All right, good evening everyone.
My name is Bill Klase.
I'm a natural resources educator with UW-Extension,
and tonight we're gonna talk a bit
about managing your land for wildlife
or attracting more wildlife to your property.
And our goal for this evening is to talk a bit
about some of the basics involved with managing wildlife
or attracting wildlife to your property,
so we'll go over those.
We'll go over developing a management plan
to achieve those goals that you have.
We'll talk a little bit about some management practices
for different wildlife.
And we'll finish with a discussion on
some of the resources that are available to you.
So, we should start by saying Wisconsin is
really rich with wildlife.
There's a lot out there, probably a lot more than you realize,
and this number for birds, 300-400
is an estimate.
We know most of them that come through
Wisconsin, in fact, there are over 220
that actually nest in Wisconsin.
There's probably a lot more mammals too
than you realize.
Now, you might notice the pine martin
in the lower left hand corner of the screen.
That's one that many folks know,
but there are a lot of other ones out there,
including six different shrews,
two different moles, eight different bats,
and four different voles, including
that really cool looking red-backed vole.
That's here in Wisconsin.
So, there's a lot of different diversity out there.
There's also a lot of reptiles and amphibians,
more than you probably realize.
There's 20 different snakes, 11 different turtles,
four lizards, there's one toad
in the amphibian family, 11 frogs and seven salamanders,
including the blue-spotted salamander.
So, there's a lot of diversity out there,
and if you're thinking you've got your woodland
or you like your woodland for one or two different species,
it might be a good idea to re-evaluate that,
and think about what other ones can I get there,
because there's some really neat ones out there
that I'd like to get to my property and see
and experience, and maybe get even more of them living on.
The key to everything about wildlife is habitat,
and there are four components to that.
It's food, water, shelter or cover, and living space,
and if you've got all of those the specific wildlife need,
you're gonna get them to come to your property.
And the more diverse you have of these different components
and different habitats, the more wildlife diversity
you'll have coming to your property.
I'm gonna go over each of these.
Many people think that water is really
the most important component, but in fact
it's much lower than food and shelter.
Those are really the key ones,
the most important ones to getting wildlife
to come to your property.
I'll talk about more of that in more detail coming up.
So, let's start with food,
and food can take all kinds of different forms.
It can be the leaves that are growing on the trees
or the shrubs or ground plants on your property.
I can be the branches.
It can be the fruit, or not the fruit,
the flowers that are coming from those plants,
or it can be the fruit that's produced,
and here's a good example: acorns.
There's a great crop that a lot of wildlife consume.
It can be the bugs that are eating those plants
like this gypsy moth.
Anybody recognize this gypsy moth
or heard of gypsy moth?
Well, good.
Or it could be the animals that eat the little animals
like this...
chipmunk?
(laughter)
This little critter in the center bottom of the screen.
So, food takes all different kinds of form.
It could be the decating leaf matter on the forest floor
that's attracting wildlife.
But let me step back a little bit
and talk about this concept called carrying capacity.
It's the ability for a parcel or a piece of land
to support a certain number of wildlife,
and there is a limit,
like you couldn't grow or support 20 deer
on one acre of land.
It's unreasonable.
The land would get degraded quickly
and the deer would starve pretty quickly too,
and so there is a limit as to how much
a piece of land or a piece of habitat,
how many wildlife it can support,
and it really depends on the animal.
One acre might be plenty for shrews,
but it's not enough for deer.
And as you can imagine, the carrying capacity of a property
is really lowest in the early spring and late winter,
when all of the leaf matter that is there has been consumed,
branches have been consumed,
and the new growth hasn't started yet,
so that's when it's really the lowest,
and it obviously improves moving into spring
and the summer.
And you can improve upon the ability
of a piece of land to support wildlife
by increasing the habitat or changing the habitat.
All of a sudden, you're going to get
more wildlife or different wildlife coming to your property,
and improving this ability to support more of that wildlife.
The key with food, or one of the keys with food,
is that it's available all year round,
and that's the way to get wildlife to stay on your property.
If there's always food there, they're gonna stay.
If they have to go somewhere else to find food,
they're not gonna hang around too long on your place,
and so there's different ways you can get that,
from a variety of different sources.
It might be nuts, it might be fruits,
it might be plants, like milkweed is a great plant.
It attracts butterflies, and then the birds that eat those
caterpillars of the butterflies are attracted
to a property where there's milkweed.
So it all kind of snowballs on each other,
and again the more diversity you have in these food sources,
the better off you're going to be.
It also protects against a single kind
of disease or insect coming on your property
and destroying all of the plants that you have.
Say you've got 40 acres of red pine that you've planted.
If a disease comes through that kills red pine,
you're gonna be in trouble
because it could kill all your trees.
So, more diversity helps in another way as well.
Now, many folks, when I give this talk on wildlife,
they'll ask questions about have you heard about this oak
they produce in the south called turkey oak?
I say no.
They say, well, it's supposed to be this great thing
for attracting turkey to your property.
My response is always, well, you could try it,
but really the best thing you can have on your property
are those trees and shrubs and ground plants
that are adapted here.
That naturally grow here.
That's gonna be the stuff that's gonna be
the easiest to grow, 'cause they're adapted
to your soil conditions, and you don't have to
have much in the way of input with them,
and the wildlife is adapted to them.
