Hey fellas some of you I'm sure have had a fire go thru your lines so I'm wondering what effect did it have on fur bearing animals and big game?

Reason I'm asking is a fire just jumped the alberta/ bc border onto our line. I'm thinking it won't burn the whole line but it will surely do some damage. There's a bigger fire maybe 25 miles away that is moving east to our line. What is you experience with wildlife and forest fires?

The new growth will be great for big game, similar to a clear cut. Nonaboreal furbearersshould do well too.

Keith

Why isn't the left screaming aboot Canada's massive release of greenhouse gases,?
America's Hat is killing the planet!!!

They are, it’s caused by climate change and white privilege.

Because it shows how quick nature can undo what those nut cases thought they were doing buying electric vehicles.

i wonder if all the smoke in the air , will cool the planted

We pay carbon tax so we're all good or so the leftards say.

Will the smoke push the marten out? Do they go upwind, down wind or cross wind.?

Being from the south. And Coyote trapping here foe 35 years. I have been around = Controlled Burns = all my life. I have seen turkeys eating dead bugs. While the forest where still smoking. Animal leave. Then come right back

All the new growth is a magnet for animals that forage. Animals that forage are a magnet for animals that hunt.

Asked a game warden once about a dead deer just off the road in a recently burned area. The land was mostly peat and would burn several feet deep in veins. Very hard to extinguish. The warden said the deer returned to their home range before the soil was uniformly cool. The hot spots blistered the deer's feet under its hooves causing the deer to die of infection.

My experience has been that a lot of furbearers increase after a fire. Especially those that depend on mice and voles and such. The major negative for me has been the problem of clearing tipped over trees that fell over my trails.

Pete

I agree with Pete about the trail work a fire creates. It took my line several years to recover from a fire. When it did though the marten returned in decent numbers. The grass comes first where it was previously tundra and that brings voles. The fire that took some of my line was a fast fire so lots still standing but some tipped. Of course the traps were ruined from the heat!

Secondary fires, that happen in the decade following the initial fire, can be pretty bad, sometimes worse than the original low-intensity fires in old-stand boreal forests at the peak of their natural fire/regen cycle (~200 years). All the dead trees burning creates a lot of heat can cause crown fires even where forests are not naturally very prone to them (.e.g. floodplain forests with spruce/fir). Such fires also destroy the organic layer of the soil and root systems of trees that rely on root regeneration, such as aspen, slowing down overall forest regeneration.

In montane areas of Eastern Siberia/Yakutia, secondary fires, which have become common in the past two decades, combined with very hot dry summers, are creating a new problem: the forest simply fails to regenerate between the fires, causing deforestation of mountain slopes and consequent erosion, so there's nothing left but rocks and a few shrubs. Naturally, everything leaves the affected area for good (voles, sable, moose, ....).

People here take care to clear as much dead wood around their cabins as possible, and (where possible) create what's called "mineralized strips" here, i.e. plowed strips 3-4 feet wide with all combustible debris cleared out. Hunting/trapping cabins here are traditionally built with tar sheet roofs but people have been trying to replace them with sheet metal roofs, because more cabins survive fires this way.

Pay attention to where all that smoke is going.
It will be the same with nuclear fallout after the big one.

Native Americans annually burned large chunks of pretty much every state. Many reasons for this, one was the fresh growth after a fire attracted game. Burned areas green up much faster in the spring than unburnt areas.

I burn my grasslands and woods regularly. I am the only one around that does that. If the animals didn't like the burnt areas they have no issue staying away. Quite the opposite happens. Early spring the fields green up much faster than all my neighbors and the deer are in the burnt areas nibbling on green shoots.

Forest fires will ruin a trapline here for a generation.Even longer if there are many fires or very large fires.

There is a BIG difference in the aftermath of a wild fire and a controlled burn....

Take note of Tatiana's post
your foothill trapline is a spitting image to ones she is talking of.
Marten will go aboreal during a fire into their holes in the ground.
It will take 20-30 years for the re-growth to support the rabbit population 8=10,000 stems / acre
if it was a ground fire then you are s-o-l because the microtone population can not be supported= 90 % food for marten year round

Your lakes will have massive algae blooms for 5 years and winter kill of fish after that because of all the nutrition release.

Good grief!^^^^^

I'm glad Southeastern US pine forests are fire resistant and actually are fire dependent. Only a raging wildfire in our pine forests (areas that have NOT been burned in several years) are harsh.....and even after those these pineywoods recover rather quickly.

Hunted Ontario years back the amount of down trees was amazing not char damaged just root damaged. The pines in the Black Hills burn for a long time the areas are closed for a year or more to traffic for fear of falling trees. Yes some burns are very slow to recover because of the intense heat.

A big fire can really hurt animal populations if they are spring time ones.
Nesting birds/birthing mammals.

Worst country to pack out moose quarters is in a 10-15 year old burn.

The Gatlinburg fire was an example of what happens when our forests do not burn regularly.

Oh and an interesting factoid.

Our native longleaf forests are long lived climax forests living four to five hundred years for the individual tree yet they would burn every two to five years.

