Wildlife refuge begins recovery

POCOSIN LAKES NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE -- Burned pond pine trees stand as if on stilts in this blackened scrub after a summer wildfire burned away the peat soil beneath their roots. All but dead, the pines have sprouted bright green clumps of needles directly from their charred trunks in a reflexive bid to survive.

Ferns have started reclaiming the blackened ground where firefighters battled the wildfire in June and July as it scorched 64 square miles of Eastern North Carolina. Black bears and deer are moving back onto the land.

The Pocosin Lakes refuge is starting to recover three months after a lightning strike ignited the wildfire.

Fueled by dense underbrush and dry conditions, the fire spread quickly and grew into one of the nation's largest blazes for a time in June. It burned about 25,000 acres of the 110,106-acre Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge and cost more than $18 million.

Even now, fire smolders underground in the carbon-rich peat soil in remote parts of the refuge. Foresters with the N.C. Forest Service fly over the refuge every few days in a helicopter scanning the blackened ground through an infrared camera looking for hot spots.

"Depending on the camera, it looks like heat shimmering on a road," said Ed Christopher, district forester for the region.

Refuge officials remain concerned that a prolonged dry period could allow the underground fire to revive.

"The big concern is when we get into a dry period that it stokes back up," said Howard Phillips, the refuge manager with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. "In fall, it often gets dry."

Phillips said that they hoped the recent rain had put out the ground fire but that they won't know until the ground dries out again.

Fire is nothing new here. It has been a part of the natural cycle long before the refuge was created in 1990 to give sanctuary to migratory waterfowl and to protect the unique wetlands called pocosin -- an Indian word for swamp on a hill. Tens of thousands of tundra swan and snow geese flock here each winter. Black bears, foxes and endangered red wolves roam the bog land year-round.

Most of the large animals escaped the fire.

"There is no doubt that some animals died," Phillips said. But there were thousands of acres that didn't burn where animals could seek refuge, and wildlife staff had seen little evidence of dead animals, Phillips said.

Evolving to survive

The natural ecosystem has evolved to survive regular, low intensity fires that burn vegetation yet leave root systems intact. For example, pond pine release more seeds when the cones are heated.

Much of the swampy land blackened by the Evans Road fire is crosshatched with ditches and canals that were installed in earlier decades to lower the water level and make the ground suitable for farming. It allowed the deep peat soil to dry out and made the refuge more vulnerable to catastrophic wildfires.

"This is a fire-adapted ecosystem," Phillips said. "It's the artificial ditching and draining that creates conditions where the fire can burn way down in the peat."

But the canals also helped in fighting the fire. Crews pumped about 2.2 billion gallons of water through them to saturate the ground and try to contain the fire.

Refuge managers have allowed the water to remain on the land for about a month to allow it to penetrate the peat soil. Recently, they've installed pipes to lower water levels in some parts of the refuge and have drawn a plan to remove the temporary earthen dams in the canals if they need to lower water quickly if a tropical storm approaches.

Trees didn't make it