Burning issues

[4wd]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-44648348

Finally some sense, after years of trying to imply controlled burning wasn't needed and caused damage/pollution/global warming.
This is what happens, dangerous amounts of taller dead stuff builds up and you get a summer conflagration sooner or later which burns the peat away too. Absolutely everything is destroyed unlike small patches of controlled burning when the peat below is wet in winter, and even the bottom of the heather is barely scorched.
You can still see the areas which burnt in 1976 here, the peat was still smoking until after Christmas.

The trouble is plenty now will be out staring more for kicks, or to deliberately destroy moorland as way to damage shooting.
I see at Winter Hill someone was arrested for deliberately starting another.

Very little rain expected for at least two more weeks.

[wr]

We gathered our hill walk yesterday evening and early this morning and it's getting harder to get through some areas of heather every year. As you say, 4wd, no burning and thousands less sheep on the Beacons are contributing to a dense mat of extremely combustible material. It's just a matter of time before someone, either deliberately or accidentally puts it on fire.
The Nat Trust bought part of a renown local hill farm about 30 years ago and fenced off an area of around 300 acres to "SAVE" the birds, orchids and reptiles etc. etc. When it all went up in flames about 5 years later they saw the error of their action and the patch has been grazed traditionally since. It was cleared of all fauna and flora by the fire and took a long time to come back to the wildlife haven it had been before NT took it over.

[rgsp]

When I used to visit the Silicon Valley area in California, I found that Eucalyptus trees really liked the conditions there, and grew like weeds. That is maybe a bit of a problem in itself, but a worse one is that Eucalypts shed papery bark, leaves and twigs, which are all rot-resistant like Eucalyptus timber, and build up on the ground. Hence they have a big and increasing fire risk. The area varies from fairly dense to sparse suburbia, so at least fires usually get noticed quickly, and there is piped water to help put them out, but the occasional one still gets out of hand, and appears in our own news items.

It appears that Eucalypts have evolved in Australia to tolerate and even be encouraged by forest fires there: the seeds germinate best when toasted by a fire, and the papery bark insulates the inside of the tree to that some at least of them survive a fire anyway. Tricky stuff ecology - far to complex for Guardian writers like the Moonbat to understand.

[4wd]

Heather seeds also can lie dormant for many years until a brief flash of fire triggers them.
Not many will regrow in ashes though.