Prescribed Fire 🔥 for Forest Health and Biodiversity

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Ryan Trapani: Before prohibition, there were bartenders, and there was a whole economy on how to get your bitters and the aromas and everything to put in and make a good cocktail. Once prohibition happened, it killed that whole economy, and it's taken till, like, now for distilleries to come back, and so to make a decent Manhattan. I'm always looking for a good Manhattan, and you'd be surprised how terrible they are almost everywhere you go. Fire is even worse. You know, it's basically been outlawed.

[00:00:29] Brett Barry: If there's one thing Ryan Trapani knows better than Manhattan Mixology, it's the Catskill Forest. As Director of Forest Services for the Catskill Forest Association, Ryan employs a wide range of forest management tools, and he's advocating for a new one—actually a really old one that may have fallen out of fashion. Welcome to "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast," where we are talking about prescribed fires and potential benefits to our Catskills forests and wildlife, so mix a Manhattan, pop a birch beer, or pour a cup of something hot because, as the kids like to say, this conversation is going to be fire.

[00:01:14] Campbell Brown: "Kaatscast" is sponsored by The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for local regions like The Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, and The Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email mountaineaglenews@gmail.com.

[00:01:33] Brett Barry: Ryan Trapani is Director of Forest Services at the Catskill Forest Association and a rare repeat guest on this show. Ryan, welcome back to "Kaatscast."

[00:01:43] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, thanks for having me.

[00:01:44] Brett Barry: Yeah, so we're sitting here by a crackling wood stove here at the studio, and it's got some maple and ash going, and that's related to your first visit here, which was a forest consultation, and you looked up and immediately kind of gasped at a couple of hazard trees right over the house, so that's what's burning today.

[00:02:05] Ryan Trapani: Nice.

[00:02:06] Brett Barry: Yeah, so thank you for that. It's a relief not to have those lingering over the house anymore. You recently sent out a CFA newsletter that went out to the membership, and it started with this: "Dear Friend of Fire, it's time to reintroduce fire carefully and at small scales so we can rebuild this knowledge and restore fire as a valuable forestry tool to restore habitat, reduce invasive species, enhance biodiversity, maintain plant communities dependent on fire, and strengthen the health of our woods." So I'm guessing that most people would recoil a bit at the idea of intentional fires in the woods?

[00:02:44] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, so in the Northeast, the fire is really going to be beneficial for ecological reasons, not so much for safety there. There probably are some areas where safety would matter where that wild and urban interface is, but really we don't have the fuels and the forest types that promote, like, dangerous fire near people's homes, except for maybe one area you know of. Maybe it is Cragsmoor above Ellenville on the Shawangunk Ridge.

[00:03:11] Brett Barry: Which is where recently there was a forest fire, an uncontrolled forest fire, right?

[00:03:16] Ryan Trapani: A wildfire—yeah, so these would be prescribed fires. We're talking about anything not prescribed is called the wildfire, but up there on the Shawangunk Ridge, or the Gunks, as some people call them. They have forests that are very similar to Long Island or down south pitch pines and blueberries, and there's ladder fuels mixed with mountain laurel or rhododendron, and that can act as a ladder fuel to the canopy, and that could become dangerous, but in most of our forests, like outside your window where it's snowing beautifully on northern hardwoods, there's really little fuels in the forest floor. It can burn some leaves, but other than that, not so much.

[00:03:54] Brett Barry: So you say that decades of fire suppression have diminished our understanding of fire's ecological value. Was there ever a culture of fire in New York, and what happened?

[00:04:04] Ryan Trapani: Yes and no. So, in certain areas, there was definitely a culture on the Shawangunk Ridge again, so up until the 1940s, berry pickers—mountain people, I call them "Mountain Americans"—used to burn, and they did it for one to three years to burn for lowbush blueberry. Buyers from New York City would come up the Smiley road to buy berries, then World War II happened: Smokey the Bear refrigeration, right? You get blueberries from other areas, and we began to really suppress fires, not just here but everywhere. The only place in the United States where they, the Forest Service, according to Stephen Pyne, who's written a lot of books about fire, were unsuccessful in convincing Americans not to burn was the Southeast. They're very rural people compared to us, but near the escarpment areas of the Catskills, you know, Woodstock, Overlook Mountain, you know, where the mountains meet the big valley, there was a culture of Mountain Americans burning, you know, and to this day, there's a legacy of mountain laurel, blueberry, and pitch pine in those areas, but in most areas, we don't have a culture of fire so much, but a lot of it's been forgotten. Long story short, in the early 20th century.

