BEATRICE - It’s been less than two weeks since a prescribed burn on part of the prairie at a National Park Unit in Nebraska. But new green growth is already beginning to pop out.


The prescribed burn at the Homestead National Historical Park included a center portion of the tallgrass prairie, along with some woodland area and around the Freeman School.


"You think about fire...and sometimes worry about it being destructive. In this case, it's really just opening it back up so the plants can grow, and hopefully we can let the diversity of the prairie, show off this summer."


Jesse Bolli is the Natural Resources Manager at the park west of Beatrice and oversees the fire plan of the unit. Burns must be conducted with caution given the continued dry weather. In fact, some wooded areas still smolder, days later.  Although it continues to be dry….some recent snow and rain will aid in regrowth…and the fire warming the ground temperature doesn’t hurt, either.


Bolli says prescribed fire helps control some less desirable plants or grass at the park. "The cool season grasses, the Kentucky bluegrass and smooth brome, are probably the best ones managed with fire. By doing an early season burn kind of when they are growing...it can knock them back and suppress them a little bit. Those are probably the ones that have the most impact. We'd like it to knock the plum brush, the smooth sumac and the dogwood back a little bit...the woody species. But we've found that it really doesn't. What it does help for those species, is that it opens it up a little bit, so we can get in and better manage it."


With pheasant, quail, rabbits and other wildlife…. burns are limited to only some of the space on the prairie….ensuring that there’s always adequate habitat remaining. "We're always hopeful that those species can make it out, in front of the burn...and most of them do. Also, by doing the burn as early as we did this year, hopefully we got the burn done before a lot of the snakes and other things like that, came out of hibernation. In the past, we've done later burns into May, and then we noticed there's a lot of snakes that get trapped by the fire. There are impacts and so that's why we don't do the whole prairie or the whole woodland, at once," Bolli said.


The recent burn involved five units of the Homestead…. specific sections of the park that are rotated for the use of fire, as a management tool.