Soldiers Delight Fire
A wildfire at Soldiers Delight
On April 4, 2023, there was an unplanned fire at the Soldiers Delight Natural Environment Area (Wikipedia) here in Maryland.
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| Source: https://soldiersdelight.org/ |
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| Source: https://owingsmills.patch.com/ |
Soldiers Delight is one of my favorite places to day hike, about 15 minutes drive from my home.
Wildfires are scary and often end in ecological tragedy. However, the Soldiers Delight area is a "Serpentine Grassland and Oak Savanna Ecosystem", and it is one of those ecosystems that actually benefit from periodic fires. Forest services create controlled burns in these types of areas on purpose, sometimes.
The mechanics of why that is true are beyond my ability to describe here, but the upshot is that a fire here is not the tragedy that one might assume it to be.
They reopened the trails and I took a stroll through it today and snapped a few pictures; while it looks devastating, life is already valiantly clawing its way back, and in time it will be even more robust than it was before.
Nature, how does it work? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Here's the pics:
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| Burned area 1 |
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| Burned area 2 |
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| As you can see, life will find a way! |
posted by Jack Lyons at April 14, 2023
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