[00:05:14] Brett Barry: And there's a history with indigenous populations burning the forest for ecological reasons or for hunting and growing. What can you say about that?

[00:05:24] Ryan Trapani: So Native Americans didn't have livestock to control vegetation. They didn't have axes. They didn't have chemicals. Obviously, they had fire, and fire produced forbs and grasses that were really good for game like deer or elk in certain areas or buffalo if you're in the middle of the country. They created prairies. Prairies weren't really natural. They were created by humans. In the Northeast, we get rainfall, so we didn't have prairies, although in some areas, some people do believe we had prairies, even in, like, Buffalo, New York, and Western New York, but they were all about taking out the northern hardwoods, which are maple, beech, birch, and replacing them with nut trees, central hardwoods, oak, hickory, and chestnut. Once upon a time, these are extremely beneficial to human beings, and when you burn frequently, those trees—oak, hickory, and chestnut—outcompete maple, beech, and birch, so Native Americans burn, and we know this because of lake sediment studies, and like Mohonk, they've done that. You could see that human beings were burning for thousands of years.

[00:06:27] Brett Barry: And you talk about pyrogenic species like oak and chestnut. What does that mean?

[00:06:31] Ryan Trapani: Pyrogenic means they outcompete other trees when there's fire. They have thick bark. They readily sprout from their roots because they have a little deeper root system, so a ground fire over and over again might knock out maple and beech and yellow birch and black birch, whereas the oak, it might top kill, but it'll come back and outcompete them, and also there's certain trees like pitch pine. They can sprout from the bark. They're just a crazy tree that's the most fire tolerant.

[00:07:01] Brett Barry: What are you hoping to see with this program? There is a program associated with this through the CFA called the prescribed burn program. What does that mean, and how can people, or why would people, want to get involved with that?

[00:07:13] Ryan Trapani: So, right now, the low-hanging fruit is to burn the field and, you know, stuff that's starting to grow up with shrubs. Now, the reason why I'm focusing on that is, one, legally, it's probably all I can do. We're navigating not just learning how to burn fire but where I can burn fire, so there's nothing in really New York to say who's qualified to burn right now in law. Okay, so I have to submit a burn plan to the regional forester at the DEC.

[00:07:42] Brett Barry: For each project or overall, okay.

[00:07:45] Ryan Trapani: This is for private land. Now, it just says in the statute or whatever that it has to be a qualified burn person. It doesn't say what that means, so I took the liberty and went to Pennsylvania. They have [now] a prescribed burn certification program in Pennsylvania, so instead of having this lengthy process of a burn boss qualification, they said, "You know, if you do this, they're trying to increase the resource of people who can burn. They created their own state-certified burn program, as Florida has. Who burns the most in the country? I think Alabama and Georgia have this as well, so it's not a national wildfire [NWCG] certification burn boss, but I can't just burn anything. It can only be low-complexity fires, and that's mainly fields and stuff because my experience is limited, so it wouldn't be in the woods just yet. It would be just in those fields.

[00:08:38] Brett Barry: And what does that accomplish?

[00:08:39] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, it increases forbs and grasses.

[00:08:41] Brett Barry: What's a forb?

[00:08:42] Ryan Trapani: Like non-woody plants, herbaceous growth, right? And we really need that for a lot of wildlife, like deer and songbirds and stuff like that, that need early successional habitat. We want to kind of take the clock and move it back. A lot of our fields are just growing back, and after a while, you can't get a brush hog in there, so if we can knock back the woody growth with fire, that would be good and keep this stuff in early succession and improve the forage for a lot of our wildlife. What it also does, though, is get everyone familiar with fire again. That's really what I'm going for as well, like we're—I just submitted a burn plan this week to Region 4 for 1 acre. What am I just trying to accomplish? I'm trying to get everyone familiar with, "Hey, this is a burn plan on private land." I don't even know if one was submitted in Region 4 all of last year, so, you know, I want them, I want everyone to be familiar with it, with smoke in the air. There's a whole lengthy process. There's 24 elements or so that are involved in that burn plan, from neighbor notification to fuel models/fire behavior. It has all contingencies in there in case the fire expands beyond what we knew. We have to have water resources. Everything has to be spelled out. I have to know where that smoke goes. I have to kind of, you know, with the fuels, kind of predict where the smoke goes, so it's really navigating the burn plan.

