Bird & Nature Blog
A clutch of the latest stories from Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance
Growing up in Arkansas, we had several informal state mottos. "Quid Pro Quo" for example—pretty self explanatory. Another, "Thank God for Mississippi" requires context. Whenever national rankings came out with measures of human well being in the realms of health, education, welfare, etc., Arkansas was always ranked 49th, saved from the bottom by Mississippi always being ranked 50th. I thought of that phrase upon hearing the report of last week's meeting of the DNR Board.
Photo by Arlene Koziol
Monday was a fun day at Goose Pond, one of the first days of seed collecting. The target species was wild lupine. Volunteers collected at Goose Pond and the Erstad Prairie, Madison Audubon’s land adjacent to the Schoenberg Waterfowl Production Area, north and east of Goose Pond.
Photo by Joshua Mayer
"Sumer is icumen in/ Lhude sing cucco" — for those of us with some British ancestry, that's the start of a song our ancestors would greet the summer in the 13th Century. It's charming, important to musicologists, and vaguely familiar to folks who remember Chaucer from their survey of English lit course. We in Madison Audubon would probably agree that the start of summer and any celebration thereof should include birds. Surprisingly, mercifully, and thankfully, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Board probably agrees.
Photo by Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren
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
