This entry is part of the ongoing series exploring at the ecological history of what is now Faville Grove Sanctuary.
Light on the Landscape: A Drive Through Southern Wisconsin
Wisconsin’s landscapes hold a timelessness and an enchantment that generations have come to appreciate. These landscapes have produced and shaped conservationists like Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Fran Hamerstrom, and Patty Loew. When John Steinbeck traveled through the state for the first time, he wrote:
“I [was] unprepared for the beauty of this region, for its variety of field and hill, forest, lake. I think now that I must have considered it one big level cow pasture because of the state’s enormous yield of milk products. I never saw a country that changed so rapidly, and because I had not expected it… everything I saw brought delight, the rising hills were not compounded, but alone and separate. There was a penetration of the light into solid substance so that I seemed to see into things, deep in, and I’ve seen that kind of light elsewhere only in Greece.”
Of course, the land doesn't stand still, as the glaciers can attest to crushing and eventually recreating those delightful hills Steinbeck referenced. Would the Wisconsin we see today be recognizable to Steinbeck? Does the light on the landscape hold the same properties? I would venture to say that in most places in Southern Wisconsin, it does not.
It is necessary to note that the history we’ll be looking at in this blog in subsequent weeks is a particular view. The light we shine on different subjects leaves plenty in the dark, especially the perspectives of women, indigenous people, and people of color. These blind spots do not necessarily negate the facts presented, but merit consideration.
It’s a sunny day in southern Wisconsin, a good day for a drive. Botany from this view can make you dizzy, so we’ll instead note general impressions of structure, shape, and form. Sometimes we’ll drive slower and put on our hazard lights to take a closer view.
In broad strokes, our drive through southern Wisconsin might look stereotypical, like Steinbeck thought: corn fields and dairy farms. Upon further inspection, the cows are inside, away from the light, and the crops are corn and soy and little else. These important points will be considered in subsequent posts and investigations which will analyze the trees, the crops, the animals, and the plants in further detail, but for now our drive will give us an overview of things.
Spring in southern Wisconsin. Photo by emily jean FCC
The size of the fields is worth considering; most property boundaries are evidenced with treelines. On a June drive, the green overwhelms. A green wall meets the eye at every woodland; every hill, swamp, and pasture too gravelly, steep, or wet to farm. Look inside these woods (you can’t) and all you see is a wall of trees and shrubs, too many trees. Where the county has thinned the edges of a woodland you might glimpse inside and see darkness.
In Leopold’s time, the trees were still in the light. Pasturing of cattle into bur oak savannas kept the habitat open, and maintained the light loving oaks. The document below depicts a study of acorn production at Faville Grove in 1940. Note the diameter and height of the bur oak trees.
These isolated trees are a legacy of one of southern Wisconsin’s chief domestic products before wide scale agriculture: open-grown oaks. In the small sampling above, the height in feet to diameter in inches ratio is about 1:1. A 2001 study of Rock Mountain trees found a ratio of about 6:1, so every 72-foot tree averaged about 12 inches in diameter. This indicates the incredible stoutness of these Wisconsin bur oak trees. Growing up in the light, the trees grew out instead of up.
Bur oak tree. Photo by Justin Meissen FCC
As we drive by today, we can see the remnants of bur oak trees in pastures–huge open grown trees surrounded in an overgrown square lot. In the 1940 mast study, oak reproduction was likely already failing. The study depicts a poor crop across the board, but any acorns that did germinate were trampled or eaten by cattle. Today, those isolated trees are likely all that is left of a once-great savanna ecosystem.
Other light lovers called the grassland ecosystems their home–the grassland birds, perhaps also classified as light-birds. Between hay fields, small grains, and remnant grassland, the habitat of the front half of the twentieth century provided sufficient area and quality for grassland birds. However, since the 1970’s no bird has declined more. This decline is one of the principal restoration efforts we are seeking to remedy at Faville Grove.
Since the 1970’s no group has declined more than grassland birds.