I was talking about fires in typical "marten bush"-type boreal mixed forests (this is what we call "taiga" here), which are similar across the globe and are made up of mixture of several conifer species, such as spruce, fir, five- and two-needle pines, tamarack, and deciduous trees such as aspen and birch, with the bottom layer composed of several species of feather and string moss and dwarf shrubs (mostly of the heaths family). Such forests gradually accumulate a thick layer of slowly decomposing organic matter, up to a few feet deep, which contains most of the trees' root systems, so a fire will kill most trees if the litter is completely dry. Fires in such forests are high-impact and it takes up to 250 years for the climax community to reestablish. The limiting factor has always been the nature of these fires - since they usually occur in the end of a dry spell, when enough humidity accumulates in the air, the dry thunderstorms that spark them usually turn into good rains within a week or two, so only a limited patch burns out. Our taiga is a patchwork of such burnt areas of different age.

It IS different in some types of boreal forests.

The Scots pine (a two-needle pine), which is one of the key tree species of the boreal zone of the Northern Hemisphere, and the #1 source of construction lumber, has a root system and bark adapted to low-intensity fires. It prefers poor, well-drained sandy soils where many other trees fail to establish, but eventually appear as undergrowth, and regular fires kill off all deciduous undergrowth as well as other conifers, including five-needle pines which have flat, superficial root systems. The Scots Pine benefits from such fires because they create well-spaced, "park-type" mature forests with just a thin layer of lichens or moss over the mineral layer, and kill off deciduous trees and spruce that create shade, which in turns raises the humidity of the soil and the number of pathogenic fungi dangerous to pines, such as Heterobasidion rot. Most importantly, fires mineralize all organic matter in pine forests, allowing all excessive nitrogen to wash out and limiting the competition from nitrogen-loving plants that need organics. Being much drier, such forests burn more often and benefit from fires every few decades. There is actually a big controlled fire program in Sweden, aimed at reestablishing such forests where there are now mixed forests. But even with all the efforts, such stable fire-resistant forests are declining. Here is an example of what a really good fire-resistant pine forest looks like, just a couple of years after a fire.






Low-intensity fires are also relatively easy to stop in these good pine forests. Oftentimes a furrow made by a tractor or manually is enough. Spray packs work well, too.
With good mature taiga forests, only rain helps. In my experience, there is very little use in the work of firefighting teams when it comes to taiga fires far away from the road network, and Be-200 flying boats are mostly used to protect critical infrastructure locally (when they are available, and they're usually elsewhere, protecting certain people's villas in the Mediterranean). This is us watching our second camp burn down, after several days of trying to stop the fire. We spent another week sitting in the middle of a mire, waiting for the helicopter to pick us up





However, here, even Scots pine forests have been suffering lately from overly frequent fires, both natural and caused by humans, combined with irrational logging regulations. For instance, a few years ago you could buy a hectare of freshly burnt pine forest (and probably still can, I haven't checked), with plenty of trees that would eventually recover, for the price of an ice cream, something like $1, so naturally, no one would let such forests recover naturally, leading to catastrophic losses of old-stand pine forests all over Siberia. Ironically, most of it was exported to China and probably ended up in the U.S., because you guys are key importers of processed lumber from China. Because of this, in some areas, especially adjacent to China (Irkutsk region, Buryatia etc.) arson is common. There may be a lot of money in the whole firefighting thing, but there is WAY more money in logging, especially now that our country, which is a key exporter of timber, has been trying to limit exports of unprocessed timber. So those with a fondness for conspiracy theories might want to look into how the timber market has been changing in the past few years.

Larch/tamarack forests are also quite fire-resistant but excessive burns kill them off, too, and larch takes much longer to regenerate, so these forests are even more vulnerable to the erosion issue that I mentioned. Nevertheless, freshly burnt (up to 15 years) larch forest in Eastern Siberia is prime sable habitat.

We also have fire-resistant birch forests here in Southern Siberia, with peculiar herbaceous communities, but they are more of a curiosity.

Remember that Alberta sold off it's government Fire Fighting Services to private, lock stock and barrel and a year later had the worst season going and paid 10X the going rate for planes . choppers, man power. Manitoba sent their water bombers and came home with a 10 million dollar surplus. Surprised it did not come up much in this last election, Except the fact that they could not find any personnel to help fight. Manitoba conservatives did the same sell off of all their equipment so we are going to take it bad when the time comes,

on another note; one of our hunting partners has a chopper service and when they finished filming the movie "Chicago Rose" they flew the chopper right up and was pressed into service during a bad season we had here, they found out how good it was to get a crew and gear in with one trip, much like Tatiana UN chopper. Three weeks into he had paid the chopper of.
The use IR and cross check all the lightning strikes for two days

Thanks all. I've been busy as a one legged man at a (This word is unacceptable on Trapperman) kicking competition. Helping neighbors wetting down their hay and straw bales. Setting up sprinklers around my farm and cabin. Then got 3 dozers mobilized from the outfit I work for. Heading out on one of those dozers today. All out air assets are stretched very thin and none available at this time.

