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Saving Oak Savannas: The Imperiled Ecosystem That Wild Turkeys Rely On

I’d never held a drip torch before. When I ask what’s in it, hoping to learn it’s some kind of safe, explosion-proof chemical, the guy leading the burn says “it’s a mixture of gasoline and diesel.”

Perfect.

As I walk around a field dripping burning fuel from the end of the can onto the grass and shrubs at my feet, I watch in awe as several acres quite literally go up in flames. The heat is impressive, the fire grows with incredible speed, and I can’t help but stare as the flames chew their way through all the grass and brush in their path.

It’s mid-May, and I’m in Central Michigan participating in a controlled burn with the National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF), SITKA, and Michigan Fish and Wildlife. I’ve come here to hunt turkey, and to get a firsthand look at what SITKA’s Ecosystem Restoration Grant program looks like on the ground, which in this case is helping fund the restoration of Oak Savannas in the region—critical habitat for tons of wildlife, like the endangered Karner Blue Butterfly, eastern massasauga rattlesnake, and, of course, wild turkey.
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Aside from staring in amazement at the power of fire, I also can’t help but chuckle at the irony of the situation. You see, as I was setting several acres of what, to me, looked like a perfectly good field ablaze, my home state of New Mexico was also burning.

For several weeks before the trip I’d watched massive smoke plumes form over the mountains in the distance from my porch in Santa Fe. The plumes, or pyrocumulus clouds, were so big it looked as if an atomic bomb had been dropped, and were courtesy of the largest wildfire in the state’s history—the 341,000+ acre Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon fire. The fire(s) started as a prescribed burn that got out of control; a fact that was not lost on me as I held that drip torch.

Setting things on fire in the name of improving turkey habitat also felt odd, given our turkey season in New Mexico was cut short this year when land managers closed the entire Santa Fe National Forest due to extreme fire danger. I’m an avid turkey hunter and had spent the better part of four days looking for birds before the closure, but only managed to get on one gobbler in that time (and busted him at the last minute—I said avid, not good).

So when the call came in from SITKA to join them on a turkey hunt and prescribed burn in Michigan, I jumped at the chance.

<h2>The Hunt</h2>
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I flew to Grand Rapids and drove about an hour north, where I joined a film crew from SITKA, the District Biologist for the NWTF, Ryan Boyer, NWTF Regional Director Tom Karsten, and SITKA Ambassador Jonathan Wilkins, from Black Duck Revival. We grabbed licenses and made a plan for the next morning over beers—given the number of people, we’d split up, with Karsten and I heading out to one spot, and Boyer, Wilkins and the film crew heading to another. We planned to meet up at the hunting club where we’d be doing our first prescribed burn mid-day.

Early the next morning Karsten and I headed out in his GMC Sierra, and I quickly learned I was in good hands—Karsten has been chasing gobblers since 1974, and has killed 97 turkeys in his lifetime (that’s 96 more than me, for the record). He’s hunted them all over the U.S., but loves hunting in his home state of Michigan the most..

We got to our first spot before daybreak and listened by the truck for a while. The longer we listened, the more apparent it became that I was not in New Mexico anymore. Slowly, the woods woke up and the cacophony of sound emanating from songbirds and insects that called the forest home stunned me—the turkey woods back home just don’t sound that way. As we stood there, I began thinking I’d never be able to hear a gobble over all of that noise.

We did manage to hear one distant gobble that morning, but eventually ran out of time and packed it in. When we arrived at the hunting club to prepare for the burn, we found Wilkins and the film crew celebrating a successful hunt. They’d gotten on a group of birds roosted in an oak savanna that Boyer and his crew had been doing restoration work on for several years, and had a perfect setup for Wilkins below a large tree at the edge of a clearing. It was one of those classic, perfect hunts you often hear about but rarely experience: Boyer called, the hens flew down first and the gobbler followed, walking right into Wilkins’ lane. It was over in minutes.
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<h2>The Burn</h2>
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I helped Wilkins pluck his tom, and then we drove to the site of the first prescribed burn. Boyer and his crew drove us past several other areas they’d burned in the past so we could see what a burn would look like over time. The stark contrast between areas that had been burned and those that hadn’t was incredible, and you could literally see the wildlife responding—Eastern Whippoorwill, red-headed woodpeckers, rough grouse, white-tail deer, black bears, eastern box turtles, monarch butterflies, the eastern massasauga rattlesnake, and the endangered Karner Blue Butterfly all rely on this habitat, and many of them were out in force.

