Forest Service to spark first ever meadow burn

The Sisters Ranger District will burn 100 acres on Glaze Meadow adjacent to Black Butte Ranch this week, in the district's first-ever prescribed burn in a meadow. The fire will scorch the world's largest population of the wildflower Peck's penstemon - and forest biologists are thrilled.

According to district ecologist Maret Pajutee, the intentional torching of this historic grazing allotment will make history.

"Prescribed burns are usually associated with timber sales or fuels reduction in the forest," Pajutee explained. "We have not been funded to do this before, but ecologically this meadow needs it."

Burning for the purpose of ecology is not in itself a precedent. For years the Forest Service has been reintroducing controlled fires in forested habitats that once thrived on cycles of low-intensity fire. But burning the largest known population of a rare plant is another story.

"This is probably the largest Peck's penstemon population in the world," Pajutee said. "And it only occurs on 325 square miles of the planet."

Pajutee hopes the fire will reduce or eliminate nonnative grasses in the meadow, leaving room for the penstemon and other native species to "reassert their dominance."

"Fire has been used in the Midwest to restore prairie communities," she said. "Lots of native plants can handle fire, but the exotics can't."

Peck's penstemon has gained attention around Sisters before. The Sisters School District owns property in the Trout Creek flood plain which it is not allowed to develop because of the plant's presence, and a swath of land near the proposed Sisters sewer site south of Sisters will remain inside the National Forest to protect the species.

Peck's penstemon population in the mid-1990s generated estimates of up to 25,000 individual plants.

Further studies, however, have uncovered well over 50,000 individuals. According to Pajutee, all other populations of the wildflower number in the dozens or hundreds of single plants.

"It's unique (in Glaze Meadow) to have penstemon in different habitats, which we don't see in many other places," she explained. "It's all over the place there."

Pajutee noted that Peck's penstemon is classified as a "sensitive" species - a "rare endemic" wildflower that only exists in the Squaw Creek and Metolius Basins.

"If we don't protect it, it has the potential to be listed (as threatened or endangered)," she said.

Protecting Glaze Meadow means reintroducing natural disturbance such as fire to the ecosystem. The Forest Service recently closed a cattle grazing allotment on the site.

Over 100 years of cattle grazing on Glaze Meadow may have actually protected the health of this record Peck's penstemon population.

Grazing caused serious damage to the meadow's marshy habitat, but these cows also kept the area "mowed" - and the penstemon proliferated.

"Grazing helped reduce competition for the Peck's penstemon," explained Pajutee. "We knew if we (eliminated) grazing, we would have to reintroduce other disturbance like fire that naturally occurred here."

According to Pajutee, Glaze Meadow was one of the first settlement areas near Sisters, before the turn of the century. Tillman Glaze homesteaded the area as early as 1879.

After World War II, Glaze Meadow was purchased by Brooks Resources along with the land that would become Black Butte Ranch. The meadow was eventually traded to the Forest Service, which maintained a grazing allotment there until the 1990s.

Because of environmental concerns, monitoring costs and other factors, Pajutee said, the Glaze Meadow grazing allotment was officially closed in 1998, although grazing had not occurred on the land since 1993.

"This has been a big priority to get this place burned," said Pajutee. "It's really exciting - it's a great restoration project we've been hoping to do for years."