The influence of light has a profound effect on where these birds nest. Starting our drive at sunrise, the long rays of the sun were dappled through treeline fencerows and the growing corn. If we took that same drive in 1935, perhaps that sunrise would show strong beams of light moving across the landscape, waning only with the undulations of the earth and the fog. Grassland birds love a long view, and the lower in the sky they can see the sunrise the better, since that means no trees block their view. A single 1935 beam of light may have crossed barley, oats, corn, hay, pasture, and scattered bur oaks, ready to nurture these diverse compartments. We will learn more about cropscapes and birdscapes and their changes in later posts.
A 1936 study of the spring flora at Faville Grove conducted by five university students (and reviewed by Norman Fasset) illustrates some of the changes in plant life. Most of the plants, animals, and ecosystems of southern Wisconsin might be considered heliophilic, or sun lovers. The heliophytes as a group have struggled with the advent of modern agriculture and especially from the lack of another source of light: fire. For a specific study of light and plants we’ll consider the false solomon’s seal (Smilacinia racemosa), mentioned in a single sentence. The students report, “Smilacinia has completely carpeted the ground.”
False solomon’s seal still carpets the ground in fire-maintained savannas at Faville Grove. Photo by Drew Harry
Today, heliophobic deer make use of the edges of dark woodlands and savannas, preferring to move along that ecotone–protected, but with a view. The false solomon’s seal hangs on along these edges, sometimes in a stunted state, and this matter isn’t helped by the deer who grin when encountering the tasty Smilacinia, a favorite treat. We will take an in-depth look later at the influence of deer and light and fire on the vegetation. For now, we get back into our car and head to the far north of our imagination, while we drive just down the road to the bog ecosystem high in the watershed, right in our backyard.
May Watts, the esteemed naturalist at the Morton Arboretum, called sphagnum bogs a “history book with a flexible cover.” We step out of our car and wade through the moat of the bog onto that flexible cover, engaging in tamarack time travel as we turn the pages back to a letter Aldo Leopold wrote in 1935.
“Approaching Lake Mills from the west, at the point where Highway 30 leaves Rock Lake, there is a small marsh lying between the present highway and the former highway on the lakeshore. Ten years ago this marsh was an admirable little botanical exhibit. It contained one of the few southern stands of tamarack and leatherleaf growing on live sphagnum peat.
I submit that this marsh, if restored to its original condition, would be a unique ornament to the community, but if destroyed and parked [filled] it would become a very commonplace affair. Wisconsin will, I hope, someday become aware that its marshes and prairies, as well as its forests and its lakes, are worth conserving. ”
Today’s tamarack bogs remain as “relict” ecosystems across southern Wisconsin. These are relicts of post-glacial times of soggy ground and cold, moist weather. With the mileage we’ve put on our car driving all over southern Wisconsin this morning, we’ve emitted the carbon dioxide now warming the earth, an earth that might not support relicts of cold ecosystems of the far north. The climate of today and tomorrow might burn our history book and erase its records written in pollen grains and safeguarded in the peat. We will keep in mind the disrupted climate as we move through this series, as its effects on every level of the ecosystem are readily apparent.
Tamarack bog. Photo by Joshua Mayer
We conclude our drive with a reconsideration of Steinbeck’s study of light. In southern Wisconsin, light on the landscape also means good health and diversity on the landscape. For some of that health, we’ll turn to our present-day backyard for a dash of hope. A view of that Greco-style lightscape might be had with a glimpse of a mid-October day in the Ledge Savanna at Faville Grove.
The trees are scattered, there are standing dead snags (great wildlife habitat), and the groundcover is vibrant with wildflowers throughout all seasons. Many of the open spaces and pasture lands of Leopold’s time probably resembled the Ledge Savanna today, but these open savanna landscapes are now a rare sight, dying without light. At Faville Grove, landscape scale restoration projects seek to restore species diversity and function, but in simpler terms we are restoring the light.
Written by Drew Harry, Faville Grove Sanctuary Land Steward
