by Carlton Ward Jr. | January 8, 2025
Why This Female Fire Crew is Burning Down Florida’s Forests
An all-female fire crew restores Florida’s habitats with prescribed burns, protecting wildlife and the endangered panther.
In this photo, fire worker Char’Rese Finney uses a drip torch to light a controlled burn at The Nature Conservancy’s Disney Wilderness Preserve, an important conservation and restoration area in the Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge. I was excited to spend a day with Finney and her other all-female fire crew members from land trusts and government agencies throughout Florida. While a team of women burning the woods was a strong story on its own, my motivation was also from the perspective of showcasing how fire is important for maintaining and restoring wildlife habitats.
I arrived at this controlled burn through advocating for the protection of the Florida Wildlife Corridor. For my work with Wildpath and the Path of the Panther project, I had been focusing on the Florida panther as an ambassador for conserving a connected network of wildlife habitat from the Everglades north to Georgia and west to Alabama. In addition to needing more wild lands and ranches to be protected from development, Florida’s wildlife also needs existing conservation lands to be managed to ensure the best quality habitat.
That’s where fire comes in. Florida’s uplands were born to burn, especially pine forests in savannas. Surrounded by oceans and baking in subtropical sunlight, Florida has the moisture and heat engine to be one of the thunderstorm capitals of the world. These conditions bring frequent cloud to ground lightning—a powerful fire starter. As a result, over millennia, most of Florida’s pinelands have naturally caught fire every one to five years. These fires often start in the late spring or early summer when the rain and lightning season would begin and the sandy soils were still dry enough for foliage to ignite and carry flames for miles. Fire is a natural process in Florida and prescribed burns, like the one Finney and her crew are managing, emulate historic patterns for the subtropical savannas. When the vegetation grows back, wildlife like Florida’s endangered grasshopper sparrow living in the habitat thrive in the short new growth. Longleaf pine ecosystems can support as much species diversity as tropical rain forests and are important stepping stones in the northward recovery of the endangered Florida panther.
After this burn, the first thing I did when I got home was share photos with my daughters. The fire crew had assembled from all over the state, from as far away as the Florida Panhandle and down to the Florida Keys and had executed a textbook perfect burn of a few hundred acres of restored longleaf pine and wiregrass savanna. As people have moved to Florida by the millions and the resulting pressure of climate change has never been more evident in our state, I am thankful for these land managers who care for a valuable piece of the Florida Wildlife Corridor and protect the Everglades Headwaters from overdevelopment.