So, if you've got, let's say honeysuckle,
native honeysuckle growing on your property,
then that's great, because there's all kinds
of wildlife that naturally are attracted
to the fruit that's produced by it.
It also has greater variety and higher quality fruit
than something you might bring in from the south
because it's adapted to here,
and it's gonna grow naturally.
You want to choose native species
that are adapted to the soil conditions that you have.
So, if you have sandy soil and you live
in central Wisconsin, or your property's in central Wisconsin,
you wanna be sure and choose species
that are adapted to growing in those conditions.
Now, there's a great publication
called "So What Should I Plant?"
that's available online.
They've stopped printing it, which is unfortunate,
but if you want to get a copy of that, you can go
to our website woodlandinfo.org
and type in the search bar "So What Should I Plant?"
and it's got a whole listing of like this,
of different species of plants, shrubs, and trees
that are out there, and it talks a lot
about which wildlife species are attracted to them,
when the fruit is produced, where it's best to grow them,
things like that.
And you can see, just by the plants listed
here on the slide, that there's all kinds of variety
of when the fruit is produced,
when the flowers are produced, when the fruit matures,
and so you can, by planting all these different species,
you can have fruit and food available all year round.
You see some in the shrubs especially.
Some of them flower and produce fruit
in the early summer, some in mid-summer,
some in the fall, some of them have fruit
available all year round.
And we talked a little bit about the
fun non-native species in the first session
two weeks ago.
This is just a reminder that
another reason you don't want to necessarily bring in
those plants that seem like they're a good idea
when you hear about it from someone else.
" Yeah, we should bring the turkey oak"
is a great one.
Well, it could become a problem in our landscape,
and many of the ones that were on this list
were brought in just for reasons like that.
Maybe they were good shelter belt
plants like buckthorn, or maybe they were brought in
because they provide a really neat food source
like garlic mustard or whatever it is.
But food takes other forms as well for wildlife,
and insects and other invertebrates are a good example
of that, and there's a lot you can do
to increase the number of insects and other invertebrates
on your property, 'cause they're
at the bottom of the food chain,
or they're eating some of the stuff
at the bottom of the food chain.
Many times, they're the ones
that break down rotting or decaying plant matter,
and so they're a really good resource,
and having something like an old log on the ground
is a great way to attract those kind of insects,
and you've probably heard of bears
going and digging through rotten logs.
They're trying to get at the bugs that are in there
that are breaking down the log.
So, having that component on your property's
a great way to attract certain kinds of species.
Or maybe it's a brush pile,
like in the lower left hand corner.
Along with mammals that might use it,
all kinds of little bugs use it too,
and that might be your reason why
the mammals use it: 'cause they go in there,
there's bugs they can find and eat.
And sometimes it's just the leaf litter that's
on the bottom or on your forest floor.
There's all kinds of bugs that break down that stuff
and consume it, so don't necessarily
rake up your woods.
Leave that stuff on your floor,
and you'll get a lot more different wildlife.
And things like the pileated woodpecker
in the upper right corner.
You can see the cavities it's dug into that tree
looking for bugs it can eat.
All of a sudden, it's great, it's looking for a food source,
and then it's also creating those cavities
that become shelter for other wildlife
that might want to inhabit that tree.
How many of you put out feeders for wildlife
either at your home or at your forest?
There's nothing wrong with it.
Some people might think it's a bad thing to do,
but in fact it's perfectly all right.
The key to think about with feeders is
it's a supplement to wildlife's everyday food.
I've had people ask me,
"Well, I forgot to fill my feeders up for a couple of days,
"I'm afraid all the birds that come here are gonna die,"
but that's usually never the case.
It's just a supplement, and it's a way for you
to get to see the wildlife close up,
and we have a feeder right out our bedroom window
at home, and so it's great to just sit there
on a Saturday morning and watch the birds
that come in and hit the feeder, and the squirrels,
and our cats sit right on the window,
and they're just going nuts wanting to get at those birds.
So it's all right.
It's not going to hurt the animals,
especially if you use very common things
like black oil seeds, sunflowers, or have just
sugar water for hummingbirds.
There are some keys or things to keep in mind
when you're putting out feeders.
It's good to have more feeders than less,
especially if you see that you're attracting
a lot of different birds or squirrels or whatever
to your property, just so there's less aggression.
I know that the house finches
like to just plop down on the feeder
and just eat and eat and eat,
while the chickadees are flying around
trying to find a place to land and get a seed,
so if you have more feeders, you have less of
those kinds of problems.
Use a variety of feeders.
This last slide, there's all kind of different
feeders out there.
There's ones for suet
like the box in the lower center there.
You can put out oranges for oriels,
as I said, black oil seed, millet seed,
sugar water for the humming birds.
The more variety, the more variety of wildlife
that you'll get, and it's really
kind of for your enjoyment,
so don't be afraid to put them relatively close together.
That's another good thing,
so you can watch them and see them,
so you don't have to travel around your property,
just to see where the animals.
You want to put it near to some kind of cover
so that birds especially have a place to go
when it's windy, or to hunker down
when it gets a little too cold out,
but allow for good visibility
so that predators can't just perch above them
and swoop down and get the bird
when it's coming to your feeder, and make sure you can see them,
and clean them regularly, and sometimes
just a weak bleach solution is enough to clean off feeders,
like two or three times a year,
if it's getting dirtier than that,
then clean it more regularly.
