Riverland Conservancy

The last day of vacation is always a bit melancholy. You want to cram in the last bit of fun, all the things you haven't done so far, but there just isn't time. You know you have to pack everything up and get it all in the car again as early as possible tomorrow morning. It's trite, perhaps, to talk about saving the best for last, but I certainly enjoyed today because we got to do some real birding in some terrific prairie regions.

The Wisconsin Birding Trail has five listings for Sauk County, and we covered three of them through the week. Today we went to the Riverland Conservancy - Merrimac Preserve. Alliant Energy, the power company, operates several restoration areas, and this one is just south of Devil's Lake State Park. The Merrimac Preserve encompasses more than 1,800 acres of forest, prairie, savanna, wetlands and streams in south-central Wisconsin, and provides a wildlife corridor between the Baraboo Bluffs and the Wisconsin River.

Although we found this place through the Birding Trail, the restored prairie simply blew me away. The grass and flowers we taller than we were! Just imagine what it was like for the first settlers, who must have felt buried in grass. I've never seen purple grass before, but several varieties stretched as to the horizon with short or tall purple/reddish grasses. We followed the bio-diversity trail through prairie, wetlands, and oak savanna regions, enthralled with both the plants and animals we found. I'm sure we spent much longer to complete the trail than the planners had in mind!

I kept seeing the prairie as an inverted forest. When forest birds want to hide, they fly up to the canopy where the dense leaves protect them from flying predators. In the prairie, the birds and other animals dive down into the densest grass and flowers, where the crowded stems protect them. Although a hawk or owl can hear or see a mouse on the ground, the vegetation is so thick the bird couldn't possibly capture the mouse once it was in the tall grass, could it? I noticed the same thing about the miles of corn growing in Wisconsin. Mice could hide forever in those forests of standing cornstalks. No hawk could fly into them.

Although the official Wisconsin State Bird is the American Robin, I would recommend changing that to the Turkey Vulture, which certainly seemed the most common bird we saw this week! The Birding Trail book says that Sedge Wren and Lark Sparrows are rare at the Merrimac Preserve. We saw a lot of LBJ's (Little Brown Job's), many of which were sparrows and wrens, but darned if I could see them long enough to decide what kind! All the birds seemed to be in a hurry, and enamored of the thickest branches. One resembled a Meadow Lark, but had a thick beak. Ah! I remember seeing that one before - the Dickcissel! The field guide confirms that the bib is missing in fall. Cedar Waxwings and Gold Finches were easier to locate and identify. Upon investigation, the wren was probably a House Wren. A few fall warblers of generic color and markings joined the anonymous flocks.

Then a raptor flashed by! It turned and displayed a red tail - Red Tailed Hawk we said. But as it turned, it seemed small for a Red Tail, and the face looked white with malar stripes. Could it be a falcon??? I tracked it to a distant tree and got this shot, but the details are unclear. The field guide says neither Peregrines nor Prairie Falcons live in Wisconsin. Sigh... It was probably a Red Tailed Hawk after all. Anyone else have a good guess on little evidence?

A dragonfly couple danced a duet around the wetlands, then flew away.

The wild grapes are just as ripe as those at the winery. I just hope some migrating bird doesn't get drunk on them!

We thought this might be a lupine, but now I don't think so. More investigation is required, but isn't it beautiful? Blue flowers are rare and special to me.

After our walk through the prairie we went back to Devil's Lake to eat lunch. The place was packed with picnickers and swimmers. We decided to get a double kayak and take a spin around the lake for a while. Our was not fiberglass, but inflatable, like a raft -- rather unusual, we thought. Let's just say that we got to see a 360 degree view of the lake as we paddled around, and the double paddles made sure we didn't overheat as they dripped all over us. We returned to shore to dry off, and found this marker on the sunny bench: "Life is a journey, not a destination." Somehow that seemed especially appropriate for our kayak adventure!

Our final adventure for the day was a horse drawn wagon ride through the Lost Canyon. This one wins hands down for being the deepest, narrowest canyon we saw this week. I never would have believed that a pair of Belgian horses could pull a wagon through these rocks! A doe paused to watch the parade go by. At one point, the left horse seemed stuck under the overhang. The driver said he simply had an itch he wanted to scratch on the rock. I did notice several streaks of blue paint on the walls where a wagon had come a leeetle too close! This was a family owned and operated business, and we were glad to see it, since so much of this area has gone the way of big corporations.

