Friday, October 30, 2015

A Fall Walk in the Tallgrass Savanna


A slender footpath threads its way through an Illinois wilderness. As the growing season ends – we relish memories of a rich growing season – and think about what comes next.

Scarlet oaks stand out, and the bur oaks among them are nearly invisible. There's a reason for that.


In the foreground, a young bur oak's craggy limbs are already leafless. Bur oak foliage is the first to fall. Why? Perhaps because burs are the most fire-adapted of our trees. Fallen leaves are their weapons.
Thick-barked bur oaks live on the edge of woodland and savanna – nearest the fire-prone prairie. Burs can’t survive in the shade of any other tree. All other species can outcompete it in the shade - except for its weapon of fire. Through raging fire, bur oaks clear the competition – young invading trees that would shade out and replace them. The sooner the leaves fall, the more chance their crisp, stored fire energy can burn the sap out of their competition. 

Indian hemp grows among the oaks.
The Potawatomi didn't smoke it. They used the fibers to make string and rope for their needs.
We who love the savanna are learning to re-inhabit and care for an ecosystem that has had people as a native part as long as it's been here. 

Not only trees, grasses, and wildflowers - shrubs characterize some savannas.
This one is arrow-wood viburnum. Deer eat shrubs. Arrows kill deer. People maintained the savanna in part because it was so rich in the food, medicine, and other materials that they needed. Our society today needs it for genes to benefit medicine and science, for ecosystem services, for generosity, and because its richness and beauty make our souls happy.



In prairies, New England aster is seen as kind of a weakling, typical of young restorations, 
dropping out as the community stabilizes. But savannas have trees growing larger and dying. They never get all that stable. This aster fits well here.


Another non-stabilizer, is this shrub is a hazelnut. As with bur oak, its leaves fall early
and burn hot. But without bur's armored stem, the above-ground parts of the hazel burn off too. After every fire, its hearty roots send up new stems, and it starts over.
Plants adapted to disturbance, like New England aster (you can see its leaves below the hazel, above) find their niche for a year or two, until the shrub grows back. 
The fringed gentian is a much rarer and more conservative plant than New England aster.
But it too seems to appreciate disturbance.
Here the gentians are just a couple of blue dots in the background behind a partly-burned-off nannyberry shrub.
Probably the grasses, sedges, and flowers here have many adaptations to their dynamic fire-pruned shrub neighbors.   
Briars are beautiful, delicious, and under-appreciated members of the shrub club.
This one is black raspberry, identifiable by its powder-blue canes. 
Many species of roses are also support shrubland wildlife. Tangles full of roses are especially appreciated by birds for sequestering their nests. This one, with most leaves in fives, is swamp rose. 
And here, most leaves in threes, is Illinois rose, one of the biggest, sometimes climbing ten or fifteen feet up through the shrubs and saplings. Its hips (fruits full of seed) are eagerly sought by Shrub Club restoration teams (for planting) and of course by animals (that eat them). 

But in the savanna, the oak dynamic is key. Here a lone bur oak (no leaves, center) - with its thick, corky bark - can be expected to outlast and replace the scarlet or Hill's oaks that surround it.
Scarlet oak, like hazel, has thin bark and under a natural fire regime it's mostly a shrubby "re-sprout tree."

In many areas of Somme Prairie Grove, most of the trees are the "upstart" scarlet oaks.
They invade former pastures quicker than burs because their small acorns are spread far and wide by blue jays. Most survive our relatively-mild controlled burns for many years, but bit by bit they seem to be replaced by burs. Squirrels rarely venture out here, so the stewards are the ones spreading the fat bur oak acorns. 

Gradually some savannas become bur oak groves, very resistant to fire.
But oaks may live three or four hundred years. Some here predate the coming of the Europeans. They are our elders.

Vestal Grove's biggest oak is this giant, now with a fire-scarred hollow trunk.
We wonder if we should rake around this one before fires, to keep it from burning up.
Sometimes we do. Sometimes we don't. So far it survives. We're not sure what's best. 

This grand old wreck of a tree stands by itself, limbs resting on the ground. Fire would most likely have burned them off in the natural landscape.  

Nearby lichens, mosses, fungi, and animals are gradually turning the trunk of a fallen old giant back to soil and air. 

