After the Fires

For our July field trip Neville took us to two fire-affected sites, a recent one in the morning, and one burnt 4.5 years ago in the afternoon.

In the morning we visited a spot in the Mt. Cole-Mt. Buangor forest which was burnt during the Bayindeen fires in February this year. The fire started on 22 February and burned for more than two weeks, affecting about 22,000 hectares of farmland, residential areas and state forest. Neville guided us to an area which has only just re-opened to the public. Here the undergrowth had been consumed, but the bracken was reemerging and seedlings of many species were seen. Epicormic buds were sprouting from many of the eucalypts, and we were all surprised by the new fronds on some burnt tree-ferns.
The morning photos do not appear in our FNCB-iNaturalist project, as we were more than 50km from Ballarat. They are in our Members at Large project.

After lunch at Richards Campground we travelled on to an area burnt during the Lexton/Ben Major fire, in December 2019. That fire burned for 10 days, covering an area of 2,792 hectares. The spot we were visiting held a small patch of Austral Grass-trees. When Neville first visited after the fire, he thought all the grass-trees had been killed, but some have recovered and there are new ones that have grown since the fire. Grass-tree observation.

You can see all the observations from our field trip by clicking here.

(You might notice that I have worked out how to order the observations by the time they were seen, rather than the time they were uploaded to iNat. This gives a better impression of how the day proceeded, so I have gone back and edited some of our previous trips to display the results the same way.)

Thanks to Neville for a fascinating day out!

Posted on July 9, 2024 11:46 PM by vireyajacquard