[00:10:08] Brett Barry: So let's just take that one-acre parcel for an example. What's there now? What will the fire eliminate or tamp down, and then what do you hope that will come up in its place, and does that happen naturally after a fire event?

[00:10:20] Ryan Trapani: If we were to not burn this area, it would just go back to forest, meaning trees. Right now, it was an old field, and it's just, you know, starting to get some shrubs in there growing and woody growth. We want to knock back the woody growth and increase the grasses and forbs and herbaceous growth, and we have to put a fire line around it and then have a contingency beyond the fire line in case that fire line fails.

[00:10:44] Brett Barry: So you're with the Catskill Forest Association, and you're encouraging less forest, is that right?

[00:10:49] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, we got plenty of forest, and when I say "forest," I really mean older trees. To me, a forest should include young forest and, you know, some grasses and forbs here and there.

[00:11:01] Brett Barry: And does that open space or grassland encourage a healthier forest that's adjacent to it?

[00:11:08] Ryan Trapani: That would be the ultimate goal, so one of the coolest things I ever saw was many years ago because you're talking about, oh my God, you're creating habitat for deer. Well, if this really took off and people really burned more like in scope, there could be a lot of positive impacts in the forest just by increasing forage for deer, so, for example, I was in Plattekill many years ago in Ulster County, and this guy had a hundred acres of ridge, and I was like, "Man, you got regeneration everywhere, like, you got nice oak tree seedlings and sugar maple seedlings," and he is like, "What's the big deal? I've always had those." I was like, "I don't think you know how rare that is throughout most of the Catskill Region because those are preferred tree species by deer, so that's the first thing to drop out when the deer get too hungry, right?" But the reason why is because he was surrounded by apple orchards, so the deer were satiated. They were happy. Fire could maybe do that over time just by burning maybe some fields, increasing forage, I don't know, but we have to satiate the deer belly first before really having a healthy forest because, right now, you could do a two-acre cutting right now, Brett, in this forest behind here, and they would keep up with anything that grew, right? The deer. The only things that would grow if you did a cut right now in your woods or anyone's woods around are things that deer don't like to eat, which are, you know, maybe black birch, maybe some American beech, and that's about it because they're just, they're like, almost starving out there, you know, so it's tough to overwhelm that deer belly.

[00:12:42] Brett Barry: What else does it benefit wildlife-wise, and how do you prevent disturbing existing wildlife habitat by doing this? How do you know you're not, you know, destroying ground-nesting bird land or places where even, like, squirrels and chipmunks are? You know, like, what are the precautions that are being made there?

[00:13:02] Ryan Trapani: Well, it's the time of the season of burn. When you burn, it matters. Nothing is perfect, but overall, habitat trumps everything, right? So we're losing a lot of our early successional songbirds because the forest is just maturing, so there's always positives and there's always negatives, but overall, if you burn, you're preserving a younger forest, and that's going to benefit, you know, songbirds that are ground nesting, which most are. Many are Audubon, like we talked about last time on the radio show here on "Kaatscast," you know, which was one of the biggest promoters of cutting now, which in the past they weren't always, but fire would just be another tool, as cutting is, to make it easier, hopefully one day to preserve early sessional habitat. It's like what got me onto fire too is it's just so much effort to do with a chainsaw. We do with a chainsaw at CFA through our wildlife program. It's a lot of labor. It's extremely dangerous. You know, we're dealing with our insurance company right now for fire, and the one guy who's one of the biggest insurance wholesalers in the country, he's like, "I've tried to look at where fire [how dangerous it is], and it almost never escapes. I mean, if we really looked at it compared to cutting with chainsaws mechanically, it's night and day. It's just a lot of effort, and chemicals are not without cost either. I mean, you got to treat each individual tree and everything else. Fire. The most expensive part is really the administrative side right now, just getting through the government with burn plans and all that stuff, but over time I feel like the costs will come down if everyone's on the same page and familiar with it. It'll be a welcome back to silviculture and forestry, hopefully.