It might be like a teaspoon or a tablespoon
per gallon of water is the recipe.
So, here is the key point:
if you're gonna plant, use native plants.
That's your best bet. Wildlife's adapted to that.
It's okay to do some feeding, perfectly all right.
Put them where you can see them,
and try to keep them clean.
You might want to do some harvesting,
that can enhance wildlife.
Like in the lower right hand corner,
that opening that was created and maintained,
I'll talk a little bit more about food plots later on.
That's a way to enhance your property,
add more different kinds of food for wildlife
and save those trees that are producing a lot of
acorns or nuts, there's another key element
of having more food on your property.
I'll talk a little more about that later, too.
So let's talk about water now,
and then, as I said, many people are concerned
about having enough water on their property,
or water feature, and in fact,
you don't really need it, I should say.
Many times, wildlife, if they need water,
they'll travel long distance to get it,
and they can get water from other sources too,
beyond just open water like a lake or a river.
They can get it from rain that might collect in small areas,
or they can get it from dew, or they can get it
from the plants and animals they eat.
There's all kinds of sources of water or liquids
to meet the wildlife's needs.
You don't necessarily have to have a river on your property
to attract wildlife.
If you're gonna put out different features for water,
it can be for bathing or for drinking.
People put out bird baths or saucers,
or create a small pond or a rain garden
those are perfectly all right.
You might need a permit if you're putting in a pond.
If the pond you're putting in has aquatic plants,
that's the best case scenario.
You'll attract a lot more diversity in the wildlife.
If you can, have it be moving water.
This little pond in the lower right hand corner
has a little bit of a moving water feature to it.
That's great, it helps to keep it from
becoming stagnant and keeps mosquitos
from breeding in it,
but if it's a small thing, like a saucer or a bird bath,
it's a good idea to clean that regularly,
change the water regularly,
and your wildlife'll be much happier for it.
There's a great publication produced by the Minnesota DNR
called "Lakescaping for Wildlife and Water Quality".
If you do have frontage on a river or lake
with your property, this is a great publication
on how to manipulate the habitat
so that it's the best for wildlife.
So, go to their website and you can find this.
It's like $15 or so, but it's a really great publication.
I used to have one, but someone took it.
That's how good a publication it is.
So, here are your charge, or what you need to do for water.
Check out your neighboring property and see what they have.
If there's a river or a creek right across
your property line, you might not need to do anything
to attract wildlife to your property,
or have that feature on your property.
If you're gonna build a pond,
you usually need a permit to do that,
and I encourage you to talk to the folks at your county,
either the county zoning office
or the county land information office,
or the county conservationist about
what you're gonna do if you're gonna
put in a pond.
You may even need to talk to folks in the DNR about that,
so don't start doing it without getting all the facts
so you don't get in trouble.
Shelter is the next element of these four.
It can be one of the most important parts,
because if animals have all kinds of food,
but they're exposed to the elements all the time,
they'll die just as quickly as if they don't have food.
It's a good idea to try to think about
how you can enhance the shelter and cover
that's on your property,
and it can take many forms.
It can be a rock pile, or it can be a cavity in a tree.
It could be the boxes that you put out
that are protected, or it could be
the structure of your forest as it is,
the number of conifers that you have on your property
that provide shelter and cover for the wildlife,
and wildlife use it for a number of different reasons.
It could be for rearing their young,
it could be for breeding purposes,
or just some place to escape in the winter,
especially in severe weather.
The keys for shelter are diversity,
once again, diversity.
It's diversity in the structure,
as in vertically, so you have big trees, small trees,
shrubs, and ground cover.
It can be diversity in the types of trees that you have.
You have both broad leaf trees and evergreen trees,
and in fact, evergreen trees are better for wildlife,
because they help to provide escape places
or cover when the elements get bad,
and if you can, plant as many of those,
or start planting them in groups on your property,
that's the best case scenario,
best place for wildlife to find shelter,
especially in the winter.
I mentioned red cedar and white pine.
Cedar can be a tough one to plant.
Deer really love to eat that, but
balsam fir's a good one.
There's all kinds of great wildlife packets out there
that include some of these conifers,
or you can get some great advice from
the resource I'm gonna talk about in the end.
As I said, it can take many forms.
It can be rock pile.
Rock pile's a great one for the lizards
and amphibians, and snakes if you want those
on your property.
Brush piles are a great habitat.
They provide cover for small mammals,
but they're also a food source too.
I mentioned evergreens and dense shrubs,
when they're packed together.
You can see the one at the bottom.
It's covered with snow, but the interior of that
is sheltered from the snow and from the wind,
so birds will fly in there and hunker down
to stay warm.
Wind blows or tip up mounds, in the lower right hand corner,
you can see a picture of that.
It's kind of hard to see. It's the bottom part of a tree.
Sometimes trees will get blown over,
partially blown over, and the roots will get exposed,
but they'll still be healthy and growing,
and that place where the roots are exposed,
there'll be a lot of soil with it too.
As the rain washes that soil down,
you'll get kind of a mound of soil.
There's a bit of shade there too,
so it's a really good micro-habitat.
It's a bit moister than the surrounding landscape.
