Subject: Re: Slash Burning
Date: Jan 18 11:14:09 1996
From: Bruce Newhouse - newhouse at efn.org
This is a very complicated issue; I would advise taking any
"clearcutting/slash burning is good" or "...is bad" responses with a
grain or two of salt.
Native American burning in the Cascades, Coast Range, and Western Oregon
Interior Valleys of Oregon for thousands of years greatly impacted
vegetation community composition at the landscape level. (Lightning fires
also, to some extent in the Cascades.)
There are different effects which result from clearcutting and slash
burning versus landscape-scale Native American burning, and there are
significant variations depending on site conditions. Trends and effects
on bird and other animal habitat have been studied to some extent. Try
contacting the USFS Pacific Northwest Experiment Station in Portland for
a bibliography. The OSU and UW libraries would be comprehensive sources
as well.
Bruce Newhouse
newhouse at efn.org
On Thu, 18 Jan 1996 bharrison at macnet.com wrote:
> Tweets, OB's
> When I was growing up in a small coastal community, my family spent
> many summer afternoons in the wilds. We hunted, fished, hiked, picked
> berries, etc. I remember when we would go bear hunting, we would visit
> vast clearcuts that had grown up with salal, huckleberry, salmon berry, and
> all sorts of other brambles. I can remember seeing flocks of hundreds of
> Band-tailed pigeons feeding on the salal berries, which I'm sure no one
> sees anymore. This was before the logging corporations and the state and
> federal governments started slash burning clearcuts in that area. Does
> anyone else share the opinion that slash burning destroys, or prevents the
> development, of potentially good habitat for all sorts of wildlife
> including many species of birds. Clearcutting may or may not be a practice
> that continues, The question here is this: given that the practice of
> clearcutting exists, is slash burning afterward a good idea for birds like
> the Band-tailed pigeon, and other wildlife, or is it only good for
> mono-culture tree farming, and a detriment to wildlife? Anybody have an
> opinion? Are there any studies that address this question?
>
> Bruce Harrison
> McMinnville, Oregon
>