It is a lot farther from Baraboo Wisconsin to the Hoosier National Forest than I thought. Most of yesterday on the road. On the plus side, I got a lot of audio book done. On the down side, it was a long and not so interesting drive.
I went down to Madison to meet with Paul DeLong, senior VP at American Forest Foundation and the one who does Tree Farm. We met for lunch at the Tipsy Cow, on just off the Capitol Square. We had a great talk about landscape management plans and ecological restoration.
Paul was the Wisconsin State Forester, and so his ideas are interesting and informed by experience. I have a lot to think about from talking to Paul, the guys at Aldo Leopold and Chrissy’s uncle Jerry Apps, who I also talked to. Jerry’s most recent book is on the CCC in Wisconsin. Got a lot of impression and information to make sense.
I walked around Madison, went down to the old lake trail where I used to run and walked up and down State Street. It was more than a mere walk down memory lane. Walking around these places stimulated a lot of thought. Wisconsin has great traditions in conservation & education.
One of the better things about Wisconsin was/is “The Wisconsin Idea”, a philosophy of the University of Wisconsin System that the university programs should be applied to solve problems and improve health, quality of life, the environment, and agriculture for all citizens of the state. This is in line with what Aldo Leopold did in Coon Valley and what Jerry Apps did during his career in UW extension. It was a boots-on-the-ground partnership of the people and the professors. I thought about that in its original context and how it works and might work now. Such a great tradition. It made such a difference, but it is not well known.
My first picture is the State Capitol and the statue of Hans Christian Heg. He was born in Norway, but when the Civil War broke out he joined up to fight for his adopted country and to set other men free. He led Wisconsin 15th, a Scandinavian regiment. He was killed in 1863 at Chickamauga, GA. One of Chrissy’s ancestors fought with the Wisconsin regiments in the Civil War. He survived the war, but his wife died while he was gone. Next is Bascom Hall and Bascom Hill. It doesn’t look that steep, but it is hard to walk up that hill when the path is icy. I did it hundreds of times. Studying at University of Wisconsin was great. Being born in Wisconsin was a great move on my part.
Picture # 3 is shows food trucks in front of Memorial Library. After my drunken student stage, I moved into the nerdy scholar stage. I spent many – many hours at that library, actually liked it. They did not have those trucks there in the old days. There was wagon where some hippies sold very good cookies, but that was about it.
The lake trail is picture #4. For a couple years, my life was studying at the library and running on that lake trail. Sometimes they were mixed. My method for writing papers was to read all the sources and then go run. I thought about it as I ran. It brewed. When I got back, I wrote everything in one sitting and then filled in footnotes and cleaned up the prose. I found it much better flow. The flow of the run complemented the flow of ideas.
Last is Geko Arts. The only reason I include that is because Cousin Elise has her jewelry line with the same name.
If we don’t plan now for the restoration of oak forests, our children and grandchildren will not have them. It takes 40-60 years to grow and oak tree and they are not regenerating fast enough.
It is easy to overlook this problem. Oaks are common trees. There are lots of oaks … now. But if you look under the big oak trees, you find very few little oak trees. Little oak trees don’t like to grow in the shade of big oak trees. That means that oaks need disturbance. Fire was much more common in oak forests in the past. We need it again.
I stopped off at Hoosier National Forests to talk to Travis Swaim, who is managing for oak regeneration. They recently burned 750 acres and I wanted to see what it looked like. I am doing oak regeneration on parts of my land, on a smaller scale of course.
Southern Indiana is an interesting ecology. It is hilly. Looks like western Virginia, not the Indiana we see in the flat north.
Travis talked about the differences on the Hoosier National Forest. They have relatively dry south facing slopes, where oaks can compete well and wetter northern slopes with deeper soils where the poplars and maples dominate. They also have karst landscapes, i.e. very permeable limestone soils.
These were and will be again hardwood forests. In fact, this is the heart of the hardwood. Settlers cleared these forests and much of what is the Hoosier National Forests was exhausted when the government acquired the land in the 1930s. CCC and others planted pine, longleaf and white pine. These are now mature and foresters want to transition back to hardwoods, including oak.
