For thousands of years, the indigenous peoples who called Lackawanna County home burned the rare ridge-top barrens on Moosic Mountain.
The land’s stewards are continuing that practice to prevent forest fires, protect precious habitat and provide food and nourishment for the flora and fauna who call the mountain home.
"I would say we'd probably like to use fire more, but we're trying to make sure that we're doing effective fire where we are," said Pat McElhenny, Director of Stewardship for The Nature Conservancy (TNC).
In early August, TNC hosted a Blueberries and Fire festival at its Eales Preserve on Moosic Mountain in Jessup in Lackawanna County. TNC staff, as well as representatives from the Pennsylvania Game Commission, took groups on hikes to pick berries and learn how controlled burns have helped the unique barrens on the mountain thrive.
TNC is a global environmental nonprofit that has protected more than 125 million acres of land across the world. The organization prioritizes work in four important landscapes — Kenya, Borneo, a large island in Southeast Asia; the Amazon and lastly the Appalachian Forests.
The Appalachian Mountains stretch more than 2,000 miles from Alabama to Canada. They form a natural superhighway for species to move, according to TNC.
Emily Tramontano is TNC’s preserve manager for most of Northeast Pennsylvania. She, along with McElhenney, guided a hike through the barrens, directing a group to pick low and high bush blueberries and huckleberries — which greatly benefit from burns.
"Please don't feel any need to hold back. The birds got their … fill. The deer are coming. There's plenty to go around," she told the hiking group.
Development plans lead to preserve
The 2,250‑acre Eales preserve sits next to State Game Lands 300 and the Pinchot State Forest. The Lackawanna Valley Conservancy has also preserved another 260 acres on the mountain.
McElhenney called it an island.
"As we're starting to get more pressure from outside of the preserve and the adjacent property owners, we have more fragmentation … we had that 10,000 acres of connectivity, but that's what we have," he said. "It's not like we're picking up more acres as there's more development too.”
Tramontano told the crowd at the festival that the threat of development is part of the preserve’s origin story.
In the mid-1990s, the Scranton Lackawanna Industrial Building Company (SLIBCO), the industrial development corporation of the Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce, planned to build a 1,124-acre Moosic Mountain Business Park on the land.
Next to the business park, the Federal Bureau of Prisons was set to construct a $40 million minimal security women’s federal prison on 400 acres.
The Sierra Club and the local Citizens Alert Regarding the Environment (CARE) group filed a federal lawsuit to stop the project because of the globally rare forest on the land. They also contended that the site-selection process violated federal environmental laws.
U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler issued an order to stop the work on both the business park and the prison on Dec. 11, 1995.
In 1999, the Nature Conservancy and then-Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge’s administration together paid $2.2 million to preserve the land. The USP Canaan federal prison was later built 18 miles away in Waymart.
Today’s threats of development come from the data center and energy industry, which has multiple projects proposed in the county’s Midvalley.
Rare barrens enjoy fire
Those rare ridge‑top heath barrens make Moosic Mountain unique. The soil is acidic, rocky and shallow and lacks nutrients.
There’s scrub oak, pitch pines and ericaceous shrubs, including the blueberries, and it’s home to migrating birds, snakes and rare and endangered insects, like Lepidoptera, which includes moths and butterflies.
Eons ago, native people practiced prescribed fires. Plants, like blueberries, thrive after a burn.
"You burn a patch of blueberries. The next year, the following year, those berries are coming back thicker, juicier and more abundant,” Tramontano said.
Pitch pine, she said, adapted over hundreds of years to become not only fire-adapted, but also fire-dependent.
“They need fire in most cases for reproduction,” she said.
The pines also have serotinous cones, McElhenny added, and "they need to have heat to open them up."
Barbecue for birds, sun for snakes
Animals who live in the barrens also thrive after a burn.
Tramontano said the best day for birding is one day post prescribed fire when “everything is black and charred.”
