The Pawnee montane skipper butterfly was nearly wiped out four years ago by the largest wildfire in Colorado history. The one place in the world where the butterfly lives was right in the path of the Hayman fire, which burned 138,000 acres and destroyed 133 homes.
Today, the fragile skipper with a 1-inch wingspan is a symbol of forest revival. The fire site is now a mosaic of ruin and revival.
It’s a patchwork of lush ground cover and wildflowers, not seen in centuries, set against a barren landscape of charred sticks.
People and animals are returning too. Campers and horseback riders were in the forest last week. Rangers report deer, mountain lion and bear sightings.
Bald eagles have disappeared, but the three-toed woodpecker – usually seen in Alaska and Canada – has turned up in the woods.
“We’re seeing the rebirth of a forest,” said Brent Botts, district ranger for the Pike National Forest and manager of the Hayman restoration team.
Still, noxious weeds have taken root in the most severely burned areas, forcing out the native plants that wildlife munch on.
A silty sediment from runoff has clogged some drainages and forced the closing of four campgrounds.
And while the tiny burnt-orange butterfly is staging a comeback, it will take five centuries for the entire forest ecosystem to revive, scientists say.
Federal foresters are trying to help, with $800,000 in tree-planting over the last three years.
“Hayman is the crown jewel of all things bad about fire,” said Merrill Kaufmann, a forest ecologist retired from the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins. “There are many thousands of acres that don’t have a surviving tree on them.”
Two dozen scientists are using the fire as an ecology lab studying the biological dance of forest recovery.
The scientific studies cover an array of topics, including erosion control, threatened-species survival, reforestation methods and noxious-weed control.
The research will determine how the nation’s forests are managed and restored in the future.
“We’ve never been able to study the effects of a catastrophic fire like this before,” Botts said. “Where other fires (in our area) have been 1,000 or 2,000 acres, this one was 138,000 acres.
“This will tell us what restoration treatments are most beneficial in future fires.”
The Hayman fire began June 8, 2002, in the Pike National Forest, southwest of Denver, and raged for six weeks. It was the most severe fire the forest had seen in 700 years, according to the U.S. Forest Service, and it took 2,500 firefighters working every day to put it out.
The total cost of the fire, including damage and rehabilitation, was $238 million, the Forest Service said.
The fire burned half of the tiny skipper butterfly’s habitat – the only place on Earth where two plants crucial to the skipper meet – Blue Grama grass, where larvae feed, and the Prairie gayfeather, which provides nectar.
There were about 116,000 skippers in 1987, when it was federally listed as threatened. Scientists estimate that about 5,800 survived the fire.
While the skipper is staging a comeback – from an estimated 0.02 per acre in 2002 to 0.80 per acre in 2005 – the fire burned an important winter roost for up to 40 bald eagles at Cheesman Reservoir.
The eagles abandoned their winter home when the fire left no pine needles on the dead tree stalks for thermal protection, said Leslie Ellwood, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist.
Still, the same landscape of dead trees has become home to two species of woodpecker, said Natasha Kotliar, a wildlife biologist for the U.S Geological Survey in Fort Collins.
Drawn by the bugs eating dead trees, the three-toed woodpecker has moved in from its primary range in Alaska and Canada.
The hairy woodpecker, a common Western species that finds its food by feeling for the vibration of beetles in dead trees, also has flown into the Hayman area for the first time.
Other birds, such as the mountain chickadee, have dropped out of the forest community because they depend on foliage to glean insects.
About 35 percent of the forest area was severely burned – killing the forest canopy. Another 50 percent was a low or moderate burn – racing along the forest floor and wiping out ground vegetation.
The forest floor, reinvigorated by a release of nutrients from ash, is now thick with wildflowers.
But it will take centuries for the once-predominant ponderosa pine to re-establish because the pine’s heavy seeds blow only a quarter mile at a time.
“The only way for more trees is for those trees to grow up and, in 20 to 40 years, generate their own seeds, which blow another quarter mile,” said retired researcher Kaufmann. “It’s a slow process. In terms of re-establishing the forest and entire ecosystem, you’re looking at 500 years.”
The Forest Service has planted 400,000 seedlings on 1,600 acres at a cost of $800,000, Botts said.
The specialized seedlings were grown at a Halsey, Neb., nursery for two years from the seeds of 450 bushels of cones collected from Hayman – seeds genetically adapted to the decomposed granite soil and harsh climate of the Pike forest.
“Pine trees from Albuquerque would not survive here,” Botts said.
The Forest Service also spent $17 million on a variety of emergency erosion-control measures, and scientists are studying which ones work best.
The Upper South Platte watershed delivers 80 percent of metro Denver’s drinking water, and a landscape of scorched soil left the city’s water supply vulnerable to ash flows and erosion sediment in Cheesman and downstream reservoirs.
So forest workers shot a cocktail of straw, water and seed out of roadside cannons, staked down straw-bale barriers and used old-fashioned home-gardening techniques to hand rake and seed to keep soil from being displaced.
The most effective method is proving to be helicopter drops of 1-ton straw bales bursting over an acre at a time. More than 12,000 acres were covered for $6 million.
“Dry straw mulch was most effective – it provides immediate ground cover,” said Pete Robichaud, a research engineer studying post-fire erosion control for the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Moscow, Idaho.
At $500 an acre, it also was a relative bargain compared with other treatments.
Another problem foresters have been fighting is non-native, inedible plants that are dominating the most severely burned areas, upending the forest food chain.
Invasive plants such as cheatgrass, Canada thistle, Musk thistle and toadflax are well-suited to burn areas and can take over the forest, scientists say.
The Forest Service has spent more than $100,000 on noxious- weed spraying, Botts said.
“We’re trying to figure where exotics are most likely to establish because if you can go in quickly and figure out where they establish, you can stop them before they spread and get out of control,” said Molly Hunter, a research associate at Colorado State University specializing in fire ecology. “It’s a big concern because they are fast-growing, produce a lot of seeds that can travel long distance, and they thrive in these severely burned environments.”
Staff writer Dave Curtin can be reached at 303-820-1276 or dcurtin@denverpost.com.
