Flowers, forbs, fauna to follow fires

A week after an inch of rain finally put the brakes on the fast-spreading Bear Creek and Trail Creek fires on Flathead National Forest, broad swaths of the forest looked like a blighted moonscape — charred, limbless snags rising from the blackened ground that was pockmarked by stump holes where whole Douglas firs and ponderosa pines were reduced to ash.

Already there was evidence, however, that life still stirred under the surface. In many places, hardy grasses with deep root systems had begun emerging after the first soaking rain, dotting the barren landscape with tiny clusters of green.

Wildfires have been the big newsmakers this summer — reshaping landscapes, forcing evacuations, grabbing headlines and spurring political finger-pointing on both sides.

But in their wake, a different kind of transformation is already taking place in the forested mountains of Montana.

Many of the upper crowns of the standing trees still bore brown needles, periodically falling to the forest floor to become what resource officer Shannon Connolly described as “Montana mulch.”

Such a stand-replacement burn, where the fire grew intense enough to kill all the trees and most of what was in the soil, will take time to regenerate, but eventually will give way to open, grassy meadows — prime habitat for deer and elk along with other browsers and huckleberry-inclined bears.

Other areas saw less intense, mosaic-type burns that left alternating patches of black and green.

“This fire wasn’t so extensive that it’s going to change a lot of animals’ migration patterns,” Connolly explained, walking through a mosaic burn area in the still-active Trail Creek Fire perimeter. “That’s where these mosaics are really good, and if it was a monoculture stand, then you’re creating really good habitat.”

In a separate interview, Glacier National Park restoration ecologist Dawn LaFleur said she also saw encouraging signs shortly after the Reynolds Creek Fire had quieted down on the park’s east side in early August. Western Montana’s first major wildfire, it burned through close to 5,000 acres to the north and west of St. Mary Lake.

“We were walking two weeks after most of the fire activity, and we had plants already regenerating, the beargrass was coming up, different species of willows, raspberries, thimbleberries that were already coming back in the burn,” LaFleur said.

“There were also deer already pretty thick throughout the area. The elk will utilize that habitat quite a bit ... especially when you get that flush of vegetation in the spring.”

The park’s approach to wildfire management differs from that of the national forests, where stakeholders include loggers and hunters, both of whom have been displaced by the fires in the Spotted Bear Ranger District of Flathead National Forest.

“Fire is part of the natural cycle, and some of these areas haven’t burned in a long time,” Jeff Mow said after a fire briefing in West Glacier last month, the day after the Sheep Fire in the neighboring Flathead Forest forced the temporary evacuation of Essex.

Mow is the superintendent of Glacier National Park, where two of Montana’s larger wildfires have together burned more than 23,000 acres this year.

While suppression measures are employed to stop a fire’s advance toward structures or population centers, park managers typically let the natural processes unfold when fires are confined to more remote areas — such as the Thompson Fire that had covered 18,847 acres in the south-central Nyack drainage.

But officials stress that the park won’t be any less impressive.

Shortly after the Reynolds Creek Fire was under control in late July, resource officers on the firefighting team noted the view that had opened up in the area, exposing even more jagged, iconic peaks from the Sun Road’s east side and offering glimpses of waterfalls and other features that had lain hidden from view for decades.

The roughly eight miles of road contained in that burn area will also provide a portal into an ecosystem in its first stages of regrowth.

“Once you open that canopy up, in the understory you get a lot more grasses showing up,” LaFleur said. “We have some forb species that only show up after a fire. After the soil changes and the canopy grows in, they’ll die back.”

The aptly named fireweed will be one of the first forbs to return to the landscape, thickly blanketing the burn area in purple blooms. The fireweed’s seeds — having lain dormant in the soil — are stimulated by the passing fire, which melts the waxy coating and triggers the embryo inside to germinate.

“Come next summer and late summer, you’ll get a lot of the wildflowers showing up, and they’ll go to bloom and take advantage of that open canopy,” LaFleur said.

White spirea will be one of the first perennial shrubs to repopulate the burn areas. While whitetail deer and mule deer will graze on the flowering plant, it’s not considered an important food source for game animals. Yet in the next few years, it will emerge along with huckleberry, elk brush, snowberry, Rocky Mountain maple and other understory plants that provide some of the initial root systems needed to stabilize soils and minimize erosion.