[00:14:46] Brett Barry: What have you learned so far about containing it to a specific area and not letting it go past that?

[00:14:52] Ryan Trapani: Knowing your fuels, you know, if you get it down to mineral soil, meaning your fire line around it, that would be the easiest thing to do. I've volunteered on a lot of fires now at the Albany Pine Bush. You can do a wet line where you mow the grass down and then you put some water down so it can't get beyond that. Hand tools are really, really great. You don't need as much water as you think if you put in your fire line. It's amazing how little water you need, but up there at Albany Pine Bush, they're really the only ones kind of burning in New York State regularly, and they do it for the Karner blue butterfly up there.

[00:15:27] Brett Barry: There's someone who has a place a few miles from here who's been clearing for months and months and months to kind of get the Japanese knotweed down. Would that be a candidate for this program?

[00:15:38] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, there's a lot of talk about how this could maybe be used on interfering or invasive species, and again, our knowledge is limited. A lot of us think that it probably could be used as a tool to reduce invasive species, like stilt grass, right? Maybe knotweed, but really, I'm going to be honest, the research is limited because we just—we're just trying to apply fire right now safely to answer all those silvicultural things. We need more experience with fire in the northern climate, I think, but yeah, maybe it could be used for that.

[00:16:10] Brett Barry: This email that went out starting with "Dear Friend of Fire," I thought, you know, it captures you right away, and like, what's this about? How quickly did this idea come up? I mean, it seems like something you're really excited about now.

[00:16:21] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, well, I mean, the first time I really saw the benefits of fire—I've read about it, but seeing it and feeling it and touching it is totally different, right? The first time I saw it, there was a wildfire on Cherrytown Mountain just above Kerhonkson on forest preserve property, a wilderness area, and it burned, you know, I don't know, hundreds of acres, and American chestnut sprouted from the old stump sprouts, so it actually produced chestnut because it was growing from old roots. They died back from the chestnut blight afterwards, but I picked garbage bags of those chestnuts. I used to go up there with the blueberry rake for 2 or 3 years and actually rake them up and put them on a ramp, the blueberries, so the berries would fall down the ramp and the leaves would stay behind. That's how many blueberries there were up there. It was just an awesome wildlife habitat. The bears were in there with the deer, the rabbits, and songbirds galore! It's noisy. That's when you're like, "Wow, this fire stuff is really cool!" Forbs and grasses, and there's bulbs, you know, like when you go on Ashokan Mountain or you go up Overlook, that's not natural. That's actually caused by humans. That was prior burning. Same thing with Shawangunk Ridge. That's not natural. That is from humans burning the bejesus out of it, so a lot of those bulbs and stuff—southerners call them balds. We don't know what we call them up here. Those are from humans, you know, but that's really good wildlife habitat, those openings, so that's really got me into fire, and then after, like, you know, using a chainsaw a lot, I'm like, "Man, this is a lot of work." There's got to be an easier, more efficient way to kill small trees, you know, and fire is definitely not perfect. You can't just burn once and be like, "You're done." It's something you have to revisit.

[00:18:04] Brett Barry: Are there specific parcels or species that you're targeting or attempting to prioritize in getting this program up and going?

[00:18:13] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, so at first, I can only really—I'm limited to those low-complexity fires, right? With limited experience and credentials, it's really all you could do in those fields that are starting to grow back, right? So that's what—that's the low-hanging fruit. That's what we're going to target. Ultimately, I would love to target oak stands where, you know, like, a perfect place to do a fire would be where the forest floor is. You know, some mountain laurel, some blueberry, and there's an overstory of oak, and now there's competing maple trees, red maple especially, and we need to kill those maple trees. Now, that doesn't mean that you just burn only. You may have to use some herbicide and target some of those maple trees and then do a fire. There's a lot of silviculture in that, and people studying that is like Penn State out in Western Pennsylvania and the USDA Forest Service. There's a lot of good information on how to use fire to promote red and white oak.

[00:19:13] Brett Barry: And as you said, fire is one more tool in the box, and that's the whole mission of the Catskill Forest Association, right? It's to not just let forests go do their thing, but to manage them in a way that keeps them healthier and actually promotes more biodiversity.