We remember when it fell. It was precious to us as a tree, and now it's precious as a log. We're glad it finally had a chance to reproduce, and we rejoice in its many saplings nearby. These organisms are our friends. As we learn and understand more and more about them, large and small, we enjoy being better neighbors. It's a good feeling to walk through all this thriving natural richness, season after season.   




6 comments:

James McGee said...

I think the key to the burr oak's ability to survive fire is just as much in the buds as it is in the bark. The lower limbs of your red oaks have been pruned by fire that would not harm a burr oak. What allows the buds of plants like burr oak and lead plant to survive heat that will kill other species?

Also, I think the Viburnum pictured is the invasive Viburnum recognitum. Our native Viburnum rafinesqueanum has shorter petioles.

Valeria said...

Lovely site and project! Our California Oaks do not want to be raked underneath as the acorns that make it to sprouting need the duff of the leaf matter... one problem we have is that the feral boars eat all the acorns..

Interesting to hear about the role of the shrubs that transition from the Savannah, we have biomes that are Chaparrals but they also get short shrift in land management especially by the BLM and 'restoration' projects will alter the sucession pattern of burn areas by planting forest( usually timber..Douglas Fir) and not allow the burn area to naturally be a meadow, then chaparral then woodland...

Do you have word for the shrublands?

Stephen Packard said...

Valeria, thanks for interesting comments.

The varieties and classifications of our fire-dependent woody communities are unsettled.

One of our major classifications includes the category "shrub prairies." But we have few to no quality examples to learn from.
Early observers (the 1800s for us) called some areas "oak openings." These were mostly what we would now call savannas - with widely spaced mature oaks and few shrubs.

Another community term was "barrens." These were said to be named by people comparing them to the pine and oak sand barrens of New Jersey and elsewhere along the Atlantic coast. Some were shrubby and many had small oak shrubs regularly pruned back by fire. Sometimes, one person's "oak openings" was another person's "barrens."

It seems likely to some people that shrubby savannas and shrub-less savannas were just phases that depended on weather and fire frequency. They seemed "shrubless" when the fires kept the shrubs down so they functioned as herbs.

Many people now use the word "scrubland" to describe what's essentially a Midwestern chaparral. But that community is little understood because no "original" examples survive, and no restoration efforts are all that far along.

Stephen Packard said...

James, you may be right about the scientific name of the "arrow wood" viburnum. I haven't studied them. Swink and Wilhelm seemed to have pardoned me from that labor when they wrote about Viburnum recognitum: "This plant gets its name from the Latin "recognitus", which means restudied; this from a preserved reevaluation of the Viburnum dentatum complex; perhaps Fernando should have left well enough alone." In other words, the keys don't altogether work on this group, in part because the wild plants are likely interbreeding with horticultural shrubs planted in people's yards. In any case, we may or may not find that they behave like natural shrubs in nature. If they turn malignant like buckthorn, we start cutting them out, whatever their names are. But so far, they seem "to play well with others" at Somme.

James McGee said...

Yes, the Viburnums are confusing because I think people did not start to differentiate them well enough initially. The only reason I know the difference is because experts told Pete Jackson and Pete told me. If you look at a specimen of Viburnum rafinesqueanum you will see it is quite distinct from your specimen. I have not seen evidence of interbreeding in my area. At one time I had thought I had seen intermediates, but I now think I was just confused by the variability in the petiole length of V. recognitum. I think waiting to see if they "...'play well with others' at Somme" is a mistake. Viburnum recognitum has taken over rare prairie remnants with state listed species and oak woodlands at Deer Grove. It is controlled along with common buckthorn, glossy buckthorn, winged burning bush, barberry, and other bird dispersed invasives at Deer Grove.

Stephen Packard said...

Valeria,

Someone pointed out to me that the evil genie of autocorrect sabotaged one of my comments to you. Double checking, I found yet another typo.

The computer has changed my efforts to write "shrubland" to "scrubland" hundreds of times, and I've changed it back, but I missed one. In my response to you, with both corrected, the sentence should have read:

"Many people now use the word "shrubland" to describe what's essentially a Midwestern chaparral. But that community is little understood because no "original" examples survive, and no restoration efforts are not all that far along."

(Sadly, I don't know how to correct the original comment.)