On a late August morning in the Goethe State Forest, insects piled onto yellow wildflower blooms until the stems drooped under their weight.
They flitted between saw palmettos and goldenrod, buzzing loud enough to startle Logan Deuel, a supervisor with the Florida Forest Service. He swatted at an exuberant fly, then returned his hands to his hips, admiring the scene.
In April, the Cow Creek fire burned a swath of this forest almost three times the size of Central Park. It was an intense, destructive blaze that prompted evacuations and took six fire departments to fight.
The forest’s regrowth has “just been incredible,” Deuel said.
Plants and pollinators returned in droves over the summer, replacing moon-grey ash piles with patchwork quilts of wildflowers and palmettos. Cow Creek’s rapid regrowth is encouraging, ecologists say, and the product of careful management in a fire-prone state.
The fire
The Goethe State Forest headquarters was quiet in the early afternoon of April 21. Deuel had just finished fixing the water fountain when his radio crackled to life. One of the service’s pilots had spotted a thick plume of smoke in the northern section of the forest in Levy County, near Cow Creek Road.
Deuel tossed his fire gear into a white pickup and drove deeper into the forest.
“It's just this apocalyptic wall of fire on two sides of the highway and everybody scrambling,” Deuel recalled.
Flames ate away at thick layers of dead, dry plants. Strong winds spread it quickly, spitting embers that started new, smaller fires. A monthslong drought, the worst in Florida since 2012, shorted the forest over two feet of its typical rain. Flames pushed through dried ponds and wetlands that normally would’ve stopped them.
Wildfires burned throughout the state, the most in decades. Resources were spread thin.
“Our folks were tied up on the Kings Road fire, which was another wildfire south of here,” Deuel said. “So we had pulled in supervisors from other counties.”
Help came from every fire department in Levy County, plus others from surrounding counties and state agencies, too. Helicopters whirred overhead, communicating the fire’s spread and dropping buckets of water on its “head”: its hottest and most intense front.
In the end, the fire burned for about two weeks. It destroyed an outbuilding, but neighbors, homes and livestock survived unscathed.
Many pine trees died. The forest service auctioned off plots of dead trees for timber harvesters to come in and clear out. Crews “salvage logged” around 750 acres, leaving strategic patches of trees where red cockaded woodpeckers are known to nest. Most of the revenue from the sales went to the state general fund, plus a portion to the county.
Most pine trees survived, though, and new life surrounds them.
“It’s just like an absolute boom of biodiversity,” Deuel said.
The plants
Deuel watches his step to avoid tiny wildflower buds as he approaches a hubcap-sized saw palmetto.
“It's a really just tough, kind of almost prehistoric-looking plant,” he said, admiring a cluster. “Each one of these has probably put on a dozen, two dozen palm fronds already.”
The palmettos connect to each other with thick stems that dip above and below the forest’s sandy soils. Their scaly, black-charred stems look almost reptilian, earning them the nickname “gator backs.”
The gator backs are glimpses of a much larger, underground network of shoots and stems the plant uses to reproduce. As flames burned above-ground fronds, soils insulated these subterranean reserves.
They began to regrow within a week, Deuel said.
This above-and-below-ground shuffle allows individual palmettos to survive a very long time, said University of Florida fire ecologist Rae Crandall. Researchers in other parts of the state identified plants that could be over 5,000 years old: older than the Egyptian pyramids.
“Our plants are adapted to these frequent fires,” she said. “They're going to invest below ground. That's what is keeping them going forward.”
Crandall hasn’t dated stringy, pom-pom shaped wiregrass but suspects it could be even older than palmetto. “When you're out in Goethe, these are potentially ancient plants that you're walking through,” she said.
The fire is ancient, too.
Crandall and UF colleague David Godwin direct an outreach program called the Southern Fire Exchange, which provides fire research to those managing burns.
Studying fire scars on tree trunks provides a “window into the past”, Godwin said, and reveals that fires have always been common in the Southeast.
Fire is such a powerful force for rejuvenation in Florida that land managers “prescribe” it. When carefully planned, monitored and managed, it can control tree diseases, reduce the risk of wildfires and stimulate new growth.
In North Central Florida, and across the country, Native Americans have used fire for thousands of years. Florida cattlemen adopted similar fire-lighting practices following colonization. Today, the state sees more prescribed burns than wildfires.
That sets it apart from the Western U.S., where higher-intensity wildfires fueled, in part, by climate change, are driving longer recovery timelines.
In the West, “the system sort of starts over,” Crandall said, “whereas ours, it's more of a regeneration, renew, regrow.”
The pollinators
Back in the Goethe State Forest, Deuel crouched by a fallen tree, so close that the brim of his hat almost hit it.
“If you’re really quiet, you can hear the wood-boring beetles,” he said with a smile.
They’re one of many insects that emerged following the fire. Bees, butterflies and dragonflies came, too, likely a mix of previous residents and newcomers.
Rachel Mallinger, a pollinator ecologist at UF, said it’s common for recently burned areas to have more pollinators than their unburned surroundings.
“That area that was burned can be really attractive for a few different reasons,” she said. Essentially, the growing forest offers a bed-and-breakfast combination.
Newly-bare ground makes nesting easier for the bees and other insects that dig their homes into the forest floor.
The plants that grow back quickly tend to produce lots of flowers. Thanks to a fire-cleared landscape, they may be more visible to pollinators.
“ A lot of those insects that might be in that area are maybe being drawn from nearby habitats that didn't experience the burn,” Mallinger said. “There also could be insects that survived the burn that were in that area that have emerged.”
The year ahead could look even better thanks to the timing of this wildfire.
Growing-season burns like this one increase plant and pollinator diversity in the years that follow, Mallinger’s research found.
Still, the sheer number of butterflies and bees that have returned to this part of the forest already is enough to make Deuel grin.
“To get to, like, step back a little bit and appreciate the beauty of it and see all this life come back is a really good feeling,” he said.
