Cover photo by Peter Gorman
This entry is part of the ongoing series exploring at the ecological history of what is now Faville Grove Sanctuary.
Recovery at Faville Grove Part One: Plants
Ecology is generally understood as the relationships between living things. One interesting way of adding a dimension is by incorporating time. The relationship between a mouse population and a weed outbreak analyzes this relationship at one point in time. But adding a series of observations strengthens the inferences that are possible to draw between mice and weeds, in addition to factors like weather, land-use, predators, and disease.
Above: Fran Hamerstrom’s vole index on the Buena Vista Marsh in central Wisconsin corresponds tightly with the number of Harrier nests… until DDT is widely used.
At Faville Grove, Arthur Hawkins initiated a study of the wildlife and plant populations, relying on elderly residents of the area to recall what the area looked like 70-90 years prior. Of course, memory is fallible, and recalling the exact year the muskrat population exploded, and how many muskrats were trapped, is unlikely without detailed notes. But knowing that the muskrat population tended to explode every couple of years is certainly valuable information from an ecological restoration perspective.
Previously, we viewed the overall landscape character at Faville Grove, and took an in-depth look at the Orchids in the Faville Grove Area. Today, we’ll run through in broad strokes some of the changes in plant life since Hawkins’ analysis in 1938.
What attracted settlers to the Faville Grove area? According to some accounts, bluejoint grass—apparently ubiquitous in the low prairies—appealed to the settlers as livestock feed. This harvesting of “marsh hay” actually preserved many of the prairies in the area, and today Faville Prairie, Snapper Prairie, and Waterloo Prairie (on Bluejoint Road) are all State Natural Areas with a diverse flora. The haying kept the prairies’ open character, and were maintained in a mostly undisturbed state, free from grazing or intensive land use. Unlike many other “Prairie Acres” or “Meadowlark Lanes” in southern Wisconsin that were developed and named after the things they destroyed, Prairie Lane at Faville Grove and Bluejoint Road both harbor native prairie with their associated grasses and birds.
Martin Prairie at Faville Grove. Photo by Drew Harry
Hawkins states: “The first settlers reported endless acres of shoulder-high bluejoint covering the Crawfish Prairie.” A prairie restoration from agricultural land, Martin Prairie (above), in the historic footprint of the Crawfish Prairie, looks quite like the endless acres early settlers witnessed.
Beyond the low prairies, most of the remaining landscape was churned and eventually plowed into agriculture; once-idyllic waterways became polluted with the soil upon which that agriculture was built. The rich organic matter of the prairies sloughed into the rivers, and the Crawfish River—once over 22-feet deep with clear water and wild rice lining the banks—became a muddy and silty mess barely four feet deep. Today, the river remains silted and in poor condition, still lacking its wild rice. In dry years, when I’m kayaking down the river it’s more of a slither through the mud than a paddle. Elsewhere at Faville Grove, like at the Kettle Pond where Madison Audubon has recently protected nearly the entire watershed, we’ve re-introduced wild rice, and it seems to have taken off. Away from the runoff and massive inputs of nitrogen and phosphorus, the species has established well, and will hopefully persist and expand.
2021 intern crew with a robust wild rice specimen, just south of the Kettle Pond. Another patch of this maize relative is poking up behind Zach’s head (first on the left). Photo by Drew Harry
Wild rice was apparently harvested as a food crop early on, pointing to its abundance. Likewise, despite its diminutive stature, cranberry was also apparently harvested by early settlers. Cranberry could be found alongside blueberry, in the bogs and tamarack swamps which were quite common in the Faville Grove vicinity.
Cranberry in the Laas Tamarack. Photo by Drew Harry
Today, the cranberry is restricted to the Laas Tamarack, and harvesting the species for any sort of caloric surplus would certainly be impossible. Drainage of swamps, wetland degradation from runoff, early peat and tamarack harvest, and invasive species have continually threatened the cranberry on the local landscape, though a few persist where they’re protected.
Moving into the more upland areas, a plant that Hawkins made special note of was Scarlet Painted Cup.
Scarlet cup plant, also known as Indian Paintbrush. Photo by Joshua Mayer
To my knowledge, this plant hadn’t been seen in the local area since 1936. With permission from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, I collected a small amount of seed from a prairie remnant and reintroduced it in an appealing spot. To my surprise, one year later, we had over a dozen flowering plants. Last year I scattered that local seed on the same site, so hopefully in the future we can expand this population throughout the sanctuary. Interestingly, this plant is a hemi-parasite in the family Orobanchaceae, and at Faville Grove it is doing well in a short-statured prairie with another member of that family: the wood betony.
A yellow variant of the Indian Paintbrush at Faville Grove. The yellow is actually a bract, a modified leaf, while the flower is contained within. Photo by Drew Harry
Continuing upward on the moisture scale, we’ll next visit a specialist of the dry and gravel prairies of Wisconsin: the pasque flower. One of our earliest bloomers, Hawkins described “luxuriant mantles” of pasque flowers decorating eskers and knolls throughout the area. However, he noted grazing quickly eliminated the species, and apparently just a few remained on Springer’s Hill in the 1930’s.
The lonely pasque flower at Faville Grove. Photo by Drew Harry
Today, I know of a single clump of blooming pasque flower, in appropriate habitat on a gravelly knoll, but this spring we found an individual plant on a separate gravelly knoll that must have come from seed that we spread around.
The pasque flower is a good candidate to make a concerted effort to restore at Faville Grove. We have many locations with the right habitat, and early accounts even noted women heading to the hills around Easter and filling their aprons with pasque flowers, only for the flowers to wilt before they returned home. We hope to fill camera storage, rather than aprons, with pictures of the species in the future.
Just a small sampling of the more than 700 native species recorded within Faville Grove Sanctuary, the stories above nevertheless illustrate the importance of protection and management for the perpetuation of certain species within an ecologically healthy landscape. In many cases, vistas and individual species have been restored, but there’s always more work to do eradicating invasive species and protecting what’s left.
Written by Drew Harry, Faville Grove Sanctuary land steward
