African Wildlife & Environment Issue 77 FINAL ISSUE

FAUNA, FLORA & WILDLIFE

HEATHLANDS IN AFRICA

EUGENE MOLL

Mike Mentis’s article “To burn or not to burn? The straw deserts of the Drakensberg” in issue 75 of this magazine, took me back to our 1960s student days together at UKZN Pietermaritzburg. This nostalgic reflection made me realise that >50 years on there are an increasing number of people who argue that fire is not an ideal management tool for grassland and savanna despite decades of research that fire is natural and necessary in many African ecosystems.

A group of Certificate Students from the Southern AfricanWildlife College standing in the Mariepskop heathlands overlooking the Blyde Dam; note the dominance of ericoid-leaved shrubs

grassland systems where his birds lived. What he had also stumbled on, but seemed not to realise or articulate, is that we in southern Africa have extensive heathlands. Mike’s extensive and intensive work in the Drakensberg, using the distribution and abundance of Greywing and Redwing Francolin, demonstrated that the birds only occurred in veld burned the previous winter. They were scarce or absent in overgrazed and over-rested veld – showing that veld burning was key to their

This increasing trend to challenge the science, where 'city people' or 'compassionately minded humans', who believe they know best, is in many cases interfering more and more with natural ecological processes – fire being one (and culling perhaps being another). But for this piece I’ll stay with Mike’s story, because as he did his research, he started to understand that his birds were dependent on the plant soil nutrients as key in determining their distribution! And that fire was the main ecological driver of the

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