The habitats Boyer is working so hard to restore are called Oak Savannas, which, it turns out, are one of the most highly imperiled ecosystems in the U.S.. According to Boyer, 99% of them have disappeared since European settlement. They look exactly how they sound; mature oak trees interspersed with meadows of native grasses and wildflowers. Maples and other non-native species have crept into these areas over time as human settlement has encroached and the forests have been managed differently, which has created a thicker forest canopy and has been detrimental to various wildlife species.

This is a story those in the Western United States know all too well at this point, as evidenced by the massive wildfires that burn each year in places like California, Oregon, and this year, New Mexico. In the early 1900s, as much of the West was settled, the U.S 's wildfire management policy became one of total suppression, which over time led to significantly higher fuel loads than forests traditionally saw and is one of the reasons why fires today tend to be so much more destructive than they used to be. Couple that with climate change and a fire season that grows longer each year, and you have a recipe for disaster.

It’s common knowledge that fire has been a naturally occurring and important part of the Western forests forever, but fire-dependent ecosystems exist east of the Mississippi, too. “These ecosystems, the oaks, these wildflowers, these grasses, they've evolved and thrive with fire. They need fire—it's like taking a daily vitamin,” Boyer said. “Thinking about an oak tree, even its root structure is designed and has evolved to protect it from fires coming through. When you lack that fire, you start to see a shift in the ecosystem.”
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That shift is what led Boyer to spearhead an effort to restore them. Since 2008, the NWTF, along with over 34 organizations including NGOs, local contractors, tribes and private landowners, have been working to restore and connect oak savanna habitats throughout western and southwestern Michigan. In that time, the total project cost for all of this restoration work has exceeded 3.6 million dollars, which was raised through various grants and agreements similar to the one that SITKA’s ecosystem grants program awarded him.

SITKA started their ecosystem restoration grant program in 2019, and has awarded over $1 million of grants across 33 different grantees. The goal of their grant program is to fund grassroots projects that improve the state and function of an entire ecosystem, not just increasing huntable populations or working specifically to address problems within a certain species. “As hunters we have a really specific role with wildlife, but the health of wildlife is connected to a thousand other things. I think it's important to SITKA and the people that are part of the community to be thinking about stewardship under those terms,” Lindsey Davis, who heads up SITKA’s ecosystem grants and conservation partnerships program, said.

The grants they’ve awarded have supported everything from a scholarship fund for a youth-oriented backcountry hunting program in Montana to research looking into mallard duck population dynamics along the Mississippi River Flyway. “Part of why we love doing what we do is it connects us to this broader thing, which is the environment around us,” Davis said, “And the grants try to participate in that in a lot of different ways.”

These days, it’s fashionable for brands within the hunting space to use this kind of science-based, holistic thinking in their marketing and ad campaigns, but I’ve always been left wondering whether this is akin to “greenwashing,” or if these companies actually put their money where their mouth is. The work going on here in Michigan speaks for itself—Boyer says the SITKA grant helped the NWTF partner with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the USDA Forest Service to restore habitat on 255 acres of land, which is part of the broader effort of restoring and maintaining over 6500 acres of oak savanna within the Huron-Manistee National Forest over the next 15 years. “That cash contribution from SITKA is critical to us, and we've been able to use it to cover seed costs, and to cover on-the-ground implementation work, which allows us to do more and get more done,” Boyer said.
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“SITKA has been a wonderful partner, (they’re) super supportive of the work. They understand it. They see the importance of it, and that aspect of it outside of just the game species—there's so many added benefits, to water quality, to non-game species, endangered species, and just healthy ecosystems,” he said.