LaFleur added that Bicknell’s geranium and rock harlequin will also help re-establish life on bare forest floors and have only been observed in the park after a fire has burned through the area. Willows and mountain ash will then start to establish a five- to six-foot canopy in the first several years, with the conifers more slowly filling in behind them.

Similar to fireweed, lodgepole pine is another fire-dependent tree species, requiring periodic wildfires for new seedlings to germinate.

Lodgepole seeds remain bound inside the cones by a thick resin until a fire burns it off, allowing the cone to open and finally release the seeds. LaFleur estimates those seeds can remain viable for decades after the cone falls from the parent tree.

Examples of regrowth can be seen in the North Fork in areas burned by the Red Bench Fire of 1988 and the Robert and Wedge Canyon fires of 2003.

Other conifers, such as ponderosa pine, larch and Douglas fir, have evolved characteristics to resist damage from wildfires. Many self-prune, shedding their lower branches to reduce the likelihood of ground fires climbing up into the crowns, and grow successive layers of thick, protective bark to help weather a fire as it passes through.

LaFleur added: “In the higher elevations, we have five-needle pines like whitebark pine, where their seedlings need to have no competition, so a fire will open the canopy up and if the seeds are available in the area, it makes it a much more amenable habitat for species like whitebark pine and spruce to get established.”

Glacier Park and other resource agencies in Northwest Montana will still have to contend with invasive weeds in the fires’ aftermath.

“The other side, which isn’t so positive, you have that open canopy, so it also opens up the area to invasive species,” LaFleur said. “After a fire, it’s usually in areas that we already had existing infestations of non-native plants.”

St. John’s wort can begin showing up as soon as a week after a fire passes through, followed by yellow toadflax, spotted knapweed and hawkweed. Fire teams try to minimize the introduction of those species through mandatory wash stations for all helicopters, engines and other equipment being brought in to the fire lines from elsewhere.

“We’ll go in and assess those areas where we know we had infestations before and look at trails and areas where we dug hand lines and any other areas,” LaFleur said. “We’ll be monitoring for the next three years and then treating them if any invasives show up.”

Connolly will also be on the lookout for that threat and added that reseeding will be prioritized in areas already known to have invasive plant problems, giving the native seedlings a head start when the spring thaw ushers in the next growing season.

Excavators already have been at work in the Spotted Bear district, scooping massive chunks of sod-like ground back into dozer lines and piling downed snags on top to mitigate runoff and downstream erosion.

“Falling snags into streambeds creates fish habitat and helps create some of those holes you’ll want to fish later,” Connolly said. “In that sod, there’s site-specific native vegetation, there’s a seed bank in that soil, there’s different types of microbes and root systems still intact.”

Rehabilitation work will continue in the coming weeks and months as the Burned Area Emergency Response team moves in.

In the Spotted Bear Ranger District, the specialized crew will be led by Craig Kendall, a Flathead Forest soils and hydrology expert, and will continue much of the ongoing work in the area, prioritizing human safety by removing hazard trees and rehabilitating trails and roads.

The team includes additional experts from a range of disciplines, including engineers, biologists, and arborists. Erosion control will be a major focus, and the team will analyze drainages for new flooding potential and identify priority areas for reseeding the land and planning long-term rehabilitation.

Adding to the challenges of forest rehabilitation, resource managers expect that climate change will play an increasing role in forest fire recovery. A warmer, drier climate could shift the way flora and fauna repopulate the landscape.

“Some of the research, particularly in the Eastern and Canadian sides, indicates that what comes back in may be more prairie-like and less forest-like,” Mow noted. “With the changing climate and seasons, some of the habitat will be more suitable to grassland species than forest species. It’s not clear that you’re going to get back some of the normal forest regeneration.”

LaFleur seconded the potential impacts from climate change.

“I would suspect that because of climate change, our forests will be slower to recover because there will be more drought stress, that it will be more amenable to more of a grassland habitat on the east side,” she said.

Still, Mow said the park won’t try to manipulate the landscape to purposely re-establish the ecosystem as it existed prior to the fire.

“We don’t have an end goal where in a hundred years, we want the forest to look like this, with these types of trees,” he said. “It’ll come back someday, but it might look a little bit different than it did before.”

Reporter Samuel Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.