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Hunting News Latest Hunting News Panhandle rebirth - Wildlife, landscape recovering after big fire
Hunting News Latest Hunting News Panhandle rebirth - Wildlife, landscape recovering after big fire | Panhandle rebirth - Wildlife, landscape recovering after big fire |
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| Written by Texas Parks and Wildlife | |
| Tuesday, 01 May 2007 | |
 Photos by Jeff Bonner According to the National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho, wildfires east of Amarillo burned 907,245 acres in late March 2006. Now, ranchers, wildlife biologists and university researchers look out on a changed landscape. The fires were tragic for many people. Rancher LH Webb has told the story of March 12, 2006 many times, how he tried to save his cattle and nearly lost his life. That Sunday morning, as the Webb family returned from church to their Seven Cross Ranch, the wind was gusting close to 50 miles per hour, the sky gone gray-brown with airborne prairie topsoil. At 3 p.m., neighbors called. The fire was coming. “My wife and I decided we’d load some things we didn’t want destroyed—the family Bible, the computer, photos,” Webb said. “I told my two little girls to get whatever was special to them, their favorite stuffed animals.” Webb sent his wife and girls to a safer place up the road. He and his son stayed “to see what we could do to save the place. I got the bright idea to go a mile south down a pasture road to open a couple of gates, try to let the cattle escape.” “When we got to the gates, the fire was there, a wall of flame,” Webb said. “It was either take the offense and go through it or wait to let it come toward us. I told my son to hold on and pray and we just drove through it. It was zero visibility, the cab filled with smoke. My diesel pickup stalled out three times and finally I phoned a friend, who came to get us. By that time, the fire had blown through and it was just blowing dust and smoke.” Webb said he still loves his way of life and the big sky prairie country, and he sees reason to hope for a better future. “It’s going to take a while for this land to recover, but there have been fires here for centuries before any human beings were on this land, and it’s always come back,” Webb said. “The fire was a very bad thing for ranching operations, fences, structures, people and livestock,” said Jeff Bonner, a wildlife biologist in Pampa. “But for wildlife and habitat, it will be good in the long run.”  Photos by Jeff Bonner “But with the moisture we’ve had in most of the area this past fall through the spring—we’ve have five inches just in March—this country’s really loaded and in the chute to jump out this year,” Bonner said. This spring, rolling prairie hills that looked like the Sahara Desert last March show lush green again. The grasses are coming back, and the yucca, and woody plants like wild plum. The hurt that may take longest to heal is the larger trees, especially big cottonwoods along creeks and rivers that provide important roosting habitat for turkeys. “The big cottonwood trees were probably the biggest loss,” Bonner said. “It’s hard to replace a 100 year- old cottonwood, not just in terms of wildlife habitat, but in terms of beauty and aesthetics.” Ground-nesting birds like quail and lesser prairie chickens also took a hit. “The sheer scale and size of the fire and having a hard time finding a place to build a nest afterward hurt lesser prairie chickens,” Bonner said. “This wasn’t a patchy fire that burned some places and skipped others—birds would have to fly miles outside the burn area to find anywhere to nest. Follow that up with a drought, and you have little or no insects for them to eat.” Larger, more mobile animals like white-tailed deer and pronghorn antelope appeared to have fared better. “We run a 15-mile Gray County spotlight route where we census deer every year, and the entire area had burned along that route,” Bonner said. “One year after the fire, we saw about the same number of deer.” “Pronghorn are real mobile, they have huge home ranges, and are notorious for moving where the groceries are. The best place to find green is in the burn area a year later. All you’re seeing there is they moved where the food sources are.” |
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 02 May 2007 ) |
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