The restoration work we’re taking part in happens to be on private land, which is a critically important piece of the puzzle for Boyer. While most of the restoration has taken place on public land, because so much private land exists in the Midwest it’s imperative to restore savannas there, too, since they act as connectors to larger swaths of federal land. That, in turn, allows species like wild turkey to move freely in search of food sources and shelter.

As I watch the crew create a fire break of freshly tilled dirt around the 7-acre field we’re about to set on fire, I ask one of the landowners, Mark Redfield, where his interest in projects like these came from. Redfield, who has a minor in Watershed Management, is one of the member/owners of The Grass Lake Hunting Club, which has been around since 1948. He said when he originally brought the idea of doing prescribed burns on the club’s property to the other members, there was “substantial” resistance. “Everybody’s afraid it’s going to go south, but the members over the years have all bought into it,” he said.

“We've probably done 10 different projects, whether it's wetland or the grasses or the flowers, the burns, all kinds of different things. Every one of them gives you a different landscape, and the more landscapes we get, the more diverse it is, the more critters,” Redfield said. “Now everyone in the club is really big on it. The bird hunting is better because of the cuts, and then (the burns) add additional food and bedding areas for the deer and turkeys.”
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Boyer says he’s run into some resistance in convincing landowners to participate in burns in the past, but having areas where they can show results is incredibly helpful. “All that we're doing is mimicking natural disturbance cycles to try and setback succession,” Boyer said. “If you go back through and you see [the aftermath] of where a tornado ripped through a swath of forest or an ice storm or straight line winds, for instance, it does not look pretty.”

“Initially it does not look good, but these systems are resilient. They're designed to be able to withstand and respond to that type of disturbance,” he said.

After an area burns, that response looks like Lupine popping up. Then, Karner Blue Butterflies move in to feed on the Lupine, along with other insects, and Turkey and other species feed on them.

At a time when wild turkey populations are shrinking across the country, it’s easy to get behind any project like this that might help, and it’s that kind of long-term, ecosystem-based thinking that Sitka is aiming to increase through its Ecosystem Grants program. They think doing so is crucial to not only increasing future hunting opportunities, but TKTK. QUOTE TKTK.

<h2>Experiencing a Thriving Ecosystem</h2>

We timed our burn perfectly, and rain began to move in that night, extinguishing all possibility of something re-igniting. The next morning, I went out with Boyer and Karsten again to try and fill my tag.

We had more luck than the prior morning and got a hen talking to us within minutes of shooting light. Boyer called from 20 yards behind me as I sat motionless under a tree on the edge of a meadow, hoping we’d convince the hen to cross the road from where she’d been roosted, and that a tom would follow her.

She never came, but we did manage to call in a coyote to about 20 yards before he winded us. We hit several different spots that morning and chased a few birds along the way before we went to another prescribed burn. It went equally as well as the first.

We had one more opportunity to get a bird that afternoon, and Karsten took me back to the first spot we’d visited on my trip. We heard a distant gobble and began working towards the noise. Eventually, we worked our way up onto a rise where we got a glimpse of the jake we’d been chasing. He was posted up in a clearing about 150 yards from us and had absolutely no interest in moving. So, we played the waiting game. We’d call, he’d gobble, and stay right where he was. There wasn’t enough cover to move in on him, so I stayed put, hoping we’d convince him to make his way up the hill towards us.

As I sat there listening to that jake hammer away for what seemed like hours, Karsten suddenly grabbed my arm and loudly whispered, “black bear.” I slowly turned to see a bear not 50 yards from us, checking out a feeder at the back of someone’s property adjacent to where we were hunting. We watched him sniff around for a few minutes, then slowly amble off into the woods, completely unaware of his audience.

The jake eventually lost interest, or maybe we did—it’s not every day you get a close-up encounter with animals like that in the turkey woods. But, here in Michigan they’ve got something special, and the result of all the work that Boyer and the various groups have been doing to restore and support the health of the ecosystems speaks for itself.
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As I walk around a field dripping burning fuel from the end of the can onto the grass and shrubs at my feet, I watch in awe as several acres quite literally go up in flames. The heat is impressive, the fire grows with incredible speed, and I can&amp;#8217;t help but stare as the flames chew their way through all the grass and brush in their path.

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