My pictures are from my walk in the woods to see the burn. They also thinned, leaving high quality oaks for regeneration. Travis says they may have to burn again, but maybe not. They will have to monitor and see how it goes. It is an art.
My pictures show the open oak forest. My second picture is rattlesnake master. I was glad to see this in the burned zone, since I extrapolate that my own rattlesnake master will survive the fires we plan to set in December. Last picture is deeper woods with beech trees. I was glad to see the beech survived. I like beech. These were near the road, where they first set the fire, so it was not that hot.
From death comes new life. I know that is true and amply demonstrated on the ecology of the land, but I am still upset by the near total death of the ash trees (Fraxinus).
Ash trees The ash were among my favorite trees, with their glad grace, dark green leaves and fast growth. Ash quickly formed groves. They were among the first to leaf out in spring and in fall turned a beautiful golden, not yellow but really more golden color. Except the white ash. They could turn a beautiful maroon. Beyond those things, I liked ash because they seemed almost impervious to disease. You could plant ash, or more commonly just let ash plant themselves, with reasonable certainty that they would cover the area w/o problems. This last part proved not to be true.
Ash were very common in southeastern Wisconsin. That and their tendency to form groves of almost purely ash has made their rapid demise because of the emerald ash borer more painful. You can see the destruction easily just driving down the roads. That was exacerbated by another of the ash characteristics. They were a pioneer species, quickly filling in disturbed areas, like areas near roads.
Kettle Moraine again I drove up to Kettle Moraine State Forest (Northern Unit) along Highways 41 and 43 and the Götterdämmerung of the ash as particularly noticeable. By the time I arrived at Mauthe Lake I was in a profoundly sad mood and I was uncharacteristically pessimistic. The weather conspired in this. It was overcasts and gray. I thought for sure it would rain, but I needed to do my walk around the lake, as I have been doing for than fifty years.
Mauthe Lake is a gift of the glaciers. It is pretty, but not remarkable. The lake is much more prominent in my personal landscape of memory than on the ground. It was carved out during the most recent ice age and is the headwater of the Milwaukee River. The Milwaukee River does not start here, but flows through early on. Mauthe Lake is important to me because it was where I first learned about conservation, where I came to appreciate the Ice Age and where I saw how landforms interact with biotic communities. I took part in a nature camp there when I was in 5th Grade. It made a lasting impression. In HS, I rode to Mauthe Lake on my bike. In college, I hitchhiked down. I have driven up here dozens of times. The visits bring back memories and I can see the changes that have been taking place over the decades. I expected the dead ash. I had approached the visit with trepidation last year. They were mostly dead by then.
The old trail The walk around the lake is two miles. As usual, parts of the trail were flooded. This is not a problem. Once your feet get wet, they cannot get any wetter, so you just trudge on. You start off in a cedar swamp, with white cedar, tamarack and – until recently – lots of ash. It was on this leg that I felt the deepest discontent and rehearsed the narrative of loss. As I walked, however, I got more cheerful. Maybe it is the stages of grief. I was moving on to acceptance. More likely it was a prosaic combination of seeing more of nature and an improvement in the weather. The sun started to come out and that makes your disposition sunnier.
The turning point came as I crossed the Milwaukee River and started into the mixed and pine forest on the other side. There are a lot of big oak trees there, mostly bur oak. We had the big old oaks surrounded by lot of small and newly deceased ash trees. This reminded me of the impermanence of … it all. At some time in the not very distant past, this ground was probably sedge savanna, with a few big oak trees, some still extant. The oak savanna was almost certainly the result of fires set by Native Americans. I speculate that settlers grazed cattle there. After that, when the land because State Forest, the ash moved in. In other words, the ash were part of the cycle, not the beginning nor the end. This does not take the sting out of their loss, but it does put it into perspective.
You come into a red pine forest as you gain a few feet of elevation. These pines were planted in 1941 and thinned four times. This forest now looks a lot like an open southern pine forests, with a lot of sunlight hitting the ground allowing for diversity. My loblolly on Brodnax look very similar. The red pines are a little bigger than mine, but surprisingly not that much. The Wisconsin trees are nearly 80 years old; mine are just over 30. Trees grow faster in Virginia. Of course, all trees grow faster in their exuberant youth and then plateau. My loblolly will not end up bigger.
