The Leduc Naturalist: Fires are back

Our wildfire season started right on schedule again, this spring.

Article content Our wildfire season started right on schedule again, this spring. Over a month of heavy rains protected large swaths of our forests, yet enough land was left un-drenched to maintain over 100 regional fires at any one time. Now, with climbing temperatures and daily precipitation tapering off to small storms and showers, we’re back in the thick of it.

This trend is not only predictable, it is necessary for agricultural crops to grow and ripen in time for harvest, and for hay crops to mature and be cut. Our neighbours are again complaining for the third year in a row about cross-border smoke, but what are we to do? It seems lost on them that if they are suffering, we probably have it worse.

Recommended Videos We have always had fires each summer, and with the horrific conflagrations of the past 20 years, we are burning up those long collected fuel reserves to the points where they should have been all along. The heavy rains from late May to early July have ensured that we won’t have a brown summer as we had three years ago, but burn the forests will. Provinces, territories and US states have multiple mutual aid agreements to tackle blazes that become too large for local efforts, despite all the political rhetoric from those trying to score cheap points against forces fully engaged in responding.

Let’s get behind our natural resource heroes and support them in the ways they deserve.