Producer's Notes for Science on the SPOT: Fire and Butterflies

On a glorious sunny August morning I found myself in a parking lot in the Marin headlands attending in a pre-burn fire crew meeting. While most of my attention was allocated towards snapping photos of the fire crews, I picked up a few words from the burn master Roger Wong. My ears perked up when he described how we should flee down hill in the unlikely event that the flames escaped their control. Good to know.

He went on to inform the crews where the ambulance would pick up casualties in the event of an accident, and that helicopter extraction was standing by in case anyone was badly burned. The crew of about 30 firefighters appeared completely unfazed, just another day at the office. The divide between these fairly heroic-looking fire crew members and myself was exaggerated by the fact that I was provided with the last available set of fireproof clothing, which was far too large for me. I also had to figure out how to wear my bulky headphones and a bright orange hard hat simultaneously.

It was my first day out as a primary shooter for QUEST’s Science on the SPOT. As the summer intern I was just happy to be out in the field producing content, instead of being back in an office logging tapes and making coffee the way so many productions require of their interns. I had just moved back to the bay area from Bozeman, where I had spent the last three years as a graduate student in Montana State University’s MFA program in Science and Natural History Filmmaking. A few months earlier I had met QUEST Producer Chris Bauer at the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival. We both had films screening the festival, and between screenings I had told him that I was a huge fan of KQED and QUEST. He suggested that as a student I should look into the possibility of interning with QUEST. Now here we were, three months later, about to film a prescribed burn intended to improve habitat quality for endangered Mission Blue Butterflies by increasing the population of their fire disturbance dependent host plant, the Silver Leaf Lupine.

I was very eager to try to impress Chris by getting some great footage of the burn, despite being relatively unfamiliar with the QUEST camera and audio equipment. Compounding my challenge was the bright sun and wind; not ideal conditions for shooting interviews with digital video.

The burn had actually been planned for the week before, but thick fog dampened the possibility of a quality burn at that time. But now the weather was just right for a fire, and the fog seemed content to lurk off shore in the distance. When I was first told about the shoot I had pictured a giant controlled burn the size of several football fields with 30 foot flames leaping into the sky, but I later found out that the burns would actually be performed in 3 meter square open topped stainless steel boxes. The fire crews placed the boxes over areas of grass and brush that had been previously marked of and used gasoline in a drip can to ignite the dry vegetation which immediately lit up. In my eagerness, I moseyed up to the edge of the box and peered over the edge with the camera. While it was not the huge conflagration I had previously imagined it was certainly a powerful blaze, enough to singe the fuzzy wind protection covering the camera’s microphone (don’t tell anyone), and make me consider taking a few steps back. When the fuel was exhausted and the fire burned out, they would move the box to the next plot and “cold trail” the burnt plot with fire hoses.

While humans have an innate fear of fire, it is a natural part of the coastal grassland ecosystem. Wildlife Ecologist Bill Merkle explained to us that historically the coastal region was comprised of a mosaic of habitats allowing any one particular area to burn at a time within its own boundary. Humans had a drastic effect on the ecosystem, and generations raised on warnings from a certain bear in a ranger’s hat had resulted many areas going unnaturally long without a burn.

This brings us to the point of this entire endeavor… by performing prescribed burns on specific parts of the coastal grassland within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area Bill Merkle and his partners hoped to increase the Silver Leaf Lupine population, with the plan to burn larger areas if the experimental burns proved successful. Lupine thrives in areas that experience disturbance, and the plant’s seeds actually require some sort of “scarification” by fire or abrasion in order to germinate. The day’s experiment was to compare scraping with McLeod fire rake to a controlled burn, to see would prove more successful in inducing seed germination and growth.

By the end of the day the crew had successfully burned four separate areas and seemed satisfied with their work. I was also feeling pretty good about the footage I had collected, and the interview we had done with Bill Merkle. It was then that I happened to look over at my fellow QUESTrian Chris and realized that we had both forgotten sunscreen. And with that, two rather rosy-hued filmmakers headed back to the city.

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