Tips & Tactics: Prescribed Burning

Let's talk a little bit about prescribed burning. We'll go into a little more detail on prescribed burning and at least where we're concerned, we're prescribed burning a lot for timber management. But you know, especially smaller landowners and local landowners are not just interested in timber management, they're interested in other things. Mostly it's wildlife. Whether it be quail hunting or turkey hunting or deer or combination of the two. It's important not to just burn the whole farm or the whole all your timber stands at one time. If you really want to lean toward quail or turkey management, you want to break it up. You want to do what you've heard before as the block burns or the pattern burn, the patch burnings, quail. This is very general to you folks who know a lot about quail management. I'm not going to try to go into that because I'm not an expert. But basically, so far as your quail are concerned, you do need to do smaller patch burns. Maybe the largest areas, 20, 30 acres and somewhere very close by, you need some that's unburned and probably stay on a biannual basis. You need to be burning something for the quail every year, but they also need a place to hide to rear their young. On the years that you've burned, that quail's got to have a place to hide. So he needs somewhere close by that was burned the previous year that you're not going to burn this year. That's real important. So annual burns for quail is good, but patch burning is, I think, extremely important to the proper management of quail habitat. And so your property needs to be more on a annual to biannual basis. In doing those patch burns, quail a little bit along, I mean, excuse me, turkeys a little bit on the same lines, but you need some three year rotation burns in there as well, simply because of the soft mass, something like rubus or BlackBerry. If you've got that on your site and you're on a three year, then you are producing blackberries. The turkeys really like that, any kind of soft mass, and that's important. They also need nesting cover. So if you're burning every year, for example, then you probably don't have the ideal turkey habitat. Where you may have the ideal quail habitat, you don't have the ideal turkey habitat. So, you know, a consulting forester can take your property and amount and divide it up and come up with a plan that maybe covers a little bit of everything on the burn and you'll never have it ideal for quail. You might not ever have it ideal for turkey or ideal for deer, but you can hit a happy medium in there and divide these burns into blocks, depending on what your goals are, and divide those stands into blocks and do some patch burning. But I see a lot of landowners burning their whole entire timber stands every year or all at one time, maybe every other year, but all at one time. And I think that landowners should consider breaking those stands up and thinking about the needs of the wildlife and what they need. They need, they need. Both quail and turkey need brood rearing habitat, which is a little cover. And, you know, they need some soft mast areas where they're, you know, they can get some soft masts in the summer and the late spring as food, as a food source. Your annual burns are going to produce, you know, some seed from a variety of different native species for your quail and your turkey, mostly quail. And so, you know, I think a forester consultant can really help you do that. And breaking up those burns is real important.