There's a bit of a divot where it was,
and so a lot of little critters like to be in there,
especially insects and other invertebrates
will get in there and they'll feed in there
and then other animals will come and eat those,
so don't think that's a bad thing on your property,
and you can leave a few of those
on your property, it's a great way to enhance
the variety that you have around on your land.
I talked a little bit about deadwood last week,
or coarse, woody debris, we call it.
It's another great thing to leave on your property.
I know, as a person that burns firewood,
you hate to leave some stuff out in the woods,
because that could be the last few sticks
that get you through to the spring,
but a little bit out there,
and in this picture in the lower right hand corner
there's some great examples.
There isn't many. That's just a couple of logs.
They're breaking down pretty quickly.
There's not a lot out there.
We're not leaving a lot out in the woods,
but just a few pieces like this scattered about
are a great way to attract all kinds of different wildlife.
Maybe use it for denning, or for hunting from.
Dead trees are one of those resources that's a great,
also called snags, that's a really great thing
to have on your property.
Try to keep as many of those as you can.
Now, you don't want a whole forest of dead trees,
that doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?
But about six of these snags per acre, is okay,
or one to six is what some of the guidelines recommend.
That may sound like a lot, but scattered across
your property on average,
it won't seem like it's that much at all.
If you don't have many snags, or standing dead trees,
you can create that yourself by doing what's called
girdling them.
You take your chainsaw and you cut in about two inches
in a ring all the way around your tree,
and you do one about two inches above that,
and that'll effectively cut off the flow
of water going up from the roots
and nutrients going down to the roots
from the branches,
and so after a couple of years, that tree'll die.
I did that just recently.
I had a couple of trees that are really close together,
and I wanted to favor one of them,
but I didn't want to cut the other one down,
I just wanted a snag,
so I just girdled it, like we talked about last time.
I released another tree, I made room for it to grow
by killing the tree next to it,
and it's gonna stand there for many years,
because it's sound in the middle
and we'll get birds that are making branches,
there'll be cavities in ithose, and there'll be
all kinds of birds that'll use them.
You can also put in nest boxes.
We've put in a bat box on our property.
The first year, we had 17 bats in it.
It was pretty cool. My wife was very excited.
In fact, she dragged me out in the middle of the night
to go see the bats in it.
But it was cool, it was really neat.
But there's all kinds of other boxes,
wood duck boxes are very common to put out,
there's blue bird houses,
another thing that people commonly put out.
There's a whole slew of those,
and there's probably tons of resources online to find out
how to make them, which birds like which,
so don't be afraid to take a look and try
some different things, and see how well it works.
Brush piles can be a really good resource.
As I talked about, they're a place to escape
for things like rabbits and squirrels.
They're really easy to build, and they'll last
a long time if you build them right,
and the key is the base for the brush pile.
You can't just throw branches into a pile
and think it's going to be a really great resource.
In fact, those break down really quickly,
and animals don't use them very much at all,
but if you have a really stout base
like the picture in the lower left hand corner,
is a way to do it.
So, you take sticks that are maybe
six to eight feet long, that are about four inches
in diameter, put four of them in a row like that
and put another four on top of that
to create a really stout base,
and then you can pile branches on top of that like crazy.
Something that's about six to eight feet wide
and about six feet tall is a good sized brush pile.
And since that base is so sound,
as the light stuff starts to break down on top,
you can pile more on top of that
and keep building on it.
It'll last five to ten years before those big branches
on the bottom break down completely,
and you need to build a completely new one.
That's pretty easy and will last a long time.
Now, if you want to attract some snakes...
Anybody want to attract snakes?
We've got some, they're really cool actually,
and fun to find.
You can build a little habitat for those too,
called a hibernation mound,
and the picture in the upper right hand corner is what that looks like.
You dig a hole.
You put some big pieces of like branches or
stumps in there.
Put some loose material in there as well,
and you kind of cover it with more branches,
kind of like a brush pile,
and the snakes love it.
They'll get down in there and they'll stay there all year.
We actually found some in our compost pile,
which wasn't exactly what we were hoping for
but it worked great.
So, here's the keys.
Save those dead trees.
It might be the big trees that have big spreading branches
or that have some cavities in them already
that animals are using.
Build some brush piles.
You don't need 10 of them per acre,
but a few scattered here and there is usually
enough to attract a lot of different wildlife.
Put up any kind of houses you can
you think might attract the wildlife you're looking for.
Do some research to find out what's the best way
they should be built.
We've got red squirrels that get into a lot
of our different houses, so you might
want to see about ways of foiling them,
because they can be a real nuisance.
Unless you want a lot of red squirrels.
And then plant lots of different conifer trees out:
balsam firs, spruces are really good ones.
White pine works for a while,
as does red pine, but they tend to grow
really fast and they loose that habitat quality
pretty quickly.
And snags.
Dead trees can be snags, as well as living trees.
All right, last element is space.
That is, how much space does an animal need?
And the keys for this is not just how big it is,
but what's in it,
so if you could have 100 acre property that's all corn,
that might meet the number of acres for a certain species,
but it doesn't have what they're looking for.
There's no cover, there might not be
the right kind of food.
So that's why you've got to have both of these components
for it to be really good
for the wildlife you're looking for.
And don't just think about your own property.
Think about what's going on next door.
