Cover photo by Carolyn Byers
This entry is part of the ongoing series exploring at the ecological history of what is now Faville Grove Sanctuary.
Landscape Ecology: To Build a Home
Finding and making a home is one of the most intimate and telling jobs a bird will do. For a frenzied month or so, many birds make their way from Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America, all for the long daylight hours and plump caterpillars of the north. A nest, and the course of that nest, can tell us all sorts of things about the life of a bird. Birds are among the best animals for teaching landscape ecology; responding to area and structure, the bird community of an area is a reliable indication of grass versus trees and shrubs, and small versus large areas.
Leopold’s shadow looms large on the landscape, and his student’s studies of Prairie Chickens and Upland Sandpipers now cast those particular birds as ghosts on the landscape; the Prairie Chicken is long evicted from the Crawfish Prairie, and the Upland Sandpiper hasn’t flexed on a fencepost here for over one half century. With increased restored grassland acreage, we are hoping to change that.
Photos: Upland Sandpiper by Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren, Short-eared Owl by óskar elías sigurðsson (FCC), Prairie Chicken by Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren
The map below above depicts nesting sites of Short-eared Owl, Upland Sandpiper and Prairie Chicken. Through the early 1940’s, the river floodplain was a productive place for a bird to call home. Some, like the Upland Sandpiper, made brief visits, spending about 12 weeks on the prairie. Others like the Northern Harrier, Short-eared Owl, and Prairie Chicken were permanent residents, enjoying the fruits of the prairie year-long.
Nesting sites at Faville Grove in 1940’s.
The video below shows a timelapse from the nesting locations in the 1930’s to the present day. Clear changes in the landscape include the degree of tree and brush invasion (shown in red), and the fragmentation of habitat. While the area directly near the river kept at least 60 acres in prairie, the gradual fragmentation from the once vast 2,400 acre Crawfish prairie to the sliver of 60 acres saw the local extinction of nearly all grassland birds. With the addition of Martin, Tillotson, and Charles Prairie in the early 2000’s, area-sensitive birds like Northern Harriers and Short-eared Owls overwinter on the prairie, though the red areas on the 2020 map indicate there is still much work to be done to improve habitat for grassland birds. While we lack Prairie Chickens on the present landscape, Bobolink are a good indicator of grassland habitat, and in the final image of the video we can see Bobolink generally avoid woody vegetation, instead choosing to occupy the most open and grassy spots.
Another compelling representation of the landscape comes in the form of photographs.
Photo of Faville Prairie in late May or early June, looking north. Photograph by Virginia Kline, 1978, courtesy of UW-Madison Libraries’ Virginia M. Kline Collection: Ecological Communities of Wisconsin.
Faville Prairie looking south in 2022. The management of willows and woody invasion on Faville Prairie is something we are working to rectify, photo by Drew Harry
The two photos above are almost fifty years apart, and changes are stark on Faville Prairie. Most notable is the invasion of woody plants, which has been an ongoing restoration project, as Madison Audubon has worked with the UW-Madison Arboretum to cut brush, girdle trees, and fight invasive weeds. Virginia Kline’s photo was taken in 1978, and Max Partch surveyed square meter plots in 1948 and in the 1970’s, around the time of Dr. Kline’s photo.
In Partch’s plots below you can see “0” represents a willow occurring within a quadrat, while “X” indicates it occurred near the quadrat. By the 1970’s willow invasion–either from atmospheric nitrogen deposition, fragmentation, flooding, or altered hydrology–had become severe on Faville Prairie.
What does this mean for the animals trying to make a home on the prairie? As we’ve seen, birds respond strongly to the overall structure of the landscape. From 2019-2021, I documented one Bobolink and two Dickcissels total on Faville Prairie. Birds that were doing well included Willow Flycatcher and Yellow Warbler, which both enjoy the willow component of the prairie. Over the winter of 2021-22, the Arboretum crew mowed large areas of brush on Faville Prairie, opening up habitat where it was formerly fragmented. The birds have responded in a big way; this year during point counts I documented six Bobolink and two Dickcissels, eight total grassland birds whereas the previous three years combined had a total of three grassland birds. We hope to keep an open landscape where grassland birds can make a home in the future.
Opossum. Photo by Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren
In the 1930’s, the open landscape lacked shrubs and cover that pheasants and quail use. Ostensibly, Leopold, Hawkins, Robert McCabe, and area farmers were quite interested in providing the necessary ingredients to attract these species and keep them healthy through winter. Shrubs and trees and thickets, otherwise knows as “edge” features, are necessary for pheasants and quail to overwinter, and these areas are also used by skunks, opossums, white-tailed deer, and racoons, which were rare at the time. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources was even stocking raccoons into the wild, raised at the Poynette Game Farm, another area of Leopold’s research.
Market and unregulated sport hunting for furs around the turn of the twentieth century, and grazing of woodlots, left an open and barren landscape for these mammal species. To provide food and cover for game animals, Leopold and his graduate students sought to plant trees and shrubs, ironically the exact opposite of much of our work today.
The above letter depicts Arthur Hawkins’ wishlist for species to plant in the Faville Grove area. With the exception of juniper, every species is non-native. Increased woody coverage fragments habitat and effectively creates avenues for those meso-predators like skunks, opossums, and racoons–now so common on the landscape–to predate on grassland bird nests.
For a study of what pine and spruce planting might look like for grassland/marshland birds, we’ll take a look at the “Blackbird Pond,” named for the Yellow-headed Blackbirds that nested there. From 1940 aerial photos, we can see the open landscape with few trees or shrubs. Open fields dominate, with the exception of Faville Woods to the west of the Blackbird Pond.
Yellow-headed Blackbird. Photo by Kelly Colgan Azar
The comparison photos above show the Blackbird Pond in 1940 and again in 2022. Conifers were planted around the pond, but visually it doesn’t look that different. Yet even these small changes—a scattering of trees—have caused Yellow-headed Blackbirds to abandon it as a nesting site. Another landscape change is State Highway 89, constructed in 1964, slicing through Faville Woods and along the Blackbird Pond, effectively cutting the habitat in half, adding dangerous motor vehicles, and noise. Additional brush sprouts up in the right of way along the highway, which is good for some species but not necessarily preferred by grassland birds. Imagining the 1940 bird list of the Blackbird Pond, it might have included Yellow-headed Blackbird, Sora, Savannah Sparrow, Eastern Meadowlark, and Bobolink. Today, perhaps some Red-winged Blackbirds nest in the open pond area, and a Red-eyed Vireo nests in the conifers—the shade from tree and shrub planting has led to biotic homogenization, simplifying the community to common and widespread species.
Female Bobolink. Photo by Arlene Koziol
Bringing it all together, we’ve looked at photos on the ground, aerial photographs and hand-drawn maps, species lists, and square meter quadrats. Many aspects have changed since Leopold’s time, namely fragmentation of grassland habitat and invasion of woody species. Importantly, Madison Audubon and partners like the UW-Arboretum seek to reconnect these grassland fragments and implement prescribed burning to maintain openess, and these practices have effectively enticed Short-eared Owls and Northern Harriers, among a suite of other species, to reclaim this prairie habitat.
But a Bobolink—when it’s selecting a nest site—isn’t looking at square meters or species lists. A Bobolink is looking for something much simpler: open air, perhaps best represented in its own wheeling territorial flight embracing its home—the open sky and the grassland beneath it.
Written by Drew Harry, Faville Grove Sanctuary land steward
