Arctic Science Journeys
Radio Script
1997

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Fire Season Ends
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STORY: Smoke jumper George Batalia says it wasn't the worst forest fire season he's ever seen, but the more than 600 fires that raged across the state were enough to keep him and hundreds of other firefighters on duty throughout the summer.

BATALIA: "I could tell you that it was one of the busiest seasons for us in about the last four or five years. It slowed down one week and just when you thought there was going to be no more fires, two or three days later the sun would come out and everything would dry out again and it'd pick up. All the vegetation around the state just below the surface was really dry, and so all it needed was some lightning and that's what we got this summer."

Lightning triggered most of the fires that scorched nearly two million acres across the state. Firefighters were kept busy on a few of the larger fires, such as the Inowak fire in Southwest Alaska that burned 573,000 acres and threatened the village of Red Devil. But unless fire threatens valuable timber or homes, they are left to burn themselves out. State wildlife biologist Dale Haggstrom says letting fires burn improves wildlife habitat.

HAGGSTROM: "One of the first things we started working on in the mid-70s was the fire management plans, trying to get them going, to get a change in policy because we saw that attempts to exclude fire from Interior Alaska were having negative effects on the forest and wildlife. Forests were becoming older and less diverse and wildlife were suffering because of that. Most of the wildlife in Alaska are adapted to this constant change and need a mixture of forest age types as well as different species."

Ed Murphy, a bird biologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, says the Rosie Creek fire that occurred near Fairbanks in 1983 helped seed-eating birds such as white-wing crossbills.

MURPHY: "Along the upper edges, the fire damaged and injured trees but didn't kill them immediately. The spruces had huge cone crops and white-wing crossbills and other seed-eating birds were extremely abundant for the one to two winters after the fire. Also in those same areas where the trees were damaged the bark beetles and wood boring beetles attacked the trees and were extremely abundant and because of that a couple of the woodpecker species, black-backed and three-toed woodpeckers, were extremely abundant. Some other species that are rarely seen in Interior Alaska, like brown creepers, were fairly common as well."

Biologists sometimes even start forest fires themselves to improve habitat. Dale Haggstrom says a 25,000-acre fire planned for the Tanana Flats near Fairbanks will help restore diversity to the popular hunting and recreational area.

HAGGSTROM: "We're trying to do a big prescribed fire on the Tanana Flats, because we've kept fire out of there for so long that we're really behind the eight-ball. But in that area you're really impressed with the patchiness, the mosaic of different types of forest--birch stands, sedge meadows, willows, spruce. But even though it's a patchwork, it's all the same age, it's all old. And you need to have the young stuff in there too. Animals like moose like the younger shoots, that's the ones that are down within reach that are palatable and very nutritious."

But where there are winners, there are losers. Rodents and other species that cannot escape the fire may die. But overall even these animal populations bounce back.

OUTRO: For Arctic Science Journeys, this is Debra Damron reporting from Fairbanks, Alaska.