Like you might only own 20 acres
and feel like that's not enough to attract wildlife,
but it could be plenty, 'cause your neighbors
are doing some really good management around you,
and they're meeting the other parts of the needs
that the particular wildlife is looking for,
and many wildlife have different kinds of needs,
like a pair of grouse need about 10 acres,
so if you've got 20 acres, you could probably support
two grouse pairs, if that's what you're looking for.
Whereas wood ducks, they don't care at all
about how much space they have.
They like to be together,
so you could support a big colony of wood ducks
on a small bit of property.
And a flock of turkeys might require
up to 40 acres, so it's very different
depending on what species you're looking for,
and as I said, one acre could support
dozens and dozens of shrews.
So it might be plenty if you're just looking to get shrews
on your property.
And of course, deer require a very different kinds
of habitat requirements and space requirements.
And how the habitat is arranged within your property
is also a key part of this.
You want to arrange it so that,
especially if you're putting in some kind of feature
that's going to attract wildlife,
like a food plot especially,
you want to arrange it with the rest
of your property so that it becomes even more better.
That's terrible English.
Becomes an even better habitat source.
So, here's a great example of that in this picture.
You can see that the food plot is next to
a water source and has some protection
from the prevailing wind, because there's
mature forest around it.
Or you could plant conifers all round the food plot.
That'll protect the animals that are using
the food plot from the elements,
and they'll have a place to escape to
if a predator comes by.
So, this is a really good arrangement,
or, thinking about it, what's the best
way I can arrange this so that it's best
for the wildlife that you want to come visit
your property or stay there.
So, diversity is diversity, right?
I'm gonna probably hear that at least
a couple more times this evening.
The more habitat diversity you have,
the more wildlife diversity you have.
So you're looking for as much plant diversity
as you can get.
Big trees, little trees, more structural diversity,
mature forest, young forest, openings,
mature forest, the really dense forest, really thin forest,
as much of that diversity as you can get,
the better off you'll be with wildlife diversity.
Edges, where two habitats meet,
called habitat edges, for a while
they've had a very bad reputation,
for a number of reasons, and I'll talk more
of those in a second,
but they also have the benefit that
you're gonna get a lot more wildlife diversity.
What we mean by habitat edges is where
two habitats kind of meet up,
so you might have, say, an oak forest that's meeting up
next to where you've planted red pine,
so separately they have their own wildlife capacity
or wildlife that's attracted to them.
Next to each other, these two, they'll overlap,
and so you'll get this really diverse richness of habitat
and you'll get both of those two groups of wildlife
that're attracted to those two different habitats
will intermingle in there.
So it's a really rich wildlife area,
but it has some negative parts to it,
and in fact, for a long time, edges were the bane
of all the management discussion,
because there are certain species that need
a lot of big contiguous areas of forest
and if you have too much edge, then other animals
are going to parasitize those species,
and the brown cow bird is a great example of that.
It's a species that likes to live on the edge
of different habitats, and it lays its eggs
in the nests of other birds, and then those birds
rear their young, so it's a great parenting tool,
I wouldn't recommend it, but it's had a detrimental effect
on some bird populations.
So these big blocks of contiguous forest
is a way to minimize the effects of cow birds,
but you don't get as much of a diversity
because there's no overlapping habitats,
and less edge.
So there's benefits and downsides to edge,
but in general, if you're looking for more diversity,
the more edge that you have is the best way
to get that.
And here's a couple of examples of thinking about
how you can get more edge on your property.
Let's say that looking at the picture on the left,
those are four different habitat types.
Maybe they're forest, prairie, corn, and soybeans,
and so each will attract different kinds of wildlife.
In this kind of arrangement on the left,
there's only one place where there's more than three
habitats overlapping. Just one.
But if you really diversify where those different habitats
are on your property, like on the picture
on the right, you get six areas where there's at least
three habitat types overlapping, and so
so much more diversity in those areas
where they're overlapping on your property in general.
Now if it's corn and soybeans, it might be harder
to create that kind of patchwork on your property,
but if it's things like it's an oak forest,
or it's a pine forest, or it's an aspen forest,
or it's a maple forest, you can create
this kind of patchwork on your property
pretty easily, and I'll show you some pictures
of what that looks like.
Some more things about wildlife biology,
as you can imagine some wildlife have a home range,
and wolves are a great example of that.
Their packs stay within a certain area.
Those home ranges for some animals can be really small,
an acre, or they can be very, very big,
hundreds of acres in size.
Something to consider when you're thinking about
which wildlife you want on your property.
You might be like, oh, I want to have moose on my property.
Cool. Maybe.
Their range might not fall at all
within your property.
So, something to think about.
There's also this thing called a predator/prey relationship,
and the picture on the bottom is a great example
of that, it's the lynx and the snowshoe hare.
The snowshoe hare is one of the main sources
of food for lynx, and what happens is,
when there's really good growing conditions,
there's a lot of food available,
the snowshoe hare population will go up,
and since the lynx eat a lot of the snowshoe hare,
when there's a lot of snowshoe hare,
then they flourish, so their population goes up.
When the lynx population goes up,
they eat more snowshoe hare,
so the snowshoe hare population goes down.
When there's less snowshoe hare,
the lynx population goes down,
so there's this cycle of one population going up,
one follows, one goes down, one follows,
over and over again.
It's, I think, a 10 year cycle about,
where their populations go up, they'll crash,
they'll go up, they'll crash.
