Become an IDP Certifier — This past March I had the opportunity to spend a week in Har-pers Ferry, West Virginia, getting reacquainted with the 10 benchmark competencies of the NPS Interpretive Development Program (IDP) as a certifier. For the past two years, I have received monthly envelopes from the IDP staff at Mather Training Center stuffed with two interpretive products to assess based upon the established NPS national standards for different types of interpretive programs. The trip back to Mather in March has committed me for another two years.

Being a certifier is hard work but it is also enjoyable. Amidst all of the other administrative items that clog our days as interpreters, reviewing and certifying interpretive products has been refreshing. It gives me the opportunity to sit down for several hours each month and actually think about the process of interpretation. I get to take a monthly mental vacation to another national park site, partaking in an interpretive talk, an interpretive writing piece, a conducted activity or some other type of program. I also have the regular opportunity to cannibalize a trove of excellent tried and true techniques or ideas that could be adapted into programs that my colleagues and I give at my home park. Being a certifier has also made me a better coach with a more succinct understanding of what makes a program interpretive.

But the above reasons are all selfish, as being a certifier is first and foremost about contributing to the professional growth of field interpreters. To wit, being a certifier is not about my development; it is completely and totally about the development of the people who take the plunge and submit their interpretive products for peer review. The workshop is devoted to producing certifiers that can assess programs positively and provide appropriate coaching feedback for improvement.

New certifiers spend two weeks at Mather learning the spirit and intent of the 100- and 200-level competencies. Countless interpretive programs are viewed, and writing pieces are read and assessed based upon the standards. Certifiers practice composing comments that are positive, constructive and adhere to the standards, not to personal preference or issues that should be left to supervisors. The coursework is unabashedly grueling, including homework of some kind nearly every night. It is no wonder that the Mather staff refer to the course as “interpretive graduate school.” At the close of the course, you leave prepared to make a significant contribution to servicewide interpretive development.

Once you complete the course, pass the final certifier test and return to your home park, work as a product certifier begins. Each month you and a certifier partner receive two products to review, discuss and determine whether they demonstrate or approach certification standards. Then the two of you must draft coaching comments that you both agree upon. Comments are returned to another certifier who reviews and edits your comments and returns them to the IDP staff at Mather, where they are finally returned to the submitter.

Once per year, usually in the autumn or winter, certifiers also participate in a “pulse week” — one week of work where a team of certifiers complete reviews of 10 interpretive products. Pulse weeks have significantly cut down on the turnaround time between product submission and returning comments to the submitter.

Each year the IDP searches for new interpretive professionals who are interested in becoming certifiers. The Curriculum Coordinator/Certifier Workshop, as the certifier training is officially called, generally happens in February or March with a call for nominations out on My Learning Manager a few months prior (even the application process is rigorous, with both short-answer and essay questions). The IDP generally covers travel-related expenses for attending the workshop.

Being a certifier is a significant commitment, and the certifier and the certifier’s supervisor and superintendent must all be supportive. A significant number of spaces in each certifier class is reserved for new certifiers. If you are interested in contributing to servicewide interpretive development, consider applying to become a certifier in 2006.

Maintenance

Ranger magazine is looking for someone to handle writing duties for this section. If you are interested in telling others about maintenance happenings, or you know someone who could, please contact the editor at fordedit@aol.com.

Protection

Rangers Use Prescribed Burns to Keep Fire Skills Honed — In any given year, full-time fire folks spend much of their time on wildfires, prescribed burns, in fire training, on severity details, or maintaining and using firefighting equipment. This keeps them ever ready for the next fire.

Such is not the case for rangers. Perhaps today more than any other time in NPS history, rangers are struggling to balance more and more responsibilities. Consequently, we don’t have as many opportunities to keep our fire skills sharpened as do full-time firefighters.

However, for those of us who still recognize firefighting as a core ranger skill — and duty — and who wish to do all we can to keep our skills honed so that we can not only be firefighters, but excellent firefighters, there is hope. And it comes in the form of prescribed fire.

The hard truth for most rangers is that we typically do not have enough opportunities to get on wildfires. That’s not to say we’ll never get on them. Of course we will if we make it a priority and if we have a supportive chain of command. But odds are that most rangers who still fight fire will only be dispatched to a handful of small fires in their home parks, and if they’re lucky, one or two large project fires during the average year.

Firefighting is a complex operation that requires a high degree of competence at all levels, from FFT2 up to ICT1. Having mediocre skills won’t cut it, and just because misfortune—or worse, tragedy—hasn’t happened due to substandard skills, it doesn’t mean it won’t happen some day. This is unacceptable, and we can mitigate the possibility of it by ensuring that every firefighter on the line is the best that he or she can be at fighting fire.

