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Goose Pond Sanctuary Update, May 2025

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Goose Pond Sanctuary Update: May 16, 2025

Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance’s Goose Pond Sanctuary always has a ton going on. Bird conservation, habitat restoration, research, and outreach are always in season here. Learn more about Goose Pond through the update below, by visiting our Goose Pond webpage, or by exploring our Goose Pond StoryMap.

Cover photo: Prescribed fire at Otsego Marsh (photo by Emma Raasch/SoWBA).

 

Spring Prescribed Fire on 243 Acres

Our spring burn season wrapped up on April 26. Although there’s no predetermined ‘last burn day’, our efforts are usually halted by the greening prairies and nesting creatures, not because we’ve completed every unit we hoped to burn. Historically, prairies in Wisconsin were burned every one to three years, so with 615 acres of restored prairie between Goose Pond, Erstad Prairie, and Otsego Marsh, we’ve got to take advantage of each opportunity we can. 

Once our burn breaks are in and the weather lines up, we are still missing one of the most important pieces of the puzzle: people! To help recruit more enthusiastic and capable crew members, Goose Pond hosted its second volunteer training at the end of March. During this training, we covered fire ecology, fire behavior, ignition strategies, tool/equipment use, etc. Eleven of the fifteen trainees also attended a live fire training where we burned in breaks and practiced suppressing spot fires. To all who helped with burning this spring, we cannot express our gratitude enough (extra special shout out to our trainees who came back for a ‘real’ burn!).

Despite tricky weather conditions - gusty winds or barely any wind at all—we completed 21 units totaling 243 acres this spring. Although most of our burning takes place at our properties, we also burned on partner lands including the Arlington Farms Research Station prairie remnant, SoWBA’s newest sanctuary south of Cambridge, and Langer Park in Marshall. Many of our burns were ‘maintenance’ burns—pushing back brush, removing heavy, smothering thatch, and boosting flower and seed production—but a few burns had less typical goals. For example, we burned a short, green hay field and 19 acres of corn stubble and litter. Both units had very different fuel types than we are used to, and with a very different goal: to expose as much bare soil as possible for seeding. 

If you’d like to be on our volunteer burn list, contact Graham at gsteinhauer@swibirds.org.

 

Waterfowl Pair Count

Mallard pair (photo by Arlene Koziol).

We conducted a combined pair count for Mallards and other ducks on May 5th. We found 29 species of bird with the highlight being 18 pairs and 67 drakes Mallards that represents 87 pairs. Most hen mallards were nesting and the drakes represented a nesting pair. In the past we were pleased to find 50 nesting pairs of mallards. The spring waterfowl migration was above normal, however most of the Blue-winged Teal and Northern Shovelers migrated north. We were pleased to count 22 Ruddy Ducks and 28 American Coots and look forward to seeing their broods. 

Graham conducted the Sandhill Crane Count at Goose Pond and only heard one crane calling in the distance. We were surprised to see a crane on a nest in the west pond. Usually Canada Geese and Sandhill Cranes nest on muskrat houses, however muskrats have found Goose Pond since the low water years of 2022 and 2023. Hopefully muskrats will return this year.

 

Spring Plants – Pasque Flower, Wood Betony, and Shooting Star

Pasque flower, one of our most well known spring plants, is always the first on the scene. Lavender flowers with a yellow center emerge even before their leaves, and they provide food for some of the most daring pollinators, primarily bees and flies. Pasque flowers usually bloom at least one full month before Madison’s average last frost date of May 11 (depending on where you look). Its saucer-shaped flower and an abundance of silky hairs help to keep pasque flowers warmer than the surrounding air. 

Wood betony, a rather bizarre plant with a swirling yellow flower spike and fern-like leaves, was first seen blooming this year in the very beginning of May. This species is a hemiparasite meaning that it relies on host plants to survive, but it does make some of its own food through photosynthesis. This contrasts with ghost pipe, a true parasite, and does not photosynthesise at all. Wood betony will attach to big bluestem, Indian grass, Canada goldenrod, and many other species in its quest for nutrients. Host plants are often much smaller in stature or killed outright, and space is provided for more conservative flowering species. Queen bumble bees, who have just emerged from hibernation, prefer wood betony over almost any other spring flower.

Shooting star was historically abundant across southern Wisconsin in dry-mesic, mesic, and wet-mesic prairies along with savanna habitats. This year, our shooting star opened just a few days after the wood betony. This handsome little plant has petals that range from white to a deep pink, but all have yellow and brown centers. Individual plants may take five or more years to mature and flower. Shooting star is now largely confined to prairie and savanna remnants, but Goose Pond has thick stands of it in some of our prairie restorations. It’s pollinated by bumble bees (buzz pollination), long-horned bees, green metallic bees, and others.

 

Opportunities, Articles, and More

 

Three Summer Interns and Tucker’s return

Each summer Goose Pond Sanctuary welcomes three interns in the early stages of their career to learn the ins-and-outs of ecological restoration. Throughout the summer, our interns will become well-acquainted with numerous invasive plants that we’ll be pulling, spraying, and cutting. In addition to invasive plant removal, they’ll be given opportunities to assist with banding American Kestrels and Purple Martins, participate in the Annual Mud Lake Butterfly Count, collect seed, and learn as many native plants, insects, and birds as they can stomach! We look forward to Andy Smith (a returning intern from last year), Logan Bahr, and Becca Black joining us starting May 19.

In addition to three summer interns, we will have another familiar face returning to Goose Pond. Tucker Sanborn, who worked at Goose Pond in previous years, will be coming back as a seasonal employee helping out at Goose Pond as well as the newest SoWBA sanctuary in Cambridge.

 

Written by Graham Steinhauer, Goose Pond Sanctuary land steward; Mark Martin and Susan Foote-Martin, Goose Pond Sanctuary managers; and Emma Raasch, Goose Pond ecological restoration technician