By Bill Kleiman
Below are a few highlights of our annual report. You can read the entire report with many more photos here: nachusa_grasslands_annual_fire_report_2024_2025_opt.pdf
- Burning hubris: It is as if fire gathers our small errors, our shortcuts, our complacencies; and gives us trouble for our hubris. Did we fill all the gas tanks on all our pumps? Did we check the water filters on the piston pumps this morning? Are the fire breaks well prepared? Is the layout of the burn unit too complicated?
- Redundancy: We have multiple UTVs so any one UTV can go down. We have a support truck with various tools and a big tank of water to refill. We have a fire scout whose job is to help us watch the back lines. We build in redundancy to increase safety and get more fire on the ground.
- We need more than fire: Degraded habitats that we burn, often need seed and brush management.
The bottom line:
- Number of burn days was 20, which is a limiting factor.
- We burned 2,225-acres of Nachusa on 22 burn units
- We assisted on 596-acres on 6 units.
- Average size of a burn unit was 101-acres with a unit as small as 4-acres and big as 300.
- Average crew size was 12.
tacos. We burn for tacos
logistics.
He knows prescribed fire.
Blogg who was our burn boss on two days of fire at Franklin Creek Natural Area.
south of Nachusa. Bill and Molly responded to a request for help from DNR’s Russ Blogg. The winds were
strong and dry, but we worked safely from interior lanes for several hours. This untouched photo is as
the sun set and the glow of the fire dominated the lens.
a circle of the grass. Then use a drip torch to slowly ignite a circle of fire, letting the fire move away
from the circle.
I have been walking around units we have burned this year to see how effective the fires were. I
assume you all do the same. Some areas blacken, the exotic shrubs will be set back, the floristic
quality will improve a bit. And then you walk through some of our natural areas that are in very
poor condition. Yesterday, I ran a brush mulcher through one such site and opened it up so easily,
but there are so many such sights. Let us be bolstered by Aldo Leopold’s summary, “That the
situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.”
The Illinois Prescribed Fire Council stores a number of prescribed burn reports from different programs here: https://www.illinoisprescribedfirecouncil.org/prescribed-burn-reports.html
grassland restoration network 
I like checklists. Nothing is worse than having forgotten something when you need it in the field.
Redundancy is good. A lesson Kyle Lybarger learned recently in Alabama.
If no one else is going to say it, that is a lot of acres. Good job