BAKER CANYON — On a charred hilltop overlooking what was once healthy chaparral until this week's fire transformed it into a blackened moonscape, wild land expert Robin Wills poked his boot at some ash Friday and declared the area wasn't half as bad as he had feared.
"Actually, I kind of like it," said Wills, quickly adding, "but for ecological reasons, because it means rejuvenation of plant life in this area."
Wills, fire program manager for the California Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that seeks to protect wild lands, toured the blackened area on foot.
He was joined by Trisha Smith, project coordinator for the Nature Conservancy, which manages portions of the burnt land for the Irvine Co.
The fire consumed more than 5,330 acres, scorching a wide swath several miles long and destroying 30-year-old chaparral in some places. In addition to killing wildlife, the fire burned native plants, such as black sage, buckwheat and California lilac.
But the conservationists said the landscape will renew itself, possibly within 10 years. It could be 20 or 30 more years, however, before the vegetation is as abundant as before.
The fear, they said, is that with the blow dealt the ecosystem, weeds and nonnative plants can now move in and compete with native plants.
Smith pointed to a small creek bed, where giant reeds--tall, bamboo-like plants with yellow stalks--had escaped the fire.
"You see the fire jumped over the creek and didn't cause damage here," Smith said. "But burning might have helped by taking out the reeds because they're fast-growing and can overwhelm the native plant species, such as oaks, sycamores and willows."
In addition, the giant reeds can choke the creek bed and cause flooding in winter storms. Also, when they die off, they can become fuel for brush fires, igniting and causing damage to a creek's tall oak trees, sycamores and willows, she said.
A similar ecological battle occurred in the aftermath of the Laguna Beach fire in 1993. Only there, the invader was a gangly South American plant known as tree tobacco, an unsmokable distant cousin to common tobacco.
While the native plants struggled to come back, the tree tobacco sprouted faster and dug its roots deep into soil that once nurtured cactus, competing with other plants for water and space, Wills said.
In order to give the California sage and cactus a chance to return, workers aggressively attacked the tree tobacco, uprooting the plants or painting their stumps with herbicide.