Training can help us develop our firefighting skills, laying a foundation upon which to build. Continued application of said skills during wildfires provides opportunities for firefighters to grow, thereby becoming excellent at our trade in due time. But when a dearth of wildfires leaves our fire experience logs looking alarmingly sparse, prescribed burns can fill the void as effective substitutes for the real thing.

Like on wildfires, we feel the heat of the flames up close during prescribed burns. In some cases, prescribed fire puts us closer to the flames, depending on how much torch time one gets. And whether laying strips during a prescribed burn or conducting a burn-out on a wildfire, we’re still putting fire on the ground either way. By doing one, we get better at the other.

We develop burn plans, strategies and contingencies, we conduct the briefings, gear up and get to work implementing them. Like on wildfires, teamwork is essential during prescribed burns. It often requires detailed coordination between adjacent forces, some of whom have never worked with each other before.

We wear our PPE, heed the 10 and 18, provide LCES, monitor the weather, and adjust our plans as necessary when conditions require change. We watch the green searching for that elusive smoke and we watch the black for deadly snags. We respond to slopovers, spot fires, and burning snags. We rehab engines, equipment, and caches. We do all of this during prescribed burns just as we would during wildfires, no different.

Although the containment lines are prepared in advance for prescribed fires, we sometimes need to cut the burn off early due to being out of prescription or other reasons. In these cases, we end up digging line just as we would on a wildfire. And digging line in the smoke is digging line in the smoke, regardless of the fire’s classification.

Personnel in trainee positions can make significant headway in their task books on prescribed fires. While nothing can truly replace the wildfire experience, there is recognizable worth to increasing one’s skills as a trainee during prescribed fires. Some would even say prescribed burns make a better training environment due to their already being contained.

There is no perfect substitute for the real thing. True. But the real thing isn’t always available to us. Nor is prescribed fire, but for those who wish to gain prescribed burn experience, ample opportunity does exist. Most regions in the NPS have active prescribed burn programs, most of which are growing. If a ranger’s home park does not burn, there’s no reason he or she should not be able to burn in another park in the region.

It all boils down to preserving our traditional ranger skills, one of which is firefighting. Fires will always burn in our parks — and we’ll always be called to fight them. We must be ready. One way to help us achieve this is helping out with prescribed fires.

So get out there, rangers. Smell some smoke, sling some weather, lay down some fire, and feel that incomparable rush that can only be felt when the world around you is on fire!

Ready to burn!

~ Kevin Moses, Big South Fork

Resource Management

The Department of the Interior announced with fanfare this spring that scientists have documented, more than half a century since last being confirmed in the United States, the existence of at least one ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas. The bird was reported in early 2004 by a kayaker visiting the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, and was subsequently seen more than a dozen times by expert observers from the Cornell (University) Lab of Ornithology and other institutions. At the DOI press conference, Secretary Norton also announced efforts to secure millions of dollars in funds for the recovery of the nation’s largest woodpecker.

It’s commonly — but incorrectly — assumed that endangered species listing, or that such a discovery as this one, automatically brings funding to study and protect the species. In the case of charismatic species, this has often been true, as with gray wolves, manatees and peregrine falcons. However, the funds and attention garnered by such species are often a result of private individual and organizational efforts as much as they are a reprogramming of government dollars.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that leads the listing and recovery of endangered and threatened species, as of May 1, 2005, 1,263 species were listed in the United States — 987 of them endangered (388 animals and 599 plants) and another 276 (129 animals and 147 plants) as threatened, or “in danger of becoming endangered.”

Another 517 endangered and 26 threatened species from foreign countries are on the list. Another 21 animal species are proposed for listing. Species listed are supposed to have a recovery plan, outlining measures to improve the status of the species and its habitat, although only 1,030 of the 1,826 species on the entire list have approved plans.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is also supposed to designate critical habitat for each species, though it’s only been done for 478 species, partly due to the controversial nature of endangered species listing, plans and habitat designation or management, and with the time and costs associated with such activities. There is stiff competition for the time and dollars desired to track and hopefully recover these species.

Although the ivory-billed woodpecker was not found (yet, at least!) on NPS land, this news reminds us that there are likely still undiscovered species — even charismatic, relatively recognizable ones — within our agency’s jurisdiction.

In Yellowstone, microbiologists have found previously unknown species living in the most extreme geothermal environments, and they suspect that hundreds of species remain to be discovered.

In many habitats, it’s likely that only a small fraction of the world’s invertebrates have been identified. It may seem moderately shameful that 133 years after the establishment of our first national park, we are in the infancy of a formal inventory and monitoring program. But we should shelve any guilt and celebrate the importance of this effort to document what species we have long known are within our parks.

And we must remember that this, too, is still a beginning. The current I&M program focuses on vertebrate and vascular plant species, leaving much work to be done in other categories of biology and for other park resources. From this program and from the ever-curious observers of park resources, be they visitors or staff from any discipline, may come the next breaking news. Are you watching?

~ Sue Consolo Murphy, Grand Teton