As Tatiana has said my bush is much the same as was described. Aspen,alder,spruce, pine, willow and Tamarack. With a mix of muskeg, peat loamy soil as well as grassland type of soil. They way the smoke is going straight up I suspect is a sign of a hot fire. Rain in the forecast thankfully but before that we've got a 30 deg C day or 2. We've been fortunate that the wind is blowing the fire away from our line but that'll change.

Thanks again for your insight and experience

Stay safe on that fire line

Thanks jingles. Cut 2 miles of fire line today with 7 D6's. I struck out with my guys (3 d6) heading to the border to clear line so crews and heggelund can get in. I've got 20 years on a dozer but never forest fire work. It's been a long time since we could crash and stack trees. Anything over 6" goes to the mill these days but it felt good to be out there tipping over some of those big trees. Wind changes tomorrow and won't be in my favour but we're doing our best. Some aircraft would help. Hand fallers came and cleaned up the standing fuel around the cabin.

The plus side is there's some easier access to the line but the down fall is there's easier access to the line.

Take care.

I've seen coyotes move back in to fires as soon as they quit burning. Lots of dead mice and stuff.

With sniffy and his crew wanting us to go to electric cars to control global warming, why don't he call trustdo and tell him to stop all the fires so we don't get global warming

Was perfect comditions for fires to become beast with that last weather.
When you see lightning in the smoke cloud you know you have a beast growing.
It is those 60,000 foot clouds that are putting the smoke into the jet stream to have fall down 1/2 the world away
One of your Alberta fires grew from 5 ha to 50,000 ha in 36 hours , hope that is not the one effecting you.

NWalta does your fire have a code name we can look up and follow ?

on a return of marten experience; two of the areas I trap had fires 35 years before and it took 30 years for them to return in a aspen /parkland setting and a jack pine ridge habitat

I hope everyone stays safe, one thing guys from down south have to remember is the short growing season up there so the forests don’t have the amount of time to regrow there in a year that they do in the southern USA.

Its not about regrowing down here. Historically and even to this day crown fires just are not a thing here. Our fire regimen is ground fires sweeping through every few years knocking back hardwood growth and favoring fire adapted pines, longleaf and shortleaf. The big stand replacement events for us are hurricanes and to a lesser degree tornadoes.

I'm unsure of code# but on the bc fire app it is the peavine creek fire. Today it was fairly subdued. I don't know how many of miles of line we cut today but we went up the border then crossed into bc. We skirted some spot fires and headed back south cutting line. We will end up at beaverlodge lake tomorrow late morning early or early afternoon. I'll try to send a link. This is a relatively small fire compared to some of them that are burning. Because our provincial wildfire guys are tapped the county of grande prairie is running the show and I must say that I'm very impressed with the organization and way things are being done. Guys working hard on the dozers gettin 'er done. It is a bad time when crashing trees all the fluff from the poplar trees and willows plugging up the rads.

I'm not so good with the googler or confuser so I hope this works.
https://www.bcfiremap.com/

The fire is in the purple area straight west of Grande Prairie there's a fire symbol in that mess lol that give info on fire.

Was able to get to the Alberta fire pages and view that fire size.
May Mother Nature give you a bath is in the best interest
Good luck on the line....I did see some jumpers from Boise Idaho are up there helping

only been in that area once when you had a Alberta Trappers convention up there, most people travelling the Alaska Highway pass through that area
Best of luck on the line

Thanks N of 50. Think they had the rendezvous in teepee creek. Yes the tourist drive right thru our little town. Not much to see in ol luggage stop alberta but I like it. Forecast has changed to thunderstorms. Not good. Bc forest service was planning a back burn today but conditions changed and they gonna plan for tomorrow morning. Hope it doesn't turn into a snafu. Got half a day with the cats then we'll get a rest maybe. Lol. Some low life's broke into the other cat crews trucks while they were working on the line. A winch cable around the neck and drug down the line would be a problem solved.

Just a update on the fire. The evacuation alert has been canceled for my area due to a steady amount of precipitation. The north and south cat guards are completed. Both crews averaged about a mile a day. The one crew had 4 D6T dozers and built their guard 4-5 dozers wide. My crew had 2 D6T' and a D6N. We built ours 2-3 dozers wide with a couple 100'x100' helo pads. That's not bad for both crews considering we both got pulled off the line multiple times due to the fire getting real aggressive and plans for a back burn. The travel to our staging area took min 1hr each way to get to our staging area and back out to the line. Some times this would happen twice in a day.

Yesterday was a exciting day. The Bc crews bunch the wood,,strip and then put the bunched woodon top of the strippings. It was a near disaster when their row on bunched wood caught on fire and burnt down the line like someone left a trail of gas and then sparked it up. All is good and they managed to get it under control but it was iffy at the time.

Anyone driving past should really stop into Trapper Gords treading post off the Alaska highway.

Hopefully thing settle down with those fires.
The weather system is putting all the smoke in a back curl over us to the Ontario boarder much like the east coast got last week

Correct

And the paradox is that controlled burns prevent wildfires.