Good day. I am Keikoa with the Cape Cod National Seashore. Have you ever noticed smoke and
fires burning on the Cape? Well, there's a good chance you are seeing the National
Seashore's fire management program at work. The young adults who are a part of AmeriCorps
Cape Cod Fire Corps, along with the friends of the Cape Cod National Seashore, work year
around to protect the landscape and protect us from wildfires. Plus, the AmeriCorps team
members gained great work experience in environmental sciences. In fact, they finished the AmeriCorps
year with 11 months of work experience in fire management, making them highly employable.
Today, we are out in the field talking with seashore fire management officer Dave Crary,
AmeriCorps Cape Cod members and volunteers from the friends of the Cape Cod National
Seashore. We'll be learning a little more about the way they work together to use fire
as a tool to manage and protect the Cape.
Hello, I'm Kate Sullivan, fire technician with the National Park Service, and we're
here today with Fire Corps and the friends of Cape Cod National Seashore. Good morning.
I'm David Crary, Jr. from East Ham, and I'm the fire management officer here at Cape Cod
National Seashore. We spoke with Dave Crary about the history
of fire on Cape Cod and why the seashore continues to do controlled burns today.
At Cape Cod fire ecology, over 14,000 years ago, the last great glacial ice sheet left
this area, leaving behind the substrate, which is Cape Cod. Vegetation has grown on that
for at least the last 8,000 years, I mean, forest vegetation, and it's accumulated over
those years. The material that was left by the glacier, just basically unconsolidated
sand and granicular debris, gives rise to a very xeric vegetation type. Pitch pine trees,
huckleberry, black oaks, scrub oaks, those grow in very dry sites. Those dry sites burn
from time to time, and the species that are here have adaptations to survive periodic
fire. The glacial ponds in Wellfleet and Truro, those deep, beautiful ponds, cores have been
taken to the sediments, and then it's been analyzed for both charcoal layers and for
pollen. And that shows, the analysis of that shows that probably three times a century,
every 30 to 40 years, a fire burned through the landscapes of Wellfleet and Truro, the
landscape that you see behind me. This is truly a joint effort of both the seashore
and the community. As a member of the general corps, I work three days a week with my housemates.
There's 13 of us, and we do conservation work, taking out invasive species, and also doing
shellfish propagation. We do environmental education, going to schools and teaching kids
about the water, and we do disaster preparedness and response. We run the shelters in case
of any storms that knock out the power, and our last focus area is volunteer engagement.
So we like to bring in members of the community to volunteer alongside us. Cape Cod National
Seashore can't do this all on our own. Both members of AmeriCorps Cape Cod and volunteers,
such as the friends of the Cape Cod National Seashore. We've been doing this with Dave
Curry for many years now. I've lost track of how many. Carl Sylvester is actually the
coordinator who started this. We started in the fall of the year in November, due cutting
and piling, because the seashore is very respectful of the town's restrictions about burning
until the middle of January. So by the time January 15th rolls around, we have lots of
burn piles ready, and one of those, or several of those, actually are going today and keeping
us warm on a damp March day. AmeriCorps Cape Cod member Lisbeth Rodriguez works as the
volunteer coordinator for fire management at the seashore. It is her duty to ensure
volunteers know what to do, where to be, and to make sure they are safe on the job.
So my job is to keep all the gear ready. We have gloves, no-mix, and hard hats for our
volunteers as well as loppers and hand saws, and I reach out to different groups, and I
have them come in for cut pile burn projects like this, and I have to make sure all our
volunteers know how to use the equipment safely and effectively. Not only is this a great
skill-building experience for the Fire Corps members, and the volunteers who help out,
but this is a great life experience for them as well. There is a lot to take away from
the year they spend as a team. It is a really wonderful experience. In these few months
that I have spent out here, I have learned quite a lot, and I feel like I have grown
quite a lot. I would highly recommend this to anybody who is interested.