[00:19:29] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, absolutely, I guess the analogy I use is, like, alcohol. Okay, you're like, "What alcohol?" So, I mean, look at prohibition. You know, I was reading an article about this, and before prohibition there were bartenders, and there was a whole economy on how to get your bitters and the aromas and everything to put in and make a good cocktail. Once prohibition happened, it killed that whole economy, and it's taken till, like, now for distilleries to come back, and someone to make a decent Manhattan. I'm always looking for a good Manhattan, and you'd be surprised how terrible they are almost everywhere you go, but it's coming back. Fire is even worse. You know, it's basically been outlawed, and not just for Native Americans [but for everyone]. It's been so cost prohibitive. They're requiring some states' burn boss. If you are a burn boss status, it is very high up. It takes many years to get that. You're just not going to have a resource of people to burn if we're going to require that, so basically fire was almost illegal in many areas, and that knowledge is, you know, it takes time to come back.

[00:20:35] Brett Barry: Yeah, well, I guess those who set up these regulations have been burned, so to speak, because of the unregulated fires or campfires that go wild. You know, all the things that we're seeing about roasting a marshmallow in a dried kind of western environment, it sets off this month-long series of fires, so it's going to take a lot, I think, to convince people otherwise that fire is something that can be used in a manageable way and may even reduce the likelihood of the fires we don't want to see, right, because you're getting ahead of it in some ways?

[00:21:09] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, exactly, so the way some people are selling this is, well, if we burn, then we're going to have fewer high-intensity fires because, look at the ridge, the Shawangunk Ridge has tons of fuels up there because it used to burn all the time. Now, it doesn't. Now, you get these really big fires that could be damaging, right? If you burn more frequently, they're going to be less severe. They're, you know, severe, meaning less negative impact, so out west, they pay the price for not burning because they have a dry climate and they do get fuel buildup, and then it's really bad, right? We do get 40 inches of rain up to 60 inches of rain by Slide Mountain, right, so we don't have that problem as much. We had a leaf fire in Peekamoose, what, two years ago? And yeah, if you have leaves coming up to your house, your house will burn down. It will, so we're not, you know, we're not totally immune to negative fires, even in areas that we don't think of burning. It could happen.

[00:22:10] Brett Barry: Do you have any sense of what happened prehistorically with nature's own regulation of forests in this area before even Native Americans were doing their prescribed burns? What were the forces at play that were keeping the forest diversified, or maybe it wasn't, and what have we as humans done to stand in the way of those natural processes?

[00:22:33] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, wow, that's a big question. I mean, [but] I just wrote an article called "Forest Lacking Humanity" for the Shawangunk Journal because someone called in or emailed me being like, "I'd really like you to write an article about, like, what the forest would be like without humans." Well, we already have that kind of—it's called the Catskill Forest Preserve. It's not totally without humans, but, you know, the forest would go towards shade-tolerant plants in the Northeast. I'm not speaking about anywhere else, so that's your sugar maple, your eastern hemlock. Unfortunately, we have the woolly adelgid. That's the most shade-tolerant tree, an American beech. American beech is the most shade-tolerant hardwood, and eastern hemlock is the most shade-tolerant conifer, so it would move towards that. It, I don't think, would be as diverse. It's kind of like saying, you know, an apple tree that's unpruned will still produce fruit, right? If you prune a thing or you cut trees around it from shading it out, it'll last longer and produce more fruit. They both will always be beneficial in some ways, but humans have the ability, just like beavers, except for humans, much more, to inject sunlight into the forest, and that basically creates diversity because some plants are just shade-intolerant. It's kind of like John Burroughs, our naturalist, right? What did he say when he was up on this one stream that he loved to fish? I'm not even going to say it because it's one of my favorites to fish, and he's remarking about how the tanners had gone through, and by his time they were already gone. In the late 1800s, it was already abandoned bark shanties, but he is remarking on picking blackberries because they created openings in the forest, which otherwise would've been a block of hemlock, and I love hemlock, but it's really not good for wildlife except for deer wintering yards, but the blackberries came up, and I'm sure some aspen here and there came up, and maybe some white ash here and there and black cherry—it diversified things kind of like farm abandonment. You can see that in areas of the forest preserve to this day where there's stands of black cherry that only could grow after farm abandonment, and they're now getting shaded out, and they're reverting to sugar maple, and that's not necessarily the worst thing in the world, but I wouldn't—I would question whether it's more diverse. I don't know, but it's got its own beauty, and I wrote about it in that article, like there's nothing cooler than an old sugar maple stand with spring ephemerals growing under them, you know, flowers and stuff and ginseng, right? That can only grow in that environment, but there's cost too, and that's shade-intolerant plants.

