history in action

Recovery: Wildlife

Recovery: Wildlife

Today, we’ll continue our look at Art Hawkins’ “Wildlife History of Faville Grove” and compare it to what we’re seeing on the land today.

In 2019, mere feet from that pasque flower we visited last time, I relocated the nest of an American Woodcock that we had found (and protected) during a prescribed burn. I went to check on the pasque flower, and while there, I thought to check if the woodcock nest remained intact. As I approached the nest site, the hen kicked up and hit my shoulder as it flew away. I stopped, took a look down at the ground, and after careful scrutiny found four woodcock chicks frozen on the ground.

Photo by Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren

Recovery: Plants

Recovery: 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.

Photo by Peter Gorman

Landscape Ecology: To Build a Home

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.

Photo by Carolyn Byers

Landscape Agriculture

Landscape Agriculture

We might consider our prairies like those old growth oak trees–an ancient grassland. With tremendous investment in roots, the prairie grasses are able to be burned off and cut most years unlike the oaks, but the critters who live in the old growth grassland aren’t so lucky; when the mower comes, if they aren’t able to move out of the way then the inhabitants are toast. Through the first half of the 1900’s, the mowers came about once per year and most species were able to work with this arrangement. Since then the ancient grass has been replaced with alfalfa, and the mowers visit five, six, seven, eight times per growing season, causing enough destruction for most species to abandon these fields entirely.

Photo by Arlene Koziol

Light on the Landscape

Light on the Landscape

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….”

Photo by Brenna Marsicek / Madison Audubon