SOUTH PASS—Terrestrial habitat biologist Amy Anderson sounded pleased Thursday about the “huge, communitywide effort” to help the Wind River Range foothills recover from a wildfire that almost completely wiped out 25 square miles of the sagebrush ecosystem in a blink last August.
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department staffer also saw some promising ecological signs. The landscape surrounding her was impressively green, the result of drenching and welcomed rains that coaxed native wheatgrass and native wildflowers like prairie smoke and western yarrow into sprouting in October.
Although optimistic, Anderson was also a realist about the immense challenge the area faces. For shrub-dependent species like sage grouse, the Weiser Knoll Fire caused almost total habitat loss, she said. Three known lekking grounds, where the birds mate, burned up.
“We’re doing our best,” Anderson said. “But it’s going to be a long road to get this back to serviceable habitat.”
On the scale of wildfires across the West, Anderson said she knows Weiser Knoll was “small potatoes.” Still, it was a crushing blow to the native flora and fauna in this little corner of the southern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
“It’s devastating,” Anderson said. “This was a lot of really productive sagebrush, bitterbrush habitat that a lot of wildlife used.”
The task of getting it back, a painstakingly slow process, was unfolding all around her. Her Game and Fish colleagues were on their hands and knees planting seedlings, trying to help Wyoming’s big sagebrush stage its slow comeback.
One seedling at a time, the young shrubs went into the dirt amid banter from biologists. Emma Freeland, a Bureau of Land Management biologist, scored an unexpected surplus of 7,000 seedlings from the Wyoming Honor Farm, which donated them to the fire scar recovery.
While the Game and Fish crew planted away, other crews of state and federal employees were doing the same, out of sight in the South Pass hills. Wyoming State Forestry’s new Gannet Peak wildland firefighting team was out there planting seedlings, and so was a crew of Shoshone National Forest staffers.
Altogether on Thursday, the three crews were on pace to plant nearly 2,000 seedlings. They went into the ground in “islands” of several hundred plants sited where the blaze burned the hottest, inhibiting other growth.
There’ll be a lot more recovery work in the months and years ahead. Anderson helped pull together a Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust grant application for $2 million to treat the area for destructive cheatgrass, which grows in thick lower on South Pass and in trace concentrations higher up.
So far, at least on the fire scar’s western flank, the preponderance of regrowth has been native species.
“Which is excellent,” Anderson said. “But the huge loss here was the shrubs. They were so productive, and fed a lot of wildlife in the winter.”
