Field Days Provide Hands-On Land Stewardship Experience
As smoke rises above a pine forest in Pulaski County, a version of an age-old natural process burns below. Crews with tractors and drip torches take center stage as a prescribed fire slowly envelopes the underbrush in a stand of longleaf pines on the property of Dr. Johnny Bembry. Onlookers take note with cameras or smartphones, documenting the dos and don’ts of managing a modern fire regime on their lands. Others, interested in the calls of birds, scan with binoculars the limbs of a nearby stand. This is the scene from one of the Georgia Conservancy’s Burning For Birds Field Days.
The vast majority, some 90%, of Georgia is in the hands of private ownership. To promote thoughtful, sustainable land and bird habitat stewardship, the Georgia Conservancy is engaging directly with land managers and owners through our Burning For Birds Field Day series. The Field Days provide landowners and the public with hands-on experience conducting surveys for target bird species and the chance to learn more about prescribed fire as a habitat management tool.
“We got the email that came out from Georgia Conservancy, which put everything together for us…and put these groups together today,” says Daniel Brown, a Houston County landowner who joined us at our Burning For Birds Field Day in Hawkinsville. “When we got here, we had all these different entities with the information that we could pull from. Today, we wanted to learn about how the habitat for quail interacts with the burning. It was very informative as far as what we learned.”
Fire has sustained pine ecosystems here since the emergence of the coastal plain, renewing the soil with nutrients, promoting the regeneration of seedlings, and thinning out competition from hardwoods. The longleaf pine ecosystem of middle and south Georgia would not and could not exist without fire, but as we’ve developed the landscape, fragmenting our remaining acres of forest, naturally occurring wildfires now pose a danger to the communities that we’ve built. Prescribed fire solves this by regularly reducing the vegetation that fuels uncontrolled wildfires. Additionally, prescribed fire allows us to meet the habitat needs of birds, both native and migratory.
“If you’re leaving leaves out throughout the winter, birds are foraging a ton down in that leaf litter, just like brown thrashers and other birds,” said Gabe Andrle of Birds Georgia to Burning For Birds participants. “Having that cover on the ground through portions of the winter or having a fire regime that includes areas that don’t get burned—so you’re not burning everything at once—creates a kind of mosaic of habitats. It’s really important for supporting a greater range of species.”
Burning for Birds Field Days feature a prescribed fire workshop. Here, you can learn how to safely conduct a prescribed burn and learn which financial and technical resources are available. The Field Days also include call-back surveys. These surveys let you sample for species of concern, such as Bachman’s sparrow, Northern Bobwhite quail, loggerhead shrike, brown-headed nuthatch, and Eastern towhee.
Thank you to NextEra Energy Resources and Georgia DNR Wildlife Viewing Grants Program for support of the Burning For Birds Field Days.
Partners for on-the-ground support of Burning For Birds Field Days include: Georgia Forestry Commission, Georgia DNR Private Lands Program, Quail Forever, Birds Georgia, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, NRCS, Tall Timbers, Savannah River Prescribed Burn Association, and Burning For Birds Conservation Collaborative.