Standing in the verdant meadows of the preserve, it’s hard to imagine the scene as an inferno. Last year’s Pulp Road Fire shocked the Cape Fear Region: thousands of acres of nature preserve went up in flames, casting ominous smoke clouds over Carolina Beach and the surrounding communities.
A year on, things are looking a lot brighter. There’s a lot more sun getting in where the fire burned through, according to Zach West, the Land Steward for The Nature Conservancy. He described the area beautifully. "It's kind of an emerald green. With widely spaced pine trees, not very much mid-story. We're kind of walking through a narrow savannah."
On the edges of that meadow is the pocosin: a wetland bog habitat defined by its high water table and substantial understory of shrubs.
Last year's fire burned a lot of that understory, West said.
"The pocosin is almost a grey and black strip along the edge, where some of the Pocosin shrubs burned and some are still standing, but underneath that is green where all those shrubs are re-sprouting," he told WHQR.
The pocosin wasn’t meant to burn last year — none of the Green Swamp Preserve was. But a nearby prescribed burn set by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission escaped onto the preserve, and burned 16,000 acres over the course of four days.
Nathan Burmester is a stewardship manager for NC Nature Conservancy Stewardship Manager Nathan Burmester said, "pretty much the entire entirety of the Green Swamp was burned out. And it was largely done on purpose.”
The aerial maps show long green lines where a helicopter intentionally dropped fire onto the natural fuel in the preserve. Once the blaze got out of control, this was actually the safest way to manage the fire, Forest Service staff told WHQR after an investigation last year. Parts of the land in the pocosin hadn’t burned in 70 years. They were overdue.
"We do the controlled burns as often as we can in these uplands, every two to four years. And then the pocosin needs that fire maybe every eight to 20 years," he said.
The plants can feel the difference — especially the carnivorous flora indigenous to the region, Burmester said. Those plants grow out of bulbs, so even when the leaves burn away in a fire, they survive.
“We've had pictures of like six days after the burn those flytraps popping right back so they come back incredibly quick. whether it's a controlled burn or the wildfire, they come back much larger. The traps themselves are taller, and the traps like are bigger than if they haven't seen fire and long time," he said.
The grasses grow better too, since the brush in the midstory has cleared out. The grasses feed more insects, which feed the flytraps and the birds. The trees prosper as well: West says the pond pine overstory in the pocosin needs fire to go to seed.
"The heat from the fire will open the cones and so there will be re-sprouting of pond pines," he said.
Other pine varieties have wax coatings on their seeds that need to melt in order to grow a sapling, so the next generation of trees needs fire in order to grow.
Deb Maurer, the conservancy’s southeast coastal plain program director, hopes to see the pocosin managed better in the future, meaning, with more fire.
"We see this as an opportunity, not as a problem," she said. "You'll see there are some dead trees. No doubt, some of those trees are well, some of those trees are sprouting, some of those trees definitely are dead. That's not a bad thing. That's just a transition from one type of pocosin wetland community to another, temporarily, until trees grow back in or whatever that fire regime dictates.”
Despite in some cases, being burnt all the way to the ground, the trees are already recovering, sprouting foliage and new branches — sometimes even from charred stumps. In another year, experts say, you won’t be able to tell a fire came through at all.