It's a really interesting and fascinating thing to watch.
Probably not for the lynx or for the snowshoe hare,
but for us to see that.
So there is these type of relationships out there,
and so, that's why like the pileated woodpecker's
a great example of that.
If there isn't many trees out there with bugs in it
that it can find food in, it's not gonna hang around
and it's gonna take off.
And of course there are animals out there
that are adapted to us.
Racoons are a good example of that.
Anybody have porcupines chewing on their house
or on their structures?
We've got that. It was neat the first time.
The second and third time, not as much fun,
and then, I think, the last time,
one of our dogs discovered the porcupine.
That wasn't very fun, but these things happen.
I mentioned red squirrels as well.
They'll get in and chew on stuff.
They can be a nuisance, but we want to live in the woods,
that's what's going to happen.
We've got to be prepared to live with those animals as well.
How they feed is another thing to consider.
Some animals are what's called specialists,
some are generalists in how they feed.
Bears are a good example of generalists.
They'll eat just about anything,
and whatever's most abundant,
so when it's summer or spring,
when there's a lot of flowers and new plant growth,
they'll chow down on that, whatever's most abundant.
Whereas the woodcock are an extreme
example of a specialst, where 90% of their diet
is made up of earthworms,
and so once the ground freezes, they're gone,
and it's funny every year in the spring,
there's a part of our road that's exposed,
it's south-facing so it warms up pretty quickly,
and that's where we always see the woodcocks land first.
That's where we notice them when we're walking the dogs.
Yep, they've come back.
The ground must be thawed enough that they can get in there
and get at worms.
Whereas the grouse, and I'm gonna mention grouse
a lot in our discussion, because it's one of those species
that there's a lot of different things going on
in its life cycle that lend itself to talking about
managing for wildlife.
In the summer, grouse will eat whatever's available,
but in the winter, they primarily eat the buds
of the aspen trees, and you often see them
up in the tree chewing on the buds,
and that's their main food source.
So they're both things at times,
both a generalist and a specialist.
All right, the last time, we talked a little bit
about this concept called "forest succession."
It's the changing of one forest type to another.
I'm gonna talk about it again today,
because in a second I'll relate it to managing wildlife.
So, it's the change that takes place
when some kind of event occurs on a parcel of land.
Say there was a big windstorm that knocked down
all the trees, or ice storm that knocked down all the trees,
or a fire came through and killed all the trees,
and we start at this, where there's bare open ground,
like on the left part of the slide.
Annual grasses, perennial grasses, after a few years
as time goes on, you'll get shrubs and fast-growing trees,
and pretty soon you'll get a young forest come in,
and after a long time, a few decades, you'll get
a mature forest, and it can stay in that phase
of the mature forest of hardwood trees for a long time.
Indefinitely, unless there's some kind of event again
that sets it all the way back to the beginning,
like a wind storm, or an ice storm,
or we come in and cut down all the trees.
So, that's going on all the time in our forests,
and wildlife have adapted to these different
successional stages.
Some wildlife, like the shrew, have adapted to all of them.
They can be found in all these different
successional stages, whereas some, like in the lower
left hand corner, the meadowlark and the grasshopper sparrow
are mostly found where it's open land,
where there's grasses, and perennial plants,
and annual plants.
They do well in those habitats, and some
are on the other end of the spectrum,
and can almost only be found in mature forests,
and some are kind of in the middle of this,
and the grouse is a good example of that.
Robins are a good example of that.
So, when you think about, I want these wildlife
to come to my property, what are their needs
in the way of the habitat, and what successional stage
should they do best in, and manage for that.
And some are using different parts of these
successional stages different times of the year
or different times of the day, depending on if they're
a kestrel or a deer.
Some of them, in the morning they'll be
at once successional stage, maybe an open grassland,
in the evening they'll be going to the cover
to protect themselves from heat loss.
Okay, so I'm gonna talk a little bit about
using the different timber management techniques
that we have to manage for wildlife.
I'm gonna focus on clear cutting and selection cutting,
because those are great examples of ways,
there are wildlife that specifically need
those kinds of management regimes.
As a reminder, we've got a spectrum of timber harvesting
that we can do from very intrusive, or cutting all the trees
like in a clear-cut, to cutting only a few select trees
like in the slide on the right,
and these are drawings of a view from above on a forest,
so those little round circles are stumps,
and the gray is the mature trees that are remaining.
So, on the left-hand side of the clear cut.
You're removing all the trees to favor those trees
that grow well in full sunlight and grow quickly.
On the other end of the spectrum, you're removing
just a few scattered trees to favor those trees
that grow well in the shade,
and in the middle, we have this thing called
a shelterwood harvest, where you're removing
about half the trees, creating conditions
where there's some full sunlight and some shade,
and that favors things like oak.
For clear-cutting, there's some obvious drawbacks.
People think they're unsightly.
I think they can be great because,
many people like them, because you can see far.
You can see wildlife going across there,
or running across it, utilizing those openings.
I think they have their own charm to them.
Some people think they're harmful to the environment
especially on steep slopes, you can get some erosion.
That's not as much of a problem here in Wisconsin,
but it can be, but if the timing's right,
if the harvest is right, it shouldn't be an issue,
but there's a lot of positives
to doing clear-cutting operations.
