Chaparral around the Southland is waking ahead of time. And that means fire season begins ahead of time.

The premature drone of a helicopter dropping water on an El Sereno grass fire echoes the unseasonal whir of the hummingbird that rips by Greg Greenhoe’s head in a quiet canyon some 15 miles away.

The acting fire management officer for the Angeles National Forest is hiking onto a brushy slope in Santa Anita Canyon above Glendora, pointing at some buckwheat.

A common chaparral plant, the buckwheat now sports brittle white flowers flecked with a rusty hue that generally doesn’t tint the blooms until summer.

“It’s already starting to red out,” Greenhoe says, brushing back strands of hair harassed by the sort of out-of-sync Santa Ana wind that has helped accelerate the plant’s growth cycle. “That’s very unusual.”

Many chaparral species are “flowering out” early this year, he says. When that happens, the plant’s moisture content has peaked. Soon the flowers drop from the stems and the plants “start shutting down for summer” and providing an increasingly drier, more flammable fuel.

And in Southern California, the seasonal cycles of wilderness and civilization are interlinked.

When the chaparral community awakes ahead of schedule, a massive human apparatus must struggle out of hibernation ahead of schedule too. Because, for instance, the tiny flowers of the Ceonothus plant poked their delicate buds out early this year, sparks are blossoming into flames on hillsides earlier than normal.

So U.S. Forest Service and California Division of Forestry crews are sweeping out barracks and exercising off winter flab ahead of schedule; Los Angeles County and City fire departments and other local fire agencies are rethinking their deployment of firefighting personnel and equipment; and all the agencies are imposing brush clearance regulations sooner.

It’s a complex rite of spring, conveniently color-coded by nature and technology.

If, for example, a camera were to focus on the yellow grass stem in Greenhoe’s fingers and then pull back, back, back to satellite altitude, it would be looking at Southern California from a perspective that has people like Greenhoe anxious: the perspective of the Forest Service’s daily fire danger map. Distributed to fire agencies on the Internet, the map reflects information gathered from 2 p.m. reports taken at 1,000 weather stations nationwide, then crunched by researchers at the Intermountain Fire Sciences Lab in Missoula, Mont.

With May looming, the map shows most of the United States colored, as usual for this time, in lime or kelly green.

But if Greenhoe were a microscopic speck on the map, he’d be standing in a splotch of orange, with a flicker of red, surrounded by yellow--the hues nature gives flames and wild-land specialists use to signify high to extreme fire danger.

Other agencies, including the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, have also looked at esoteric drought indexes and snow pack assessments, concluding that parts of the West are rushing into fire season.

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So far, Southern California’s chaparral is behaving as the scientific scrutinizers have predicted.

For instance, as Greenhoe tromped through the dry grass last Friday, Forest Service engine crews were out mopping up a small blaze in Little Tujunga Canyon. It was the 52nd fire in the Angeles National Forest this year. Normally there would have been 15 to 20, he says.

So the Forest Service, which had planned to have the Angeles, San Bernardino and Cleveland national forests’ hot shot crews, engines, helicopters, bulldozers and air tankers all geared up on June 8, will instead begin its fire season on Thursday, with full staffing by May 11.

Likewise, as of April 25, the Los Angeles County Fire Department had responded to 24 brush and 124 grass fires in April--far more than usual, says Capt. Steve Valenzuela. That agency, along with the Los Angeles City Fire Department and the California Division of Forestry, have already declared the official beginning of Southern California’s fire season.

So far, the grass and brush fires “aren’t burning with tremendous ferocity,” Greenhoe says.

But unless rainstorms sweep in to quench the chaparral’s thirst, the grass and brush will reach explosive dryness well ahead of the autumn and winter rains that naturally reboot the cycles of plant growth and fire danger.

“If we continue on the same path that we are now,” says L.A. city’s “brush guru,” Battalion Chief Rod Wilmot, “I’d say that sometime in August we’ll reach the critical level. In fact, it could be as early as the end of July.

“In my humble opinion, the fires could be more severe and start easier because of the drier fuels.”

In contrast, the neighborhoods laced into the brushland are lush and well watered. But as Greenhoe cuts across the foothills in his Forest Service truck, he points out that the landscape can be illusory.

To those astute in the ways of wildfire, much of the vegetation--palm trees, junipers, eucalyptus--look not so much like civilizing ornamentation as big wicks.

Greenhoe has seen those wicks introduce a rampaging brush fire into the best of hillside neighborhoods.

Which can start another familiar Southern California cycle: demolish and rebuild.