Open Woodlands and Glades
Recently, we spent time renovating a high quality Open Woodland and Glade habitat. This particular site in Shannon County Missouri is unique because it is one of the most western locations of the rhyolite bedrock that extruded up through the earth to form the St Francois Mountains many years ago.
Igneous Glades
Rhyolite is an igneous form of granite that has an attractive purple tint in the eastern Ozarks. The rocks make for some very rugged terrain, making management activities a bit more of a challenge. Because the rock is so close to the surface on these sites, the soil is thin, and tree growth is fairly limited.
Trees take a long time to grow, and don’t grow very tall, but lots of native grasses, wildflowers, and legumes that were created to withstand these harsh environments thrive when given plenty of sunlight.
Prescribed Fire
Many of these sites which are valuable for wildlife are fewer and further between because of our need to control widespread wildfires that once shaped the vegetation of our landscape and kept open woodlands and glades fairly open.
Prescribed fire is a useful tool, but has become more and more of a challenge to use in today’s society, so other tactics that help reduce woody encroachment on these sites for just a little bit longer between wider fire intervals will help.
This is where Hack and Squirt comes in:
In this video, I explain some of our objectives for using the hack and squirt method of thinning, and in the next installment I will show the actual process in action. Stay tuned!