re: Tree Canopy and controlled burns

Threw me off when you mentioned poplar trees in a BLH stand. That is why I thought you were talking about cottonwoods. The only yellow poplar’s I have seen in the delta were for ornamental purposes.

Guarantee our BLH would burn right now. It is bone dry. All of our land is flat but we do have lower swamps with more cypress, and slightly higher ridges that are more oak, hackberry, gum and honey locust.

I’ve been trying to do habitat improvement by just cutting every hackberry and gum tree I see to get sunlight hitting the ground.
Our shooting lanes are just filled with leaf litter, no growth. Forest is closed canopy, no understory growth, can see for 200 yards. Terrible wildlife habitat.

I’ve been wanting to do some prescribed fires for awhile now, but don’t have a handle on it. I need to talk to a forester to see what the regulations are and how wide fire breaks would be.

Have you noticed more deer activity since then?

We’ve had a few trees go down in storms but not a ton. I think this drought killed quite a few trees so that may help get some more sunlight on the floor.

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Guarantee our BLH would burn right now.

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I bet alot of them would burn right now...burn right to the ground... j/k

It's so dry everywhere, even with the rain we've been getting. I checked on one of my favorite duck sloughs, and it's still bone dry with 2-3" cracks.

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hackberry, gum

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Assuming you mean sweetgum, this is exactly why most of our BLH could not even carry a fire today, let alone benefit from it. Sweetgum is one of those mesophytic species that reduces the ability of a stand to carry a fire. We have so much of that in an near every BLH stand I see that the only way it would burn is to do some serious cutting and spraying first. I think it was Reb that brought that up earlier.

EF Hutton said “I know what stopped the St Tammany burns. Many years ago, smoke caused a big domino pile up on interstate 12.”

It was not a controlled burn that caused that pile up. It was large debris piles burn in very close proximity to the interstate. Debris piles are a huge difference from control burns.

I wasn’t there but my Dad worked it as a State Trooper and told me the story.

I own land with hardwoods and plantation pines and burn my pines every other year, which is the norm, or every 3rd year max. Basically creates food plots within pine timber stands.

LINK

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