In the morning, we will try to pack everything back into the car, including all the rocks we have picked up. It all fit in a week ago, so it should go back now, right?

Aldo Leopold Legacy

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." Aldo Leopold

Until Dick brought home a copy of A Sandhill County Almanac, I had never heard of Aldo Leopold. Now I see his thoughts and quotes so many places. He is often regarded as the father of conservation and land ethics. He was instrumental in developing the proposal to manage the Gila National Forest as a wilderness area, the first such designation, in 1924. After a transfer to Wisconsin, he continued to pursue difficult questions about how people change land and how people might be encouraged to practice conservation rather than exploiting the wealth of the land. He worked as an educator, philosopher, ecologist and wilderness advocate.

In 1935 he purchased a "worn out" farm on the Wisconsin river. He and his family lived his philosophy, planting thousands of pine trees, wildflowers and other plants while living in the "shack", a former chicken coop. From this refuge he wrote much of A Sand County Almanac. When we planned our trip to Wisconsin, we kept looking for Sand County on the map, and only when we arrived did we realize that Sand County was fictitious, referring to the sand in which farmers try to raise their crops. Leopold died in 1948 of a heart attack while fighting a fire, before his work was actually published. As we walked from the shack to the river, I felt that Leopold would have been pleased with the results of his labors, so many years ago. The river flows serenely and cleanly.

The prairie grasses and wildflowers flourish.

Small Leopard frogs jumped from river to the shoreline grasses as we walked along the sandy edges.

A Great Blue Heron had danced on the sand.

Now the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center has been constructed to foster his Land Ethic. True to his spirit, it is constructed to be completely in harmony with the environment, and won the Platinum LEED ® Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council in 2007. Part of that certification requires that materials be obtained within 500 miles of the building. They did even better, using many of the pines Leopold himself planted, thinning the forest while making more space for other trees to grow. The solar panels on the roof generate all the electricity used by the Foundation, and selling any excess back to the local power company. Their solar water heater on the roof heats water to 200 degrees. When the weather is nice, as it has been all this week, they actually open the windows, and the system shuts down automatically. No need to heat or cool the outside! We met a young architect while walking around, who came to admire this structure, and we told him that Bernheim Forest's visitor center had also won the Leeds award as well.

Since the Leopold Center is on a road officially designated as "rustic" by the state of Wisconsin, we drove through miles of farm country early in the morning to reach it. Several family groups of Sandhill Cranes rewarded us for taking the road less traveled.

Unlike the birds I've seen in spring, however, these Cranes were all perfectly silent. Maybe they have said everything that matters for now.

Wisconsin in the Dells

Much of Wisconsin was molded by the last blast from the Ice Ages, which flattened any geological features it encountered. Southwest Wisconsin is just beyond the farthest expansion of the lobes of ice, so it avoided being flattened. But from that position it was covered by massive Lake Wisconsin during the Ice Ages. When the lake drained, the remaining river valley was blasted by the rushing water, forming the famous Wisconsin Dells.

The Cambrian sandstone (that's more than 500 million years old folks) is some of the oldest exposed rock in the world. It is also incredibly soft in most places. You can rub it off with your finger without even trying. When the river swirls into whirlpools, the rock erodes in odd shaped semi-circles. Small creeks make eerie canyons where the sides almost touch until the stream pours into the lake. For a geology buff, this is really cool stuff. Small ferns cascade down the cliffs towards the cool moisture.

Erosion continues as the river rises and falls, chewing into the soft rock. Where the necessary minerals are included in the sandstone, it makes a harder cap atop the more eroded rocks. You can see tilted sandstone beneath other horizontal layers. How would you like to have this for a vacation home? At one point, we all got off the boat and climbed up to look at Stand Rock and the famous Jumping Dog. Yes, there is a dog that jumps across the five foot gap between these two rocks. Why? Who cares about a jumping dog? H.H. Bennett is the photographer who made the Dells famous after the Civil War. He made his own equipment, mixed the chemicals to put on a glass plate, hauled the lot on site, took a picture, and developed it right away before the chemicals decomposed. Thank God for digital cameras! It was impossible to take any action shots because of the time required to expose the chemicals. Any movement just showed as a blur. Bennett invented the camera shutter to reduce the time required for a photo, enabling stop action shots (the favorite of many photographers!). What has that got to do with a rock? To prove his stop action shutter, his son jumped across this gap, while dad captured him in mid-air, something that could not have been faked. I was impressed!

