Wildfire Training at Eglin Air Force Base

Mason McKinley recently went to Florida for a training exchange at Eglin Air Force Base. Read his firsthand account of his experience.

It was only my second day at Eglin, and we received a report of smoke on the installation from the civil air patrol. I had been designated in a trainee position to lead any wildfire initial attacks. It was the end of the normal workday, and the crew was just returning from an 800 acre controlled burn. We rounded up our initial attack crew of three and headed out to find the wildfire.

Mason McKinley working on his ICT4 qualifications at Eglin AFB (photo: Mason McKinley).

What was I doing at Eglin AFB on the Florida Panhandle? Eglin was recently recognized as the military’s center for excellence in wildland fire. This designation recognizes and strengthens the base’s emphasis on providing training for firefighters from across the nation. Our connection with Joint Base Lewis-McChord enabled me to spend the two weeks training at Eglin to become an Incident Commander Type 4 (ICT4).

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CPOP's Impact on the Prairie Oak Community

Imagine being a land manager in British Columbia, trying to coordinate a release of Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies. You have to find a site, integrate the butterflies into a long-term management plan for the site, prepare the release area over many years by removing invasives and planting native nectar and host species, find seeds or plugs of these plants, find an organization to grow checkerspot larvae (or decide to grow your own stock), potentially deal with the logistics of transporting animals over international borders, have the larvae available in advance, release the larvae, conduct monitoring and continued restoration in the future, and of course obtain funding for each of these processes. Quite a lot of coordination! And these are only a few of the steps involved in a butterfly reintroduction.

Attendees of the recent conference examined oak release efforts during a bird and restoration field trip to Basket Slough NWR (photo: Hannah Anderson).

Enter CPOP. CPOP, or the Cascadia Prairie Oak Partnership serves a community of people that are either personally or as representatives of an organization involved in prairie-oak conservation and species recovery efforts. CPOP helps increase coordinated project planning, share information, and tackle conservation challenges by facilitating communication, information-sharing, and collaborative action between different locales within the ecoregion, between agencies and organizations across political boundaries, and between policy makers and land managers.

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Quarterly Highlights

Camas is starting to bloom at some of our sites (photo by Adam Martin).

The CNLM Washington office has been working on many different exciting projects this spring. In partnership with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, we released over 3000 checkerspot larvae at Glacial Heritage in late February. We purchased a property in the Elwah Basin that is an occupied Taylor's checkerspot site. In the past few weeks, we have started working with a Department of Corrections Community Crew who will be exclusively be dedicated to working on prairie habitat restoration. We recently attended the Cascadia Prairie Oak Parternship Conference in Portland, attended by over 200 people. To read about all these projects and more, check out our most recent edition of our quarterly highlights.

Exploring Relationships Between Golden Paintbrush and Taylor’s Checkerspot

A pilot study evaluating post-diapause Taylor’s checkerspot larval use of golden paintbrush

Nate Haan (nate.haan@gmail.com), Mary Linders (Mary.Linders@dfw.wa.gov), Peter Dunwiddie (pdunwidd@uw.edu), Jon Bakker (jbakker@uw.edu), Eric Delvin (edelvin@tnc.org), and Cheryl Fimbel (cfimbel@cnlm.org)

Taylor's Checkerspot ovipositioning on golden paintbrush (photo courtesy of Dennis Aubrey).

The Taylor’s checkerspot (Euphydryas editha taylori) is a rare subspecies of butterfly that only occurs in a few sites in the Pacific Northwest. At one time, they were encountered in very large numbers in various lowland prairies in Washington, but these populations have now almost entirely disappeared. As a result, the subspecies has been proposed for federal listing. The larvae consume a variety of host plants, but specific information about their feeding requirements is lacking. In Washington, larvae are known to eat Lanceleaf plantain (Plantago lanceolata; Plantaginaceae) and Harsh paintbrush (Castilleja hispida; Orobanchaceae), but they have also been observed feeding on Golden paintbrush (Castilleja levisecta) and other members of the Orobanchaceae, including Sea blush (Plectritis congesta), species of Blue-eyed Mary (Collinsia spp.) Speedwell (Veronica spp.), and others.

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