The Paintball Hacks
Our July Offensive
Our first month of Covid19 hacks is completed. Very many thanks to all who helped.
On Tuesday 30 June we finished Block A7B, the Paintball Block. It is now as clean as we can get it without doing more damage than good (i.e. there are still plants, but our trampling to get to them will do more harm than leaving them until late spring).
We also swept through and finished Block A18, Stone Church. There were quite a lot of aliens, but this was cleared with the first fire cycle, and the follow up was surprisingly easy; it took just over 30 minutes to clear the block.
We now have two blocks in this patch to continue with:
- Block A7A, Old Orpen Road: this is a primary clearing and is as bad as A7b, although the block is slightly smaller. It is the block in lower Tokai with the highest granite signature and the plants are growing correspondingly fastest.
- The Stone Church wetland: this looks to be a nightmare with very dense Acacia longifolia and dense Port Jacksons, with scattered gums. A subteam have volunteered to do extra time in this and, depending on its progress, we might have to ask SANParks to get the Working on Wetlands team to help out here.
SUMMARY
A quick summary for those who missed my on-site summary.
All three blocks burned two years ago (April 2019 – strictly, two winters ago: one summer). SANParks was supposed to have done a restoration burn of A9 (A, B, C and D) and A7B in 2018, but the drought intervened and instead it burned A7A and B and A8 in 2019 instead. So A9 desperately needs its restoration burn ASAP. Our requests to SANParks for a 2020 fire were not communicated adequately via the correct channels and, consequently, it was not scheduled: but we have requested a 2021 restoration burn urgently. By contrast, Block A8 is now the only block at Tokai into its second fire cycle: it is thus the most advanced restoration patch at Tokai.
Note: Please refer to the Tokai Park Restoration Study.
Block A7A Old Orpen Road was cleared of pines just after 2006 with Block A8. However, Block A7A was not burned. It was heavily invaded by Bietou and this smothered all recovery in the block. Bietou is an indicator species of no or too-cool fires and its presence in numbers is a “threshold of concern”, indicating that the fire regime is wrong (either fires are too cool or not frequent enough): unlike Fynbos species that come from a soil seed bank, Bietou is brought in by birds. It is unfortunately a “fire retardant” and its presence inhibits the hot fires that Fynbos needs (it is a Strandveld species and tries to convert Fynbos to Strandveld).
However, it was burned in 2019, about ~15 years after clearing, but burned cool. It will take a lot of effort to clean this as the Golden Wattles have not been flushed before, so it is a primary clearing.
This block is what we will emphasize throughout July. It has 128 plant species of which 38 are aliens.
Although this is the first fire, odd plants of fire species did come up in cleared areas, but it remains to be seen what flourishes. Because of its granite mix in the sand, things grow fastest here, which is partly why we left it, but partly its history makes it the least important of our three restoration blocks in the area in terms of clearing.
Block A7B Paintball Patch was cleared of pines in 2017. Prior to that it was the Paintball play area, so got heavy foot use under the pines. It was burned in April 2019.
You may have noticed during clearing that there were two rows of cleared slash with a cool fire where much of the pine duff survived, alternating with two rows of slash that burned hot to bare soil. We will monitor the recovery from the two “treatments”, but the Golden Wattles tended to be most dense in the hot fires and we expect the deep Fynbos seeds to do best there.
The big question is what happened to the bulbs: did they survive there or not? The block has 106 plant species of which 27 are aliens.
Remember that, even in March, this area was just white sand. This was its primary clearing and it took about 200 man hours to clear it, and we cleared tens of thousands of Golden Wattles. It is now done and can rest; and fynbos grow until our spring follow up. Our biostatistics are low because we have not had the post-fire component yet, but we will be monitoring it this winter-spring to catch these.
Block A8 Stonechurch is, as I said, the most special patch at Tokai at present (yes, Upper and Lower and the entire Lower – we could argue about the Diastella patch, but it has only burned once and desperately needs a burn, although being the block most on the path to recovery.
It was cleared around 2006 (just before A7A) and readied for a restoration burn in 2010. However, at the last minute the fire teams decided to convert it to a stack burn and piled the slash. We objected and wanted them to spread out the stacks and do a proper restoration burn, but they refused.
However, as a compromise they also burned the areas between the stacks.
If you look on the Observations grid you can see on the older observations (it should open on the oldest page) the fire circles where the stacks totally sterilised the soil: only Golden Wattles survived the scorching, whereas the areas in between got a very cool fire – too cool – but most of it recovered OK – we used the circles to do the restoration planting (mainly Protea repens, scolymocephala and Leucadendron laureolum and salignum). We cleared the aliens – mostly Golden and Longleaf Wattle.
This block contains 141 plant species of which 33 are aliens.
So the 2019 burn was the second fire and this is reflected by the fact that it took us about five man hours to clear all the aliens. It is the only block in the NW sector with more than 100 species of indigenous plants, many of which are indigenous “fire annuals”: bulbs and herbs. And it is our first block where the Sugarbushes and Conebushes are natural – in their first generation (we planted them after the first cycle – so this is the acid test: do they like it here?).
So, through July, we will continue at twice a week and clear Block A7A (and the wetland for the diehards) [we will have to change our names to Old Orpen Hackers], and then do a sweep through the rest of Tokai (and tackle mainly the Pampas Grass that flowered during lockdown; we were unable to get to them in time).
We are also reserving a day or two to plant some Kreupelhout that are busy germinating (an “unhack”), but we don’t know if they will be ready for 2020 planting – so watch this space. (Some of you may know that the land just across the Soetvlei Wetland was called Kreupelhout, but the City developers thought that Sweetvalley sounded nicer).
Thank you for the great work, and all your support. Please keep an eye on our Facebook and Events pages for our upcoming spring tours – which will have to wait until Lockdown is further relaxed. But the moment we can, we will!
And, if you can help out with the spring surveys (you will need a camera or smartphone with the iNaturalist app), that would be cool.
Tony Rebelo