I remember the changes in this forest, as least I think I do. I remember my childhood hike in these woods and how I was impressed with hot deep and dark it was. The pine needles formed a thick carpet and there was not much growing under the trees. This was how they did forestry in those days. These days, they like to let in more light. It sacrifices some timber value, but creates a lot more wildlife habitat and species diversity.
What next? All of this made me ask the “what’s next?” questions. The ash trees are gone. We shall not soon see their like again. What is going to come up instead. Something will benefit from this. I observed tamarack, black willow, alder, maples, birch and – surprising to me on the damp land, bur oak. In some places the cattails had become more profuse. Maybe the treed swamp will in some places become a marsh or a sedge meadow. The trees suck up water. Absent the ash, maybe more water will stand.
I observed last time and still now that in some isolated places the ash were still standing and healthy. Sometimes dead ash were standing next to lives ones. What happened? I understand that ash trees in Asia resist the ash borers. Ash borers in Asia are endemic, but not as decisive. Some American ash likely also do not taste as good to the borers or maybe have some characteristic making the less attractive. In this maybe we have the seeds of recovery. I have a picture of the live ash near the dead one with the backdrop of a beautiful sedge meadow. The future?
We think the environment we first saw is THE proper environment, that the forests and fields of our youth was the way it was supposed to be. Nature, in fact, is dynamic and impermanent. Our nature was just one short and changing scene in the endless drama. As I described with the big oaks, it was not what had been or what had to be.
Along the trail, I passed some kids with their parents and a group of what looked like high school kids. They were looking at each other, the boys paying attention to the girls and the reverse. They were not paying particular attention to the forests around them, but they were drinking it in unawares. This is their baseline. Maybe the next generation will think that the cattail marsh next to the river is the way it is “supposed to be.” If sometime the ash recover and recolonize the fenland, these old people of the future will decry that mess and invasion, the trees sucking up water and shading out the cattails.
I know I should more joyfully embrace impermance. I know that intellectually. I know that future generations will not feel that way and maybe even I will not long into the future. From death comes new life. The environment endures and adapts. But I still miss my ash trees.
I wish I did not go, but I am glad I went. I took much less joy in my trip to Mauthe Lake because of all the dead ash trees all along the road on the way up and then all around the lake. The emerald ash beetle and killed almost all of them. I did not appreciate how many ash trees there were until I saw all the skeletons.
What to do about it? Last time I was here, I wrote about possible solutions using GMOs. Maybe we could develop ash trees naturally resistant. But maybe it is just the impermanent. I also wrote about the vastness of geological time last time I was here. The ice day did not end very long ago in the great scheme of things. The ash forests are recent. This kind of geography would be dominated by tupelo and bald cypress if they were farther south. Global warming has made most concepts of “native” almost meaningless. Maybe it is time for tupelos and bald cypress in anticipation of the “new” climate. I don’t know about tupelos, but I know that bald cypress can survive and thrive in Wisconsin, although they are not native to the state. They tend not to reproduce is the cooler climate, but if the climate becomes less cold, maybe that will change.
I like the woods and fields familiar from my youth. Mauthe Lake was where I learned to love nature. We were in a day camp up there when I was in 5th grade. We took the path around the lake that I walked today. It is only a couple of miles, but for us kids it was a true adventure. I don’t remember details, but I the feeling abides. I don’t want change, but change is what we are getting, so we can adapt and make things better or let them get worse.
First picture show a ghost forest of the ash. Next is a recently cut stump. I counted 98 rings. Since I probably missed a few, I figure the tree was more than 100 years old. Not all the ash are dead. You see a healthy one in picture #3. Don’ know why that one did not die. It might be useful to find out and maybe help spread. Picture #4 shows some tamaracks, eponymous of the trail. Tamaracks are very shade intolerant. They tend to grow in place where others do not thrive, places like bogs. Last shows the beech on Mauthe Lake. Glad to see people enjoying being outside. Facebook reports re Mauthe
Mount Rushmore is iconic and worth seeing and worth going to see if you are nearby.
