This diverse terrain unfolds dramatically: from the lowest points at our creeks, where pitcher plants thrive in boggy bottomlands, the land quickly rises through mixed pine and hardwood forests, culminating in the lichen-covered upland sandhills. These "deserts in the rain" are uncanny, vital ecosystems, providing critical refuge for a host of threatened and endangered species, including the federally threatened Black Pine Snake and our keystone species, the Gopher Tortoise.

The sandhill ecosystem makes for easy digging for our mascot, the Gopher Tortoise. These iconic reptiles create extensive burrows, which become shared havens for literally hundreds of other species—from mice and snakes to frogs and even bobcats. This incredible shared refuge earns the Gopher Tortoise its honorable designation as the keystone species of the longleaf pine savanna. Without them, there'd be little shelter from blazing summer heat or the literal fires that shape this unique ecosystem. The coming together of this diverse and resilient community of unexpected, even strange, bedfellows during times of adversity is the very inspiration for our name, the Burrow Nature Center.

When conquistador Hernando DeSoto first ventured into the Southeast, he described it as "a garden-like land of fruit bearing trees among which a horse could be ridden without any trouble." Today, in many undeveloped areas, we find impenetrable thickets of trees, shrubs, and vines, far from DeSoto's idyllic description.

What accounts for this dramatic change? The indigenous people of the Southeast, specifically the Chahta (Choctaw) on our land, intentionally used fire to cultivate a rich, herbaceous ground cover. This practice attracted herds of bison, which grazed on the diverse understory of native grasses and forbs. As the bison grazed, they also trampled seeds into the soil and deposited fertilizer, encouraging the deep-rooted grasses to regrow. When woody plants began to creep back, fire was reintroduced, resetting the ecological clock to favor understory growth and releasing vital nutrients from the ashes. This cyclical succession of fertility, plants, and animals sustained both the people and the ecosystem through a sophisticated form of animal husbandry and game management, a practice the Europeans largely failed to recognize.

Fire remains the most important tool we use to restore this land. Early settlers learned to use fire from Indigenous peoples, but they often applied it indiscriminately and too frequently. At the Burrow Nature Center, we're continually learning more about how the timing and frequency of controlled burns can help us thin unwanted brush and spur the growth of native herbs and bunching grasses. We look forward to the day we can reintroduce grazing animals as an ecological substitute for the great bison that settlers extirpated.

Today, most burns are done in large chunks, often no smaller than 40 acres at a time, aggressively lit, and contained within wide, plowed firebreaks that scar and erode the land. We prefer to create small lanes by hand and carefully spread the fire along them. By lighting smaller areas at different times, we allow for a patchwork of habitats in various stages of succession, significantly increasing overall ecological diversity across the landscape.

Addressing Invasive Species and Forest Composition

Another major contributor to the monotonous wall of green we see across our region's undeveloped areas is invasive species. Here on our land, imported privet shrubs and cogon grass have few natural controls. Unchecked by native herbivores and diseases, they relentlessly choke out our vital native vegetation. While we've done our fair share of managing such species by hand in the past, we now employ a very selective use of less toxic herbicides as a strategic part of our work on these 111 acres.

However, simply lighting everything on fire and removing invasives won't get us to the former Eden-like landscape described by early colonizers. Ecological restoration often counterintuitively calls not just for fire, but also for cutting many trees down. By thinning out these overcrowded trees, we allow more light to reach the forest floor, which again encourages a diverse ground cover and promotes healthier growth.

For millennia before colonization, our Indigenous predecessors used fire and stone tools to manage the landscape. They selectively removed certain trees for their farms while carefully preserving others like oaks, hickories, and pecans. Heeding this ancient wisdom, we at the Burrow Nature Center likewise spare fruit-bearing trees such as persimmon, crabapple, and paw paw from fire and thinning, along with ecologically diminished species like dogwood, sassafras, and chinquapin nut. Over time, our aim is to cultivate a diverse forest of food, an agro-ecological approach to land management that stands in stark contrast to the neat, monocultural rows of European agriculture recognized by early settlers. To further this vision, our nursery is actively collecting local seeds and cuttings of native food-bearing plants, which will eventually become a flourishing part of this diverse forest.

Protecting Our Keystone Species

This comprehensive restoration approach also means creating critical habitat for our best friends, the Gopher Tortoises. One vital part of good habitat is safety from predators, which is why we are actively removing hogs and requiring dogs to be leashed on our property. Our board ecologist, Zach Gray, is working with local biologists to monitor tortoise populations as we work to bring them back from their endangered status.