As we enjoyed the perfect weather on the lake, I kept asking myself where the birds were. This area is perfect for Ospreys and Bald Eagles. We finally saw one Osprey, and I believe this one is a juvenile Bald Eagle. Everyone who agrees, raise your hand. Vultures, of course, have been everywhere.

To lose our "lake legs" from riding a boat for 3 hours, we drove down to Mirror Lake State Park to just hike around, enjoying nature. A Wisconsin Ent greeted us with rounded eyes and mouth. Crimson berries from Jack-in-the-Pulpit glowed in the shady forest. These northern Jacks look much larger than ours in Kentucky.

Forests of ferns lined the trails. Some day I'm really going to take a good fern class so I can these beauties apart when I see them.

Sunset in Wisconsin. The perfect way to end the day!

Wisconsin: Cranes, Vultures and Glacial Lakes

It's time for our fall vacation, and my wonderful travel agent/husband booked us into a time share unit in Wisconsin. He kept telling me there were six water parks, and I thought he meant down the street. Nooo, this complex is HUGE, and has six waterparks on the grounds! It is right between Baraboo and Wisconsin Dells, an area that seems to be Branson du Nord, perfect for families with children and grandchildren. We will still spend most of our time in the out of doors, of course.

The International Crane Foundation is right down the road, so that was our first attraction. ICF is famous in this country for their program to save the Whooping Cranes. They breed them on the grounds, and use an ultralight plane to escort the young on their first migration to a site in Florida. They also have pairs of all 15 Cranes in the world, including the Wattled Crane here, and work with foreign governments to save all of them as well. Read the history of the Foundation on their website. It leaves out the part that the founders were only 22 and 23 years old when they began their mission of saving Cranes in 1973. How many young men end up in "feathered diplomacy" as their life's work?

I took this great movie of the Whooping Cranes in their enclosure, and was just about ready to give up on ever getting uploaded to the Blogger server. It's great when you can get any animal in motion, especially one so rare as the Whooping Crane.

Today we traveled to Devil's Lake State Park near Baraboo. The lake was formed when the last glaciers plugged both ends of an ancient river valley. The glaciers are gone, of course, but the lake remains. Great mounds of talus lie at the lake's edge, cracked off the bluffs by heating and cooling over thousands of years. The Quartzite rock itself is a rainbow of colors, from pink, to maroon, purple and almost black, metamorphosed from ancient sandstone. From a distance the rocks look gray, but that's only because they are absolutely covered with gray-green lichens. Some of the huge boulders still show the wave marks on the ancient seabed from which the sandstone was created. Really cool stuff!

A population of Turkey Vultures sit on the boulders at the west side of the valley, waiting for the morning sun to warm the rocks and themselves. When we walked along the trail, they decided they were warm enough and took to the air. Among the large birds, we saw another with lots of white on it's body, and I later determined that it was a Rough-legged Hawk, although we got no pictures of it.

On the other side of the lake are trails that lead to named rocks, like Balancing Rock and Devil's Doorway, so we decided to try one. It was listed as a .4 mile trail, so that's not too long, I thought. I should have guessed that these rocks would be up the steep cliffs, and the trails to reach them would not be easy. In fact, some conservation corps had taken the smaller boulders and made steps up the talus and cliff face. Steps with a rise of about 24 inches, and NO RAILS AT ALL.

I swallowed my acrophobia for a while, but when we lost the trail a time or two, I realized this was not a place I should be. How in the world will I get down these steep steps??? Ackkk! Dick was very understanding when I chickened out about halfway up the trail. I waited for his return, and he held my hand going back down so I wouldn't fall. At the bottom we walked through some nice flat woods and saw this cute little red squirrel. See, it's OK to stay at the bottom, especially if you are not a squirrel!