An exciting day at work!

Today was definitely an exciting day where we work!  As part of a land management program, several fields at work are managed to foster the growth of warm season native grasses.  There's a lot of benefits of planting these types of fields in our area-increased drought tolerance, more native bird species (yay bobwhite quail!), higher populations of pollinators, and some evidence of higher nutrition fodder. 

What's more, these grasslands have traditionally been maintained by fire.  There's evidence that the whole Shenandoah Valley has been maintained as open grassland by fire for thousands of years.  So in a classic case of what's old is new again, controlled burns have become a major part of grassland management, and today they did a burn on a few fields at the SCBI!

Just getting started with the first of 5 fields

The second field starting to go.  They were very careful-firebreaks were dug between the separate fields weeks ago, they did one at a time, and the set the fires so that it had to burn into the wind rather than with it.

The final fire.  You can see how they set the lines to burn in towards the center so the firebreaks got larger as the fire burned.

You could hear the flames crackling across the valley.

Going full-bore!

And done.  Each field probably only took 10 minutes or so to burn (dry grass goes up very quickly).