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Birds in the black: Through following avian wildlife, a UM scientist has discovered that burned forests play a critical role in

Date
August 10, 2005
Contact
Michael Jamison The Missoulian
In This Release
Wildlife  
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Birds in the black: Through following avian wildlife, a UM scientist has discovered that burned forests play a critical role in

What I wanted to know,” Hutto said, “was what in the world is a burned forest worth? Is there any value at all in all that destruction?
Contact: Michael Jamison The Missoulian

West Glacier – Back in the summer of 1988, when research scientist Richard Hutto started asking questions about the possible benefits of wildfires, the time wasn’t exactly ripe for a reasoned discussion.

Yellowstone National Park was going up in smoke, national forests looked like war zones, and the public was clamoring for more wildland firefighters, more firefighting dollars and more protection from blazes. Headlines nationwide screamed out adjectives such as “torched,” “blackened” and “destroyed.”

“What I wanted to know,” Hutto said, “was what in the world is a burned forest worth? Is there any value at all in all that destruction?”

With support from the National Geographic Society, Hutto set off on his search for answers, a search that would follow the unlikely path of the black-backed woodpecker. After visiting some three dozen sites burned in 1988, “one of the most interesting things that popped up right away was the fact that there was a whole lot of life out there,” he said. “It wasn’t the biological desert we were told it would be.”

Hutto, like most of America, “was raised to believe all fires are bad.”

The problem, he said, is that science and society never made the distinction between a fire that claims lives and property and a fire that burns across the West’s wild landscapes.

“We use the same language for both,” he said, and generally it’s the language of the negative – fire as foe, not friend.

But it didn’t take long for Hutto to find 100 separate species booming the year after the burn. Surprisingly, many of those were found only in severely burned forests – the blacker the better.

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Yellowstone National Park was going up in smoke, national forests looked like war zones, and the public was clamoring for more wildland firefighters, more firefighting dollars and more protection from blazes. Headlines nationwide screamed out adjectives such as "torched," "blackened" and "destroyed."