[00:25:08] Brett Barry: I guess it's just hard to imagine or to reconcile that humans are part of the ecosystem.

[00:25:13] Ryan Trapani: We're part of it, and, you know, I feel like the humans are probably riding the glacier as they receded. That's what people kind of forget. I mean, it was only twelve or thirteen thousand years ago. Who's to say the humans weren't there? I mean, they live in cold environments to this day where it's like, you know, almost a winter tundra all year round. Humans are extremely adaptable. You know, we had Charles Mann on "From the Forest" [a radio show], and he talks about, you know, probably the biggest change: Europeans coming, the Columbian Exchange, right? That's probably changed their forest more than anything and probably changed the world, really, but as far as, you know, before humans, I don't know. That's tough. There's another good book by Omer Stewart, "Forgotten Fires," and, you know, he talks about how, like, a lot of people think, "Well, lightning probably started a lot of fires," but it was probably humans all along starting the majority of fires anywhere you went from the Rocky Mountains to the prairies, and he would say this. This is something that sticks out to me in that book because back in his day [the 1930s and 1940s], they were debating these things. It was called the light burners and the never burners, and most foresters were the never burners because they wanted to protect timber, like Gifford Pinchot and stuff, but he was like, "If I'm wrong about fire [that they were human-caused mostly], then why are the prairies filling in?" And he's right. As soon as whites or Europeans came in, the prairies started filling in. You know, I mean, at first they weren't because they had cows, but now, we don't have as much farmland even in the Midwest, despite the Catskills. They're filling in with red cedar to this day. They complain about red cedar growing in because of a lack of fires, you know, and he would plant trees to show that people look, trees will grow in the prairie, and he did experiments even with black walnut and stuff. They would create their own microclimate and create their own soil types as litter would fall down, and even in areas with less than 20 inches of rainfall, they would produce trees over time, amazing.

[00:27:06] Brett Barry: So just getting back to this program that is now part of your offerings, how do you hope it will move forward, and how do you want people to engage with it?

[00:27:15] Ryan Trapani: I just want to get a few fires on private land. There's a lot of uncertainties. The two uncertainties are navigating the prescribed burn plan approval process with the New York State DEC, and I'm not berating them or anything. I think it's new to all of us, and they want to cover themselves as well. They don't want a fire that gets out of control, and now they're responsible for it. Maybe the other thing is the insurance. The insurance is very difficult. There is an insurance company. You'd be surprised how few there are in the whole country, but there are one or two or three outfits that do this, and how much that costs or increases our insurance costs is kind of, you know, we'll see, but it's about probably anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000 a year, but I just want to get a few fires under our belt with experience and then go from there, and that low-hanging fruit is those fields that are growing in, and I want to preserve those because those are so important to wildlife. I mean, how much hunters, for example, spend on food plots for deer is a lot, but, you know, fire can do similar things for forage and satisfy the deer and other wildlife species.

[00:28:25] Brett Barry: Can you just explain that? Because I'm not a hunter, so you're spending money on food plots?

[00:28:28] Ryan Trapani: Oh yeah, so, you know, they'll come in with Roundup or herbicide and kill the grass, and then maybe plant rye or oats or whatever, you know, different food, you know...

[00:28:39] Brett Barry: Which is terrible because then you've got chemicals in the soil, and it's killing all kinds of things, so...

[00:28:43] Ryan Trapani: it could be if you need to start it over, you know, because there's a lot of weeds and stuff, you know what I mean?

[00:28:49] Brett Barry: But it seems to me that fire would be a really nice alternative to chemicals.

[00:28:52] Ryan Trapani: Well, it's organic fire, so there's a great organization out there called the National Deer Association, and Kip Adams is amazing. He was at the course in Pennsylvania I was taking, and he talks about the benefits of fire for deer habitat.