"All of these birds swoop in like a horror movie, and they like to feast on the bugs that have been barbecued to perfection. It's terrifying, and it's also enlightening," she said.
TNC received a grant to place 10 acoustic recording units throughout the preserve to study bird migrations. The monitors began recording in April.
"So that's sort of something that's going to give us a better focus of what's what's actually here ... and ... how does that change? How do the birds change, or if we don't do any habitat work, how does that change too?” McElhenney said.
Darren Wolfgang has worked for the Pennsylvania Game Commission for 10 years. He’s a forester in the Northeast region.
The game commission partners with East Stroudsburg University and the University of Scranton to study the impacts of the use of prescribed fire on vegetation, rattlesnake habitat and densities, small mammals and birds.
"You do the prescribed burn, you get a lot of sunlight on the forest floor, and we're finding that the rattlesnakes are moving into those areas almost immediately,” he said.
Wolfgang said the cold-blooded reptiles like to bask in the sun.
Without prescribed fires, mountaintop barrens get overgrown and shady, impacting the snakes’ habitat — which they've been coming back to for generations, he said.
"It's important to do these … studies with the universities to find out how are they using them, and then again more importantly like how is our management activities helping or harming potentially these different species of concern," Wolfgang said.
He said entomology studies found that prescribed fire greatly increased the richness and diversity of the species of insects.
"And that's really important because what's the main thing that birds eat? Insects, right? So, the the more insects, the more healthy the habitat is, the the more good it is for like literally all parts of the ecosystem,” Wolfgang said.
Fighting fire with fire
In 2009, the Pennsylvania State Legislature passed the Prescribed Burning Practices Act, a law that both recognized the importance of the practice and provided requirements for the regulation and implementation of prescribed burning in Pennsylvania.
Before that, burns were illegal in the state, Wolfgang said.
In an ecosystem like the ridge-top barrens, fuel — or dried vegetation — can build up on the forest floor.
"One of the tools to fight those dangers of wildfires is through prescribed fire. There's a huge risk reduction in there when you have a lot of dead and dying fuels on the ground, and that builds up over time. That's not good news for anybody else nearby,” Tramontano said.
TNC burns the entire mountain section by section on a rotating basis, including the game commission land. They never burn more than 30% of the mountain at a time.
"Because we want to make sure there is plenty of ... similar habitat, for the moths and the butterflies and the bears and the deer to run over next door," Tramontano said. "And then when the fire is done, within an hour they will be back again, usually feasting on the barbecued bugs."
McElhenney said some spots won't need to be burned for 30 years.
“And then there's other places that we're going to have to burn on a regular rotation because the forests are creeping in further, and we want to sort of try to stop that a little bit. So yeah, it's sort of a battle that we do," he said.
TNC and its partners have to submit burn plans to the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) every three years.
TNC helped the game commission start their prescribed burn practices. Now the commission has a 300-person crew working across the state on prescribed burns. They burn between 10,000 and 20,000 acres a year, McElhenney said.
Wolfgang said the ecosystems are literally given a prescription for fire. Because of Pennsylvania’s temperamental weather, they can only burn around 15 out of the 365 days a year.
"We have detailed burn plans for every individual burn unit that says ‘kill this many … diameter trees’ or ‘do not kill the overstory canopy trees in a more, like, forested area where our desired management and condition is closed canopy forest,' right?” he said.
Wolfgang points out that the other name for prescribed fire is controlled burns.
"It's in a defined place. We don't want it to escape. We don't want anyone to get hurt. And then remember, we also want to accomplish all of those habitat objectives," he said.
Partnering to burn
Wolfgang said the Western states are leaders in fire suppression and the Southeastern states have long been using prescribed fires.
But what Pennsylvania does well is bring state agencies together to work together on prescribed burns and forest management, he said.
McElhenney said they want to work on getting private land owners interested in learning more about prescribed burns
"I think now moving into 2026 ... we're on the cutting edge with bringing the family together and disseminating the information for sure," Wolfgang added.
