BADGER MOUNTAIN — On a cold Saturday morning, a group of volunteers gathered around a garage on Badger Mountain with bags strapped to their sides and gardening shears in hand.
This group, all wearing face masks and standing 6 feet apart, was brought together by the Chelan-Douglas Land Trust to help save sagebrush on the Spiva Butte Nature Preserve near Mansfield. The volunteers were cutting ripe seed heads from sage and placing them into the bags to spread later.
The Pearl Hill Fire burned almost 100 percent of the Spiva Butte preserve, said Al Murphy, a retired forester for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
The Land Trust purchased the 1,396-acre property almost two years ago because of the quality of its sagebrush habitat to help protect sage grouse.
“The good news is the fire was being pushed by a 40- to 60-mph wind,” Murphy said. “So, it was a very low intensity fire to the soil.”
The integrity of the shrub steppe should remain intact, except for the sagebrush and bitterbrush, said Susan Ballinger, Chelan-Douglas Land Trust naturalist. Sagebrush is susceptible to fire and can’t grow back once it’s burned. It propagates by spreading its seeds in the wind, but the seeds only get carried about 100 feet away. And no sagebrush remains on Spiva Butte.
What the volunteers gathered to do on Saturday was not a tested or proven method of sagebrush propagation, Ballinger said. It was instead a creative effort of trying to handle an impossible situation.
“We’re having to invent methods, because the scale of these fires has really interrupted the normal process of how sagebrush reseeds,” she said.
The Land Trust is working with Benson Farms, a Moses Lake company that grows native plants for habitat restoration, Ballinger said. The seeds that the volunteers were cutting from the sagebrush were taken to people’s garages to be dried.
“You spread out a tarp and then I’ve been putting my bedsheets, fitted sheets don’t work as well, and then you lay (the sage) out to air dry,” she said.
The bed sheets smell great once they’re done being used, Ballinger said.
Benson Farms employees plan to drive around Spiva Butte on an all-terrain vehicle and fling the seeds about, she said. The company’s employees will also grow a few of the sagebrush plants to seedlings for planting later.
“There are a lot of mice out there with nothing to eat,” Ballinger said. “But when you have 10,000 seeds on a seed head, the mice won’t eat them all.”
The Land Trust employees had a very small window of time to do this work, she said. The sagebrush seeds were only ripe for about a week for plucking and had to be scattered soon after, before too much snow fell.
Volunteers gathered seeds from Murphy’s on Badger Mountain property was also selected, because the sagebrush located there was in the same seed zone as the sagebrush on Spiva Butte, Ballinger said. It means that the sagebrush grew at a similar enough elevation and location that it was a similar species.
“Normally you would collect much closer (plants) to get the same genetics,” Ballinger said. “But the scale of that Pearl Hill Fire, it is a scale you can’t believe in terms of how many hundreds of square miles it is.”