The ponderosa pine forests near Mount Rushmore were interesting. It looks like the Park Service, or Forest Service or others are doing a good job of thinning and maybe burning. We drove through here in 1997. Back then, the woods were too thick. They were asking for attack by beetles and fire and the request was, unfortunately, granted. Management looks better now.
We also went to Wall Drug. For those unfamiliar, it is a complex of kitsch. You see signs every few miles as you drive up I-90. It is not far from the highway and worth stopping. Last picture shows some silos in Wall, SD. I just thought they looked cool.
Drove across South Dakota facing a bodacious wind strong enough to worsen our gas mileage. Funny thing is that we saw lots of windmills in Iowa and few in South Dakota. Must be differences in laws or subsidies. South Dakota presents a variety of ecosystems. The place along the Missouri River is a lot like the upper Mississippi. You go west into great flat vastness. It has been rainy lately, so it is unusually green – almost Land of Oz green. We took a side-trip through the Badlands. They are interesting to look at and there are lots of roadside notices talking about the unique ecology, but they are really just a lot of erosion, the kind of thing you might find in an abandoned gravel pit or abused farmland. On the plus side, the area has largely left alone because it is not valuable for agriculture and it was hard to travel through. Lots of wildlife still exists here. My first and last pictures show bighorn sheep. Next is me with the Badlands in the background, followed by a closeup of some of the erosion. You can see the wind in the next picture and the green-green grass.
Taking advantage of my pilgrimage to the Aldo Leopold place, I stopped off in Madison. Always liked it there and Madison formed the backdrop for lots my thinking. I studied Greek and Latin. I forgot both, but the discipline of those languages stayed. I didn’t actually go to the city or the university, however, but stuck to the edges at the Wisconsin Arboretum and my old running trail that juts into Lake Mendota.
They do prescribe burning at the Arboretum, so I went to see some of the prairies maintained by fire. The big one is Curtis Prairie, originally laid out by Aldo Leopold in 1935, along with the less well-known Norman Fassett, Ted Sperry and the eponymous John Curtis, on an abandoned pasture. There was also a graduate student John Thompson, who planted seeds, along with dozens of CCC boys. It was the first example of scientific restoration. They brought in sod and seeds that they thought represented the original cover and it has been growing ever since.
You can see Curtis Prairie in the first photo. On the side is Leopold woods. It is good to have the history, since you can get ideas about the ages of the trees. These are about eighty years old. In the next photo you can see that they grew up in the open, since the white pine kept many of its lower branches for a long. Lake Wingra in the next photo is surround on three sides by the Arboretum and so is nice and clean. Next is the end of Picnic Point on Lake Mendota, the turn around point for my runs for obvious reasons. I used to be able to stop and get a drink at the pump shown in the photo, but it is now defunct.
Cudahy nature center is actually in Oak Creek, just off College Avenue. I started coming here sometime in the early 1970s, before it was a nature center and before Milwaukee County owned it. I used to read books about ecology and natural succession and then come to place like this and try to see how it worked. This is very much my “home woods.” The preserve is about 42 acres of maple-basswood forest (farther east it would be joined by beech, but there are no natural occurring beech trees in Milwaukee County outside the immediate reach of Lake Michigan fog) that managed to avoid being cut. I doubt it is “virgin” forest, as some say, but it sure is old growth.
An obvious sign of old growth are big trees, but there is more. If the stand is really old growth, i.e. has been there for more than a generation or two, you will find unevenly aged trees and a variety of species.
If you look closely, you can see how the forest composition has been changing. There are some very old oak trees. They are probably at least 200 years old. Some look like they grew in a more open setting, since they had lower branches, but most are very tall before they branch, indicating that they grew with lots of other trees.
The oaks, however, are not the future. Oaks are disturbance dependent, since they need a fair amount of sun. Their offspring will not grow in the shade of the parents and here you have sugar maples and basswood that replace them.
You can see that in my first photo. I saw the trunk and the bark and though “oak” but then looked up and saw maples leaves. I was confused for a second and then looked farther up and saw oak leaves. If I could jump 100 feet into the air, I would see an oak poking out above a sea of maples. The next photo shows some very big basswood trees. They are part of what we used to call the climate community. Basswood and maples will dominate this site until disturbed, since their seedlings can thrive in the shade. The third photo is one of the old oaks that I bet grew up in a much less dense forest, maybe a field. Last is me by the sign for the nature preserve.
