[gentle piano music]
- Announcer: "Wild Places" is supported in part
by a grant from Friends of WHA-TV,
viewers supporting Wisconsin Public Television
and inviting you to join them.
[water trickling]
- Narrator: They are rare places, pure places.
They are our wild places.
[birds chirping]
We have nearly 400 places like these,
all part of our state's Natural Areas Program.
[light music]
[birds squawking]
Join us as we explore our wild places.
[waves crashing] [light music continues]
[water trickling] [birds chirping]
[light music]
There are nearly 400 of these special places.
Number 285 is within the Dells of the Wisconsin River,
a place of water and rock
millions of years in the making,
carved an inch at a time over the centuries.
It is a sanctuary for fauna
and flora.
- Tom Meyer: This little plant's on our rare species list.
It's called 'arctic primrose',
sometimes called 'bird's eye primrose.'
- Narrator: A rare plant.
A plant best approached by water.
Tom Meyer, of the state's Natural Areas Program,
extols the arctic primrose,
a rare beauty in this rare place.
This wild place.
- It's got a grip, friends.
[light music] [birds chirping]
- Wild places, when nature comes first.
This is just one of some 400 places
that are part
of this innovative trailblazing model
housed within Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources.
There are state natural areas
in nearly every county in the state.
They range from the modest--
a small woods, foothills of the Baraboo Hills--
to the mighty-- a native prairie called Avoca.
The largest left standing east of the Mississippi River.
They hold stunning vistas.
They hold small delights.
Take a look.
Take a look at Baxter's Hollow.
Chiwaukee Prairie.
[birds chirping]
Beulah Bog.
[loon calling]
Frog Lake and Pines,
different in every season.
Saved forever.
[light music]
[birds chirping]
Cliff Germain, the program's first director.
- Natural areas are tracks of land or water
in a natural or a near natural state
to be set aside,
preserved to protect the plant and animal communities
and to preserve them
for research, educational use,
and just simply for future generations.
- Narrator: For research, education,
for future generations.
- Is he fuzzy? - Child: Yeah.
- He's fuzzy.
- Bye, moth. - Bye, moth.
[child laughs]
- Narrator: This farsighted program
began here in 1952
with the designation of Parfrey's Glen in Sauk County
as the first state natural area.
It began at the urging of Wisconsin's Aldo Leopold.
- Cliff Germain: Aldo Leopold was
on the Wisconsin Conservation Commission Board at that time
and he convinced the commission
that they should spend some money,
not just on parks and wildlife areas,
but also purchase some natural areas.
And he had a token amount, I think $35,000
was set up so that they could buy Parfrey's Glen
as the first area.
[birds chirping, water trickling]
- Narrator: Parfrey's was the first.
The first of the wilderness places.
The first of the wild places.
Over time, other natural areas were designated
on state land.
[water current rushing]
But it wasn't until 1965
that the program first received two essential items:
money for support
and money for a staff, a staff of one that is,
then staff and staff director, Cliff Germain.
- I recall that I had one assistant,
a student, and I had a canoe and a station wagon
and a pair of binoculars
and that was about my equipment. [chuckles]
- Narrator: One man, many acres.
This is what Germain and the program set in motion;
nearly 400 natural areas,
over 150,000 acres saved.
Places like Whitefish Dunes.
[waves crashing, gulls cawing]
Bear caves.
[birds squawking]
Creek sand prairie.
[birds squawking]
[bugs trilling]
Some natural areas are on state lands,
like Kohler-Andrae State Park.
Some, like the Mink River Estuary,
are owned by nonprofit groups like the Nature Conservancy
and jointly managed.
[birds chirping]
Some, like Battle Bluff, were purchased outright.
All are protected forever.
The program provided a model,
an innovative model
that's been imitated by nearly every other state,
a model that changed the mindset with this land mission,
a mission different than that of state forests,
wildlife refuges, and state parks.
A mission best described as, "Leave it alone."
- In other words, don't put any pheasants on these areas.
Don't put food patches.
Stop trying to create wildlife habitat,
but try to protect the entire community of plants and animals
and mostly leave it alone.
That was the best way to do it is just don't do anything.
Just let nature do the work.
You're managing to try to keep
that area in as near a natural state,
as near as it was before white settlement,
Many times you can drive by a state natural area,
and if it doesn't have a sign,
you may not realize you're driving by one.
But if you get into the area and start walking in it,
I think you can recognize that there's
not much human disturbance.
- Narrator: Wild places.
Places like Pewits Nest.
[water splashing]
Tom Meyer of the state's Natural Areas Program.
- Tom: Pewits Nest is a small sandstone gorge carved
by a skillet creek, which flows over a series
of little benches.
It has a cool microclimate, cool and moist.
It harbors a unique geological feature
in that sandstone gorge.
- Narrator: Nature has been left to do its work.
The seasons shape the landscape.
[water splashing] [light music]
State natural areas can be stunning,
but they were saved for reasons other than their beauty.
They're kind of like seed banks.
A sort of landscape bank, a collection of different kinds
of natural communities.
Different plants and animals
from conifers to cacti.
Different natural communities that make up the mosaic
of the crazy quilt called Wisconsin.
For we are amazingly rich in variety.
Randy Hoffman of the state's Natural Areas Program.
- Randy Hoffman: Wisconsin is uniquely placed because we have
the northern forest, the coniferous forest
coming in from the north.
From the east, we have the deciduous forest coming in from
the eastern part of North America.
And then from the west, we have the prairies and all
the plants and animals that are associated with that.
So that real combination of these major, major biomes
coming together in one spot really helps create
a lot of diversity for Wisconsin.
- Narrator: Wisconsin has over 60 distinctly
different natural communities.
[light music] [birds chirping]
Places like the pine barrens.
100, 200 years ago, pine barrens like these
were part of the north.
Now only small pockets remain of this particular landscape,
a landscape shaped by a peculiarity.
It requires fire. [thunder rumbling]
- It's kind of evocative of the west.
It's kind of this rolling sandscape
with scattered trees out there.
- Narrator: The Solon Springs Sharptail Barrens.
State natural area 65 on a rainy day in fall.
[light music] [thunder rumbling]
Seasons will pass and this place will stay,
held forever as part of the state's Natural Areas Program.
50 years ago, we began this dazzling collection.
That's 50 years and counting.
[birds chirping] [light music]
Wild places.
They are places that are sometimes thick with color,
places that hold amazing plants,
places that sometimes sing with flowers.
They sing with flowers,
and some are very rare.
The dwarf lake iris in The Ridges Sanctuary in Door County.
The northern monkshood clings to
the walls of Parfrey's Glen.
A tiny orchid on the floor of Devil's Lake Oak Forest.
Over 90% of Wisconsin's rare plants can be found
in the state's natural areas.
Often, these plants require these places.
- What I wanna know is how he chooses.
Why not just go to the next one that's closest?
He marks every flower on the--
- Woman: Yeah, that's what it looks like.
- There are no other places on the planet
where this thing grows.
It's called Fassett's Locoweed.
This plant is on the federal list of threatened species
and it's also on our state's endangered species list.
- Wisconsin is it for Fassett's Locoweed,
and this state natural area in Waushara County
is the motherload.
- This is it.
There are probably maybe a hundred thousand plants total,
but the bulk of them are--
We're standing pretty much in the middle of the bulk of them.
- Narrator: The local weed is here in part
because this lake is here.
It's a rare tunnel channel lake
formed at the bottom of a glacier.
No inlets, no outlets.
When it rains, water levels can soar 10 feet or more,
washing over this area.
It floods; you can see the telltale signs.
It floods, which Locoweed loves.
This plant needs two things to thrive:
a lot of sun and no competition.
- And when the lake levels go back down with drought,
the plants sprout up again.
The first thing that comes up is Fassett's Locoweed,
all the other plants in the meantime have been killed.
- Narrator: All that Fassett's Locoweed,
which has very long life seeds adapted to the life cycle
of a tunnel channel lake.
This plant needs this place.
[birds squawking]
And these birds need this place:
Audubon Goose Pond in Columbia County.
- Tom: This is what's known as a prairie pothole,
kind of shallow water, maybe seasonal.
Sometimes they'll dry up in the summertime.
So during the spring and fall,
it's a great place to go to see swans and thousands of geese
just packed into that small area.
But in pre-resettlement times,
we had lots of these little prairie potholes,
places where the glacier had kind of scoured
out a little area that filled with water
and was surrounded by prairie.
And this is a place where mostly water birds would come.
[light music] [birds squawking]
- Narrator: Natural areas are a place of sanctuary.
They are also a place of study.
In fact, they used to be called state scientific areas.
Thousands of scientists and researchers have used
these lands as their lab.
[staticky radio signal hisses]
- Not very well.
I get it better off to the left.
The receiver is temperature sensitive,
so the pulse rate tells me what the temperature is.
- Narrator: Rich Sajack is among them.
His beat is a mid-state natural areas
in the bluffs of the Mississippi River
in a multi-year research project
sponsored by the Milwaukee Zoo,
the Zoological Society of Milwaukee, and the DNR
on a very threatened animal, the timber rattlesnake.
- Okay, what we have here is a female timber rattlesnake.
We call her "number seven."
She's had a transmitter in her since 1999,
a year that she gave birth.
She gave birth to seven babies,
and since then she's been out in the summers hunting
and she'll just simply coil up and lay in ambush.
And if it takes- - Sajack, who has studied
snakes all over the world,
is after basic research on this Wisconsin native.
- Sajack: Oh, don't go in the hole.
- Narrator: The state natural areas are essential
to his study.
- To do any kind of long term ecological study,
one of the primary things you need is to know
that your area will be there,
that you're not going to come out here in the spring and
find a road and markers up because somebody has bought it
and is subdividing it for lots.
You have to have someplace where you can learn things
that you need to learn.
- Narrator: These bluffs once held hundreds of timbers.
- I've asked a number of the old time snake hunters
if you couldn't take your grandson out and show him
a timber rattlesnake sitting up on the bluff
on a May morning.
I said, "Would that be a good thing?"
I mean, it's part of our heritage.
It's part of our wildlife.
- Narrator: Sajack calls them the patriarch of the bluffs
for they may slither through these woods for up to 30 years.
They are an integral part of this place.
Integral, but not always loved.
Their PR is lousy, and Sajack feels it's a bad rap.
- They are, in my experience, very laid back animals.
I have in the course of my study,
inadvertently stepped over them.
I have stepped next to them.
I have stepped on them and I've never had one try to bite
until I have tried to restrain it.
She also has the tongue that she flicks out,
which is a sensory organ.
It's sort of halfway between smell and taste
that lets her know what's going on around her.
So, if you ever see a snake and it flicks its tongue,
it's not actually threatening you,
it's just trying to find out what's going on around.
- Narrator: What's going on?
The question is asked by both species.
- It's, to me, the biggest mystery of the area
is how they navigate.
I mean, their chin is right down on the ground,
so I don't know what they could use for landmarks.
People talk about them using scent trails and things,
but who's laying the scent trail
and what kind of scent trail?
So I personally think that as long lived as they are,
that they probably have just over the years
learned the woods the way we do.
But all of that stuff is just a mystery.
- Narrator: Mysteries abound here.
These special places,
sanctuary nearly 75% of Wisconsin's endangered
or threatened animals are protected
within the state's natural areas.
Thousands of others call them home.
[light music]
[birds chirping]
[loon calling]
These are rare places.
These are old places.
- Randy: The is a hemlock hardwood forest
here in Iron County.
- Narrator: Randy Hoffman of the state's
Natural Areas Program.
- What's really amazing about a place like this
is these hemlock trees that are part of this system
can live to be five, six, seven hundred years old,
an individual tree.
Most of them will die much younger,
but even after that tree dies, falls over,
it starts lying on the ground,
it takes 100 to 120 years for that tree
to totally decompose.
It can turn back into the soils that enrich the area again.
- This is a nurse log, or a nursery log.
We call it that because it has just the right habitat
for different tree species to get started.
Little seedlings, these are yellow birch trees.
- Randy: There's whole groups of insects and fungi
and other molds that are part
of that decaying wood ecosystem
that need that stuff on the ground to survive.
- Narrator: These plants and animals need this place.
- It's a decomposing hemlock.
- Narrator: In a logged forest,
these fallen trees might be salvaged.
Here, they stay fulfilling another function.
- The whole tree here is basically a community.
So these lichens are part of it.
The mosses here are part of it, flowering plants,
and then whole communities of insects that live in there.
This is a long life community,
could be a hundred years old right here.
[light music]
When the first settlers, the missionaries
first came to Wisconsin, there was millions of acres
that was very similar to the land behind us.
There's maybe 8,000 or 10,000 acres of this remaining.
- Narrator: What remains are wild places,
and the living and dying,
the processes, that are part of these places.
[birds chirping]
- We need more than just food and shelter
to really be humans, to provide some essence to life.
- Oh, there are places that lift your spirit.
There is a peacefulness that comes over me
when I come into a place like this.
[light music] [birds chirping]
[light music] [water splashing]
- Narrator: The dells of the Eau Claire River
in Marathon County on a winter day in February.
Full of motion, light, and change
as water, ice, and time work to shape this place.
[light music]
Water and time work the landscape.
Over 100 miles to the south in Adams County,
another place carved by water, by the glacier
thousands of years ago.
- Fantastic place. - I love this place.
You look that way,
you can't see anything but natural land.
I can't see a road.
I can't see a city.
I don't see a cell tower.
I don't see a house.
There aren't too many places that you can do that.
That's what makes this place wild and special.
I like it.
- Narrator: It's one of the largest State Natural Areas,
Quincy Bluff and Wetlands.
- But what's special about this place is it's big.
Quincy Bluff and Wetlands Natural Area
spans about four miles.
The project boundary includes almost 10,000 acres of land.
Well, I'll tell you a story.
The majority of those wetlands out there
were this close to being a cranberry farm.
And the Nature Conservancy worked very closely
with the owner of the property to buy it.
And I think negotiations went on
for at least a couple of years
before we finally, we finally tipped the scale,
but we could be looking over developed cranberry beds
with a large flowage 'cause you need all that water
to supply the cranberry beds
and this place would not be here.
It would not be a natural area.
We were that close to losing it.
[light music]
Land, especially in central Wisconsin,
is being chopped up into little 40-acre blocks.
People are using it for hunting,
for second home development.
Yeah, I think we dodged a big bullet on this one.
- Narrator: It took years of negotiating and money
to save this place,
years of hard work and persistence.
It takes a lot of hard work to save wild places.
- You gotta come in and just start hand pulling this stuff
and hanging it up in a tree, and if it's too close to seed,
then you have to hand pull and put it in a bag yet.
- Narrator: A crew spends a day yanking out garlic mustard,
an invasive species, by hand.
- What did I say?
The future will be somebody will be making millions of dollars
on garlic mustard, putting it in on chicken or...
- Man: It's pretty widespread.
- Woman: It's outta here.
- We hope it's outta here.
We'll keep working on it.
And a lot of people are out in full force in the spring
trying to control it.
And we have our little crew here for the natural area.
[light music]
- Narrator: Hard work.
It's taken 20 years to retrieve this prairie.
The Spring Green Preserve, acre by acre,
year after year, to get to this.
[birds chirping, light music continues]
- Yeah, we used to have two million acres
of prairie in Wisconsin.
We don't have that landscape.
We can't go out and see a prairie changing color anymore
except on these small net State Natural Area parcels.
It's not there in large blocks, so if we ever want it again,
we're gonna have to recreate it.
[light music]
- Narrator: And to recreate a prairie is a long,
exhausting, tedious process.
[fire crackling]
A process that requires hundreds of hours
and hundreds of volunteers,
volunteers who seem to have found their heart
giving up time to save this prairie.
- The Nature Conservancy owns this property.
It's called the Spring Green Preserve State Natural Area.
There's about 900 acres here.
So, the goal here is to cut off the red cedar trees,
which weren't part of this original landscape.
And a lot of people don't understand that
sometimes cutting a tree is a good thing to do.
And this is one of those times.
Red cedar came in here when we stopped having wildfire,
and when the Native Americans stopped burning these areas
and when the settlers stopped the prairie fires from coming,
red cedar got a hold.
Over the years with a lack of fire,
those red cedars started seeding down into the prairie area.
They essentially shade out
all of the native prairie plant species
growing underneath them.
[chainsaw revving]
So, this is really just a big preparation
for the next part,
which is a prairie fire.
[light music]
- Narrator: On a day in spring, they burn the prairie.
This landscape has been without fire for over 50 years.
Till now.
Prairie plants can withstand, even thrive on fire;
others cannot.
[light music, fire sizzling]
After the smoke has cleared,
the fire cooled, the work continues.
There will be hours of cleanup.
Just two months later.
Renewal.
In time, with work, the prairie will return.
Our wild places are often fragile places.
First rule: step lightly.
- Natural areas, state natural areas,
can accommodate nature photography, hikes through this area.
Nondestructive uses.
A person going out here grouse hunting
is not going to cause any problems to those natural functions.
So, those types of uses are fully compatible
with the establishment of these state natural areas.
- This way, come on!
- Narrator: Others are not.
Consider the sand barrens,
one of Wisconsin's most unusual landscapes.
- It's hard to keep fun-loving ATVs outta the sand barrens.
Unfortunately, when one ATV goes through
and leaves tire tracks in the vegetation,
it may take a hundred or more years for that to revegetate
'cause there's a whole host of lichens
and other small plants that grow on the sand barrens.
And when those are disturbed,
it's tough for them to get started again.
So the damage wrought by ATVs and off-road vehicles
on these fragile sandy environments can last for decades.
- Narrator: The damage can last for decades,
damage to a very precious place.
[birds chirping]
- Your state natural areas are usually just the jewels.
Usually, the rarest of the rare.
- Narrator: Cynthia Olmsted is the director
of the Mississippi Valley Conservancy,
a land trust from La Crosse that has had
two parcels designated as state natural areas,
including this one, one of the state's newest.
- This is the Roe Preserve,
or the official name is the Roe Unit of the Cassville Bluff
State Natural Area.
And I tell you, once I got here, I knew we had to save it.
[chuckles]
It was one of those sort of 'Aha moments' where yes,
this is one we have to really save.
Both places that we've worked with the DNR on,
the minute I get on them, you know,
you're able to see your results,
which I think is really great.
There's nothing more satisfying than thinking,
"We protected that.
"It's gonna be protected
for future generations of Wisconsinites."
[light music]
- Narrator: Protected forever,
through endless seasons,
places like Toft Point in Door County.
[waves crashing, light music]
[birds chirping]
Avon Bottoms in Rock County.
[gulls cawing]
Toft Point in summer.
Wild places.
We have nearly 400 wild places,
nearly 400 state natural areas
totaling just over 150,000 acres.
It is both a huge effort and a small step.
- In our minds,
we're only about a third of the way there.
We think we need 800 or 900 to do the job,
to really protect our diversity
and to have places like this everywhere
so that people can come and experience
what Wisconsin's landscape looked like.
[water splashing]
- Narrator: If they reach this total of 800 to 900 places,
if the state's natural areas holdings
were doubled from what we have now,
that would equal just 1% of Wisconsin's land mass.
Doubled, we would've saved just 1%.
- We're looking at this very, very long term.
It's not just what's here today,
but what's here 100, 500, 1,000 years from now.
[light music]
- They are going to be the remnants, the reservoirs,
the last bastions of what things used to be.
- Narrator: Perhaps,
there is something unique in the Wisconsin character
that responds to wildness.
Perhaps that's why this model of preservation
first suggested by Aldo Leopold was pioneered here.
We, in Wisconsin, recognized, as Thoreau once wrote,
"In wildness is the preservation of the world."
You can find it in our state natural areas.
[light music] [crickets chirping]
Our wild places.
[light music continues]
[birds squawking]
[upbeat music]
- Presenter: "Wild Places" is supported in part
by a grant from Friends of WHA-TV,
viewers supporting Wisconsin Public Television
and inviting you to join them.