
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, May 13, 1990                   TAG: 9005130013
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: GRAYLING, MICH.                                LENGTH: Medium

FIRE THAT LASTED A DAY DID HARM TO LAST FOR DECADES

Foresters say it will be decades before more than 6,000 acres of charred northern Michigan woodland looks whole again, after a fire that destroyed half the habitat of an endangered species of songbird.

Someone's brush fire ignited the northern woods of Michigan's Lower Peninsula on Tuesday. The forest was tinder dry after two years of drought and not yet green despite the early spring.

A hot afternoon wind whipped the fire into a wall of flames that advanced so fast, leaping roads, fire breaks and even the Au Sable River, that the Crawford County sheriff evacuated the town of Lovells, more than 15 miles away.

In six hours, the fire was halfway to Lovells.

During the night, the rain did what every available firefighter in northern Michigan couldn't do and put out the flames. But by then the fire had destroyed 86 homes, 130 other buildings and 12 square miles of woodland.

It also consumed half of the nesting ground left for the world's last 400 Kirtland's warblers.

It will be half a century before the pine forests are whole again, said Bill Mahalak, the Department of Natural Resources' area forest manager.

This week, the DNR will set out plans to cut down most of the fire-killed timber so it doesn't incubate a plague of blight or bark beetles. Then the state will begin replanting.

Jack pines are already reseeding themselves. Within hours after the fire, cones began dropping their seeds to the ashen ground, triggered by the heat.

It is the only way a jack pine tree germinates. And it is the only way the tiny, yellow-breasted Kirtland's warbler survives because it will nest only on the ground beneath young jack pine trees.

If the birds can survive another decade, this fire will have opened a vast new nesting range for them.

But Mahalak was uneasy about such things.

"I don't consider this fire in any way a positive thing," he said. "Generally, there's nothing positive to anything that comes at such a high cost."

The fire will even affect some trout fishermen.

Flames lapped right to the water's edge for a mile along the Au Sable River, and Trout Unlimited will put up signs asking canoeists and fishermen not to tread on the injured ground.

Some homes survived in chance islands of green.

Bruce Murray's mobile home still stood and along with it survived three evergreen bushes, one nylon windsock, one red rooster and one singed cat.

The fire took everything else.

His apple trees were black stubs. His raspberry bushes were turned to ash. His wife's 100 rabbits were cremated in their cages.

"It's all dusted," Murray said in disgust, wading through an ash pile that used to be his barn, kicking cinder chunks out of his way. "It makes you so sick, you want to leave."

by CNB