Kettle Moraines Continuing some observations from yesterday’s wet walk around Mauthe Lake. One thing I like about the walk is the constancy of the biotic communities around the lake; another is the constant change. It seems like a contradiction that both can be true at the same time, but that is how natural systems work.
One change I do not like is the death of the ash trees. I noted last time that the ash were still alive. Invasive emerald ash borers evidently arrived in sufficient numbers to change that. I wonder how the damp, but not wet, land near the lake will change.The ash grew well in this environment and changed it by their growing, pulling up water and transpiring it. Will the damp-land become wetland now that they are not doing that? Will the damp forest become more marsh-like. Or will some other sort of trees take up the slack from that niche? There may adapt some natural control. Emerald ash borers eat only ash. They have now eaten themselves out of a home, although I am sure there are residual populations lurking around. Maybe local birds and frogs will learn to like the taste of ash borers and they will be transformed from an existential threat to a mere local menace, maybe just a nuisance, or maybe human effort can extirpate them. Hope.
Mauthe Lake represents the headwaters of the Milwaukee River. The official source is nearby Long Lake, but it flows through Mauthe. The river was high, as you can see from my photos.
My first picture shows a nice stand of white pine along the path. They are probably (only a guess, I was unable to confirm & if anyone knows better let me know too) seventy years old, planted by CCC. Next is the Milwaukee River leaving Mauthe Lake, followed by a photo of is coming in. The “river” after that is not a river at all. the left branch is the hiking trail and the right one is a bike trail. The water was shallow and warm. Last is the ghost forest of ash trees.
When you get completely wet, and can’t get any wetter, you no longer dread getting wet. That happened to my feet at least. And there is a real charm in walking in the woods in the rain, even when the trail is officially flooded.
I liked how they treated the warning. They did not close the trail, just warned you to do it at your own risk. Even if it had been closed I would have gone, but I liked that I did not have to break the rules. The worst parts of the flooding were only about ankle deep, as you see in the photos below. This should not be surprising on a trail through wetlands. The surface underneath is paved with gravel, so you don’t sink into mud and walking is not hard. It started to rain as soon as I arrived, this and the flooding trail meant that I had all the Mauthe Lake Trail in Kettle Moraine State Park to myself.
The Kettle Moraine State Forest is where I first learned about ecology. This was back in 1965, when I was ten years old. I got to go to a day camp up around Mauthe Lake. We did nature walks and learned about the forests, wetlands and the various remnants of the lake ice age, conveniently names “Wisconsin Ice Age” after the state where some of its most prominent features was easily visible. I try to go back when I am nearby. I get a very peaceful feeling here, maybe reaching back to my childhood and my imaginings of the great forces that moved earth.
My pictures show the trail, the wet trail and my wet feet. There is also a cut red pine. I counted the rings best I could. There are more than fifty. This means that it was just a little tree plantation when I was there in 1965. It grew very fast at first but in the last decades grew hardly at all. Last are the red pine relatives.
I am in Baraboo at a two-day seminar at the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Leopold is the founder of an important stream of conservation, although I am not sure he would have taken credit for it.
Leopold’s “land ethic” is both simple and profound. We all live in the natural world and should be mindful of the choices we are making, both actions and inaction. Things we do that tend to improve the biotic communities on the land are good and those that harm them are bad.
The profound and ostensibly paradoxical part is that Leopold wrote that you cannot write a land ethic in a book. A land ethic has to be written on the land. You leave your signature on the land you manage and you learn from the land you are walking on. You learn from being involved. It is a melding of thinking and doing.
Observe – participate – reflect – observe … It is circular and endless, but even when I write it in this order it is misleading, since they overlap and merge in the practice.
The other point that Leopold made about the land ethic applies to most sorts of practical philosophy. It is dynamic. The process is constant; the conclusions are mutable depending on the interactions and the circumstances. I am thinking about this and I don’t suppose I can explain it in writing. But I think I understand some of it from my interaction with environments all over and from working on my own land.
