Damage to Baker Canyon Not So Bad, Ecologists Say

On a charred hilltop overlooking what was once healthy chaparral until this week’s fire transformed it into a blackened moonscape, wild land expert Robin Wills poked his boot at some ash Friday and declared the area wasn’t half as bad as he had feared.

“Actually, I kind of like it,” said Wills, quickly adding, “but for ecological reasons, because it means rejuvenation of plant life in this area.”

Wills, fire program manager for the California Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that seeks to protect wild lands, toured the blackened area on foot.

He was joined by Trisha Smith, project coordinator for the Nature Conservancy, which manages portions of the burnt land for the Irvine Co.

The fire consumed more than 5,330 acres, scorching a wide swath several miles long and destroying 30-year-old chaparral in some places. In addition to killing wildlife, the fire burned native plants, such as black sage, buckwheat and California lilac.

But the conservationists said the landscape will renew itself, possibly within 10 years. It could be 20 or 30 more years, however, before the vegetation is as abundant as before.

The fear, they said, is that with the blow dealt the ecosystem, weeds and nonnative plants can now move in and compete with native plants.

Smith pointed to a small creek bed, where giant reeds--tall, bamboo-like plants with yellow stalks--had escaped the fire.

“You see the fire jumped over the creek and didn’t cause damage here,” Smith said. “But burning might have helped by taking out the reeds because they’re fast-growing and can overwhelm the native plant species, such as oaks, sycamores and willows.”

In addition, the giant reeds can choke the creek bed and cause flooding in winter storms. Also, when they die off, they can become fuel for brush fires, igniting and causing damage to a creek’s tall oak trees, sycamores and willows, she said.

A similar ecological battle occurred in the aftermath of the Laguna Beach fire in 1993. Only there, the invader was a gangly South American plant known as tree tobacco, an unsmokable distant cousin to common tobacco.

While the native plants struggled to come back, the tree tobacco sprouted faster and dug its roots deep into soil that once nurtured cactus, competing with other plants for water and space, Wills said.

In order to give the California sage and cactus a chance to return, workers aggressively attacked the tree tobacco, uprooting the plants or painting their stumps with herbicide.

Wills said that nature’s resiliency will play a key role in Baker Canyon’s rebirth. He pointed out that some plant species rely on fire for rejuvenation. Seeds stored in the soil are activated by charring and germinate with the first rains.

He also noted that plants may not actually be dead, even though they were scorched by fire.

As he walked along one slope, Wills pointed out a very large sumac shrub that had been blackened.

“You see that sumac with about 50 limbs on it?” he said. “You may think the plant is dead. The above-ground limbs are killed, but the plant is not dead. Eventually, the limbs will break off, but the core of the sumac plant will continue to grow.

“In fact, that has so many limbs and is so high that it might have grown like that after being damaged in the last fire to go through this area,” Wills said, learning from Smith that in October 1967 a firestorm known as the Paseo Grande fire burned through the same area.

Smith said that this week’s fire burned an estimated 500 to 1,200 acres in the new and much-touted Nature Reserve of Orange County, stirring concern about potential effects on the rare plants and animals that the reserve contains. The burnt land, however, does not appear to be prime habitat for the threatened California gnatcatcher.

More damage occurred in a large expanse of Irvine Co. land known as the North Ranch Policy Plan area that environmentalists have fought to add to the reserve. The fire burned roughly one-fourth of the 9,000-acre area, according to early estimates.