[00:29:08] Brett Barry: Anything I missed or that you want to fill in?

[00:29:10] Ryan Trapani: So really, you know, the Catskill Forest Association, we try to serve small forest owners, and that's what this is for, and I also want to target small forest land because our resources are limited. You know, like when I've been going to these fires up in Albany, I would always do a head count of how many people were there and how much land they were burning, and it's about a person per acre. I was like, "I'll never have that, or I won't have that anytime soon, so we're going to keep it to less than 10 acres, less than 5 in most cases. Go really small at first, and that's okay." You know, most of the average parcel size is about 18 acres in the Catskills, and I'm fine with that.

[00:29:52] Brett Barry: And you're used to that with other techniques that you're using because, you know, this is just one of many tools, including, well, all the things we discussed in our last show together that the Catskill Forest Association does to help manage the forest?

[00:30:05] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, and our members ask us about it, so it wasn't just me being like, "I like fire." A lot of our members believe it or not—maybe it's through some of our education, maybe it's through some of the wildfires going on, that smoke that came into New York City. They're like, "Can I burn my land? Can I burn?" So once we get asked something over and over again, that's when we start to say, "Hey, maybe this should be a program or a service offered to people." That's how it works with us usually.

[00:30:30] Brett Barry: Any other services or programs that are top of mind right now this time of year?

[00:30:34] Ryan Trapani: This time of year, well, we're just getting ready for the apple tree burning season. We'll be out in every day.

[00:30:41] Brett Barry: That starts when in March?

[00:30:42] Ryan Trapani: January 1.

[00:30:43] Brett Barry: Oh, really, that early?

[00:30:44] Ryan Trapani: January 1 through mid-April every day.

[00:30:46] Brett Barry: Wow!

[00:30:47] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, so...

[00:30:49] Brett Barry: And that's essential for keeping a tree fruiting and healthy?

[00:30:53] Ryan Trapani: Yeah, yep, absolutely, there's a lot of apple trees out there still, and the reason why we started doing that again is our members would ask, and I was like, "I don't know who does it like consistently, you know, sometimes a guy here and there that does it, but so you do it all over with the Catskills from Oneonta to Glen Spey to all across the river and to Rhinebeck and beyond.

[00:31:16] Brett Barry: And your membership requirements, or how to get involved for people who want to learn more or take advantage of those services?

[00:31:23] Ryan Trapani: You can join online. Basic membership: $75 a year, quarterly newsletter. We will be sent to you by mail. It's not just online, and most events are free, and, of course, if you wanted this prescribed burn program to actually go forward, we are trying to raise like $28,000 to $30,000. The way I equated it was to try to have equipment for a 10-person crew, so we'll see if we can do it. You know, we got some people who are kind of amped up on it, so we'll see.

[00:31:51] Brett Barry: And CFA's a nonprofit?

[00:31:52] Ryan Trapani: A private nonprofit 501(c)(3), so we can receive donations and they are tax deductible.

[00:31:57] Brett Barry: Well, thanks a lot, Ryan. I appreciate it.

[00:31:58] Ryan Trapani: Thanks for having me on again, man.

[00:32:00] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:32:00] Ryan Trapani: Yep.

[00:32:01] Brett Barry: To hear our first show with Ryan, where he walked my property and pointed out those hazard trees, head over to kaatscast.com and search for Ryan Trapani or CFA. It should pop right up. While you're there, you can search every one of our shows by category, keyword, or full transcript text. Sign up for our newsletter or check out the Kaatscast Store. Please rate and review wherever you get your podcasts and stay connected on Instagram [@kaatscast]. Transcripts by Jerome Kazlauskas, announcements by Campbell Brown, chief morale and quality assurance officer Rebecca Rego Barry, and I'm your host and producer Brett Barry wishing you a happy new year filled with good health, real joy, and only intentional fires. Many thanks to Roger and Rozanne, Tom, Richard, Robin, Maisie, Allan and Donna, DGB, Carol, and all of our listener supporters. If you'd like to help support the show, there's a link at kaatscast.com. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch up with you again in two weeks for season 6/7... 7 of "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast."

[00:33:25] Audio: [SONG: "Auld Lang Syne"]