I have owned my forest land for more than ten years now. I have seen many changes on the land and changes in how I view land, my own and others. I appreciate Leopold’s thinking on this more than I did, more than a could have, before I had the responsibility on my own property.
Anyway, Leopold summed up ethics by explaining that acting ethically meant that you did the right thing even when nobody is looking, even when doing the wrong thing is perfectly legal and maybe acceptable to others. Of course, he did not originate this thought, and never claimed it was original. But it is good to recall and reiterate.
My first picture is the Leopold Foundation buildings. Much of the wood is from trees Leopold planted. The buildings are designed to use lots of natural light and take advantage of the site for climate control. The next picture is a sedge meadow in Stevens Point. This is a wetland dominated by grass and forbs, generally w/o trees. Standing water is present only episodically, but the soils are generally saturated.
I like the Leopold ethic. It fits in well with my mindful boots-on-the-ground philosophy. You have to go to the places, experience them. You gain knowledge through practical experience, and it is always contingent on what happened before. That is why you need to absorb the context. However, while experience is mandatory, learning is optional, which is where the reflection and thinking comes in.
This picture is our group photo. It was taken just before our work pulling invasive plants out of the prairie to get some of that hands-on experience. That is why some of us have gloves. Right after we finished the field work, we discussed Leopold’s essay “Axe in Hand” where he talks about making choices in conservation and understanding how we are affecting the land. The work helped with understanding and internalizing the essay. Save
I attended a program at the Aldo Leopold Foundation in Baraboo. We discussed conservation and how to communicate it with a more general public. The sessions are based on Leopold’s thinking and also his methods. He believed in learning actively. Observe – participate – reflect – observe … repeat.
I like it. It fits in well with my mindful boots-on-the-ground philosophy. You have to go to the places, experience them. You gain knowledge through practical experience, and it is always contingent on what happened before. That is why you need to absorb the context. However, while experience is mandatory, learning is optional, which is where the reflection and thinking comes in.
Anyway, the picture is our group photo. It was taken just before our work pulling invasive plants out of the prairie to get some of that hands-on experience. That is why some of us have gloves. Right after we finished the field work, we discussed Leopold’s essay “Axe in Hand” where he talks about making choices in conservation and understanding how we are affecting the land. The work helped with understanding and internalizing the essay.
I am in Baraboo at a two-day seminar at the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Leopold is the founder of an important stream of conservation, although I am not sure he would have taken credit for it.
Leopold’s “land ethic” is both simple and profound. We all live in the natural world and should be mindful of the choices we are making, both actions and inaction. Things we do that tend to improve the biotic communities on the land are good and those that harm them are bad.
The profound and ostensibly paradoxical part is that Leopold wrote that you cannot write a land ethic in a book. A land ethic has to be written on the land. You leave your signature on the land you manage and you learn from the land you are walking on. You learn from being involved. It is a melding of thinking and doing.
Observe – participate – reflect – observe … It is circular and endless, but even when I write it in this order it is misleading, since they overlap and merge in the practice.
The other point that Leopold made about the land ethic applies to most sorts of practical philosophy. It is dynamic. The process is constant; the conclusions are mutable depending on the interactions and the circumstances. I am thinking about this and I don’t suppose I can explain it in writing. But I think I understand some of it from my interaction with environments all over and from working on my own land.
I have owned my forest land for more than ten years now. I have seen many changes on the land and changes in how I view land, my own and others. I appreciate Leopold’s thinking on this more than I did, more than a could have, before I had the responsibility on my own property.
Anyway, Leopold summed up ethics by explaining that acting ethically meant that you did the right thing even when nobody is looking, even when doing the wrong thing is perfectly legal and maybe acceptable to others. Of course, he did not originate this thought, and never claimed it was original. But it is good to recall and reiterate.
My first two pictures are the Leopold Foundation buildings. Much of the wood is from trees Leopold planted. The buildings are designed to use lots of natural light and take advantage of the site for climate control. The third picture is a sedge meadow in Stevens Point. This is a wetland dominated by grass and forbs, generally w/o trees. Standing water is present only episodically, but the soils are generally saturated.
