool. Natives needed the land for hunting and for agriculture, both of which can be made more productive by fire.
Fire is enormously advantageous to a hunter. All dead material is burned, and any surviving grasses or shrubs immediately send out new growth, which attracts game from nearby unburned areas. Furthermore, in a cleared forest, a hunter can locate and kill game far easier than in an overgrown one.
In Southern New England and along the coast, native groups were more sedentary compared to northern tribes and practiced extensive agriculture. Fire was particularly frequent around their settlements, where they used it as an agricultural tool. They employed slash-and-burn practices, in which large tracts of forest are cleared using fire before being cultivated. Early accounts of colonists visiting New York and Pennsylvania describe “open plains twenty or thirty leagues in extent, entirely free from trees.”
Native Americans managed the land using fire for thousands of years, long enough for species like the Karner blue butterfly and landscapes like oak woodlands or pine barrens to become fire-adapted. Though fire may be absent now, it is partly responsible for the New England we know today.
When colonists arrived, large portions of Pennsylvania, western New York, and the coastal plains were likely under prescribed fire management. Contrary to some modern views, colonists initially embraced fire, and records show a 16th century wave of prescribed fire on an even greater scale than what the natives maintained. These early colonists, mostly farmers and hunters, used the land in similar ways as the natives, so fire stayed on the land. They put fire to use in “fire herding” to clear new land for agriculture, and to keep the forests clear. As the population of New England boomed in the 18th and 19th centuries, so did prescribed burns, and many contemporary observers wrote about widespread prescribed fires in New England even into the 19th century.
Then, as railroads and westward expansion depopulated much of the region, fire subsided. Forests regrew in its absence, and many of the old agricultural fields were replaced with hardwood “old-field” stands. Logging became a huge industry once these stands grew big enough to be harvested, and fire manifested very differently under logging than under agriculture and hunting. The slash left over after logging is superb fuel that dries out quickly, especially given there is no canopy to shade it. Wildfire gorged on the slash and New England was wracked by some of the largest fires in its history, such as the 1903 Adirondack fire that burned 600,000 acres. It’s this version of fire, not the version that existed under natives and early colonists, that modern America first responded to. These fires, along with even larger fires in the West like the “Big Blowup” of 1910, prompted environmentalists like George Perkins Marsh and Gifford Pinchot to conclude that fire was inherently destructive, and forced the Forest Service to institute its infamous total suppression policy.
The Forest Service’s suppression policy is often blamed for a lot of our problems with fire today, and the people who crafted it are painted as ignorant and dismissive of indigenous practices. This is certainly true, but they were also responding to a form of fire that was very different from the benign burns that came earlier. After living through multiple megafires, I know it can be hard to view fire as anything but a thing to be feared. In the early 20th century, that is all it was. This kind of fire had no place in humans’ use of the land, and so it was eradicated.
For most of the 20th century, it was absent, and it wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that researchers like Bill Patterson started to rediscover fire as an integral part of ecosystems.
These researchers, including Patterson, noticed that some species, like the Karner blue butterfly, rely on fire for survival and suffered precipitous declines in its absence. One of the first places in New England to reintroduce fire was created for the endangered Karner blue butterfly. It’s called the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, and it is one of the most successful of its kind. It lies surprisingly close to the New York capital, and conversations with burn boss Tyler Briggs gave me a clearer picture of modern prescribed fire practices here.
The Albany Pine Bush Preserve encompasses about three thousand acres of pine barrens, all maintained by fire. It is a mosaic of grasslands and pitch pine groves, with blue lupines dotting the grassy fields and little underbrush to obscure the pine groves. It was founded in 1988 to satisfy the Endangered Species Act, and today this rare ecosystem supports 20% of all endangered species in New York. Most pine barrens grow on deep deposits of rapidly draining sand, which can absorb huge amounts of rain but can’t hold onto it, meaning pine barren soil can dry out just a few days after a rain. Species like pitch pine excel in these conditions and happen to drop a lot of needles, which is superb tinder. In addition, as Patterson describes, “A lot of the species that grow with [pitch pine], like huckleberry and blueberry, produce one-hour fuels.” One-hour fuels are any organic material that can dry out within one hour, compared with ten-hour or thousand-hour fuels. So even in New York’s humid climate, where multi-week droughts are rare, Albany Pine Bush reliably becomes combustible after just a few days of warm, dry weather.
The Pine Bush initiative began in 1981 when the federal government, in response to increasing demand from locals, bought the land to become habitat for the endangered Karner blue butterfly. The barrens in the late 70s were overgrown and shaded out, with little lupinus perennis and few Karner blue butterflies, and the state government was desperate to transform it into healthier habitat. The only way to do that was fire. So fire was reintroduced.
Since then, managers of the barrens have adopted an annual burn plan. Under this regime, every acre is burned once every 3-5 years, a schedule that creates a patchwork of habitats in various stages of succession. Tyler Briggs, who currently heads the program, said that they try to burn 10% of the preserve every year, approximately 300 acres. The best time to burn is in the spring dormant season, after snowmelt but before leaf out, “when sunlight penetrates through the canopy and dries out the organic matter that’s on the ground.” In Albany, snowmelt generally occurs in mid-March. Mr. Briggs says, “our prime time, when we get most of our burning done, is between St. Patrick’s Day and Memorial Day.” After April and May, they may get a few low-acreage burn days, but they don’t count on it.
Modern New England doesn’t rely on the forest for food like the natives and early settlers. So why should we value fire? The answer is not yet clear, but so far fire has been a tool for ecology and preservation. Bill Patterson thinks, “the future is going to be related to the preservation of endangered species that can be shown to be dependent on fire.” This can be seen in the Albany Pine Bush, and when they’re prepping burn plans, the Karner blue butterfly is always the first concern. The butterfly needs lupinus perennis, which needs sunny fields, which are maintained by fire. The Endangered Species Act demanded the Albany Pine Bush create habitat for the butterfly, so fire was returned.
Patterson, who has struggled with burning in New England for decades, likens the Endangered Species Act to a “political mandate from heaven” that allows the Albany managers to fully implement fire. Fire wasn’t returned to Albany for economic reasons, like what motivated early colonists, or out of the safety concerns prevalent in Western states, but rather because a single butterfly species was dying out, and fire was the best tool to preserve it.
New England fire is as different from Western fire as night is from day. Its merits and drawbacks, promises and challenges, are fundamentally different. Western wildfires are enormous and dramatic; New England fires are small and hidden. In the West, scientists are scrambling to understand the impacts of fire, while in the Northeast it is often overlooked altogether. Learning about fire in New England gave me a new perspective on it from both an ecological and human standpoint, and its story in Northeastern states deserves to join the national conversation about fire.
