FIRE BEING CONSIDERED AT BIG OAK TREE PARK

EAST PRAIRIE -- Big Oak Tree State Park some day may have few giant oaks, and that concerns Southeast Missouri State University biology professor Alan Journet.

He wants to give a helping hand to Mother Nature so new oak trees can take root in the park. Journet wants to do what the American Indians did years ago. He wants to burn the dense layer of shrubs and small trees in small test plots.

The shrubs and small trees provide a lot of shade, making it difficult for oak seedlings to take root and grow.

A controlled burn was done about four years ago as part of the research project, Journet said. Journet, East Prairie High School biology teacher Chris Reeves and Trail of Tears State Park naturalist Denise Dowling want to conduct another controlled burn this spring.

But Mother Nature hasn't helped. The controlled burn has been postponed three times because of wet ground, the result of spring rains.

Dowling said they might try to conduct the controlled burn today.

Dowling said they likely will have to scrub the project for this year if they can't burn the vegetation soon. Spring growth is difficult to burn, she said. "We've got all these little green things popping up everywhere."

Controlled burns are done with drip torches that are fueled by a mixture of gasoline and diesel. "We don't just go out and torch anything," Dowling said.

The state parks division of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources regularly makes use of controlled burns in other parks.

Ken McCarty heads up natural resource management for the state parks. McCarty said the state burns some 24,000 acres of park land on a regular basis to control and manage the growth of native forests.

Those areas are home to forest and savannas. An area is burned every three to five years.

American Indians regularly set fires to clear land for travel and stimulate the growth of plants that would attract elk, deer and bison.

"By burning, they were managing wildlife resources," McCarty said.

Big Oak Tree State Park covers 1,000 acres in Mississippi County. But the huge. centuries-old oak trees are found in only about 100 acres in the park, McCarty said.

The oasis of tall trees is a living reminder of what was once the landscape in much of Southeast Missouri.

Some of the trees stand more than 100 feet high.

The park is home to six state champion trees. Two of those, a pumpkin ash and a persimmon, also are national champion trees, according to the state Conservation Department's forestry division.

The state champion swamp chestnut oak has a circumference of 258 inches and stands 128 feet high. At its crown, it has a spread of 101 feet.

The park was named for a bur oak that lived for 396 years.

Once scheduled to be cut down as a curiosity for fairgoers to the 1904 world's fair in St. Louis, it survived another half century before succumbing in 1952 to tree rot and lightning strikes. In 1954, the tree was cut down.

The large oak trees still standing in the state park won't last forever. "We have in the past several years seen an alarming number die and fall down," McCarty said.

"Within the next century and probably sooner than that we are going to lose most of those big oaks," he said.

"Oak trees require a lot of light at ground level to be able to reproduce," he said.

McCarty said increasingly the forest growth at the state park involves fast-growing, shade-tolerant trees.

Controlled burns might help, he said.

"Oaks are very well suited for fire: They have very thick bark that insulates them from it," McCarty said.

He said controlled burns should be no threat to oak trees, particularly in a bottomland forest like that at Big Oak Tree State Park.

McCarty hopes that the continuing research by Journet and others will provide a way to lend a hand to Mother Nature and preserve the forest of tall trees.