Deer and grouse are those that use those habitats
really a lot, and some species really rely
on the young stands to do most of their life cycle,
and I'll talk about a few of those in a second.
When you're doing a clear-cut, some things to consider:
you don't want those to be boxes or squares.
Make them kind of an irregular shape.
Leave some uncut areas in the opening.
If you're along a roadway, if you want a visual buffer.
Especially along water bodies, you want to leave some trees
there so you don't get erosion of the shoreline.
Leave a few dead trees or shrubs, that's perfectly all right
for wildlife considerations.
If you can do it, rather than one clea-cut on 80 acres,
if you break it up into smaller ones,
you'll have a lot more diversity of habitats,
attract more wildlife.
Things like a ruffed grouse, I'll talk about these in a sec.
And then leave stuff out on the ground.
You don't have to harvest everything,
and for some people, leaving even a few sticks of wood
if you burn it for firewood can be heartbreaking,
'cause you want that wood, you want to stay warm,
you're putting a lot of work into harvesting those trees,
but a few scattered around the property's just fine,
don't pile it up and keep it out of any wet areas,
all those branches that you leave behind provide
great habitat for small mammals,
and for places for birds to hunt for critters.
So, after the first year, you'll get a dense stand
that looks like this.
This is aspen.
See how dense those seedlings are together?
That's a great place for things like grouse with broods
to run in there and hide from predators.
It's hard to find them when they're all in there.
Woodcock use it too, as do deer.
Their young will stay there to hide from predators,
and they eat the new growth that comes in
on these small trees.
When it gets to be about five years old,
you get golden-wing warblers love this kind of habitat,
and golden-wing warblers are one of those species
that are threatened here in Wisconsin,
and their populations are declining because we don't
have a lot of habitat that looks like this.
Again, grouse use this kind of habitat as well.
You see a theme here?
Grouse again, use a different stage in this aspen growth.
It's aspen clear-cut turning into a mature forest.
Grouse use this kind of habitat.
Porcupines love this too,
and one of those animals that eats porcupines
is the fisher.
It's one of the few wildlife out there that know how to
successfully attack a porcupine, to get it without
getting too many quills in its mouth or snout.
As it gets older, some of the trees break up,
like the tree in the middle with the top broken off,
that's great wildlife habitat, and all kinds of woodpeckers
will go in there, getting at bugs that might be
in those dead trees, and grouse again use this type
of habitat for doing their drumming or breeding.
Now, sometimes, I mentioned like a red pine plantation
where it's all a single species.
It might not seem like it has a lot of wildlife potential, but it does.
There's many species that are attracted to it.
Ravens and crows like to nest in these kind of habitats.
Squirrels like to go in there.
There's all kind of nut resources in there,
so they get a lot of food from plantations like this.
If you plant the trees wider apart earlier,
instead of six feet apart, you do eight or ten feet apart
between the trees, they'll be bushier longer.
Great wildlife habitat.
If you thin the rows more frequently,
you'll get more sunlight coming in to the understory,
and you'll get other trees coming in, instead of
the one sad white pine that's there at the bottom.
And it's okay to leave a few logs on the ground,
do I need to say that gain?
Leave a few logs on the ground.
Provides good habitat.
On the other end of the spectrum is a single tree selection.
Removing a single tree here and there.
Goshawk is one of those species that do well
in this kind of habitat.
Here's some considerations.
Favor those trees that are gonna provide the food source
that the wildlife you're looking for really want and need.
I mentioned nut-producing trees because
that tends to be one of those group of trees
that tend to attract a wide variety of wildlife.
Oak, hickory, beech, walnut, butternut,
some produce nuts every year,
some it's like every three to five years.
If you can get 35 nut-producing trees
that are at least 14 inches in diameter per acre,
man, you're in great shape.
But you don't necessarily ahve to have that many
to attract wildlife.
If you have two or three per acre, that might be plenty.
If they're really good trees at producing a lot of nuts,
you're in great shape.
Those big old trees, we call them wolf trees,
that were grown in the open before the forest closed up,
with long, spreading branches.
Oak is a great example of a species that'll do that.
If you can retain those, that's a good thing to do,
and I think I talked about that a little bit last week,
Those trees provide a lot of great habitat.
The branches where the branch meets the stem,
that's a great place for animals to hunker down
when it's really cold out or windy.
And protect those shrubs that are producing seeds.
There's a lot that are native to Wisconsin:
elderberry, dogwood, alder, mulberry,
all produce a lot of fruit that wildlife are attracted to.
While you're doing your harvest, if you can
protect those or enhance those, fantastic.
And leave some spaces between the trees.
Make some small openings, so you get
a shrubby layer coming in where it's just shrubs
or small, young trees.
That provides a little bit of diversity
from a contiguous forest of trees or mature trees.
And remember to leave some logs on the ground.
How many times have I said that?
Is it sinking in?
Leave some on the ground, it's great.
You don't have to leave a lot, just a few here and there.
Now, I just mentioned creating some small openings,
they're a great resource.
They provide a bit different habitat than a mature forest,
and if you have just a few small oenings on your property,
it can really attract a lot more variety of wildlife
coming there.
The bottom part is the key thing, it's evaluate
what's going on around you.
If all your neighbors are putting in wildlife openings
or food plots, then you don't need to do that,
because you want to provide something
that they're not.
They might be providing a lot of great food source,
but maybe they don't have as much cover,
and so if you put in a lot of cover,
maybe you do a lot of planting of spruce or balsam fir
in clumps so that all the wildlife will come there
when it gets cold after they feed.
They're still gonna come to your property.
So don't necessarily do what your neighbor does.
Do what they're not doing, and try to meet
the other needs of the wildlife that they're not getting
at your neighbors property.
So do this evaluation of what's going on around you
before you do anything else.
If all your neighbors are planting corn,
then it's pretty easy.
You manage your forest for... you don't have to do much at all
and you're gonna get wildlife coming to your property.
But, think about what do you want to have
in the way of things growing in your opening?
Many folks use annual grasses or perennial grasses
or plants, they attract all kinds of insects,
the insects attract birds and animals that eat the insects,
and stuff that eats the birds,
and you've got all the food chain right there.
And it's not that hard to create an opening,
you've just got to make sure you maintain it too.
The openings can be like one to three acres in size,
you want them to be long and narrow,
running from east to west.
They can be S shaped or J shaped.
Usually they have to be built so you can get
full sunlight in the middle of summer
in the middle of your food plot,
so they have to be wider than the tallest trees
on the south side of the opening,
so maybe one and one half times,
so if your trees are 15 feet tall,
your opening has to be at least 22 feet wide.
If there are already evergreen trees next to it,
that's great, but if they don't, you can also
enhance them by planting evergreen trees
along the side of the opening,
so that animals have a place to go for shelter and cover
in case predators come along or in case
it's really cold out or windy.
How to build it.
So, the first thing you do is you lay out the boundary
of where the opening's gonna be.
You harvest all the trees and shrubs that are there.
Pull out all the stumps and large rocks.
You make brush piles out of that stuff.
If you're gonna seed it, you might need
to disk the site, and did I mention...
I may not have.
It's a good idea to get a soil test done before
you even start this process, so that you can tell,
let's say you have very sandy soil,
you're gonna want to pick plants
that are gonna do well in sandy soil,
or whatever it is, so get a soil test done
before you put any disk in the ground, or you put
any lime or fertilizer in, so you're not doing
anything more than you have to, and you're matching
the seeds and the plants to your habitat and soil type.
So you may need to disk the site,
or some kind of soil preparation,
so that the lime you put in, or fertilizer if you do that,
does well or the seeds have good contact with the soil.
If you do have to put in fertilizer, you need to
disk it again, disk that stuff in,
and then put in your seeds, whatever that might be.
It could be native grasses, or native perennial plants,
some people put in agriculture varieties like clover,
rye, or millet, whatever you prefer doing.
Now, you're probably gonna need
to do some kind of maintenance on it,
otherwise it's gonna convert back to forest,
like we talked about succession.
If you just leave it, trees'll start to seed,
trees'll start to drop in there, and they'll start to grow,
and pretty soon it won't be an opening anymore,
so you may have to mow it,
or you could just go in by hand and pull out
any trees or shrubs that are coming in pretty easy.
Have I talked about leaving trees in the ground?
I may have mentioned it.
Clean your house, not your woods.
It's okay to have a messy woods,
in fact, wildlife like that.
And, in fact, a tree that's like this out there,
you may think, oh, that's kind of a hazzard,
it's in the way of other stuff,
but that might be a great wildlife tree.
You may be walking through the woods and see
a fox running across the top of that,
or an owl perched on it or something.
Cool, right?
And it's just one little stick of tree,
it's not gonna be that much firewood.
It'll be gone in a few years anyway, so it's okay
to leave stuff like that out there,
it's okay for it to be messy.
And protect any standing trees that are dead already
that are being used by wildlife,
if they've got holes in them from woodpeckers
going in and trying to get bugs, great.
Leave them.
Those holes are going to become places for other birds to den up,
and there are other wildlife to use.
Leave those on your property.
If you're thinking about harvesting trees,
check to make sure that there's not already
something nested in there or denned in there,
especially if you do your harvesting late in the fall,
it's probably a better time to do it.
The spring might be a tough time,
you could hit live trees with nests in them.
One to six dead trees per acre is,
I mentioned that earlier, it's a good rule of thumb.
If they got broken tops, those are good ones to leave.
If they've got mushrooms growing out of the side of them
or the bark is falling off, those are good ones
to leave for wildlife.
If you've got tall trees on your property,
that might become a perch site for some of these predators,
especially if you're near to a water source, like a lake
or a river, you might get an eagle perching on it.
We've got eagles flying over our property, even though
we're a mile and a half from the Wisconsin River.
We've got some big red pine in our property,
and that's where they come and perch.
So there, there's your goal.
To get eagles to fly on to your property.
I said it's possible, it's definitely possible.
You can do it.
Anybody have any seasonal or permanent ponds
on their property?
You might have them.
In the spring, there are ephemeral ponds
that last only a few days after the heavy rain.
They might look like this one in this picture.
They might be there for a few days and then gone,
and in fact, there's a lot of wildlife that use these,
not just for drinking and bathing,
temporarily, there's some wildlife that only live
in those ephemeral ponds.
They're alive for a short bit of time,
and then they're gone, so it's cool to have those,
and if you do discover you do have one,
then try to protect them as much as you can.
Don't cut down all the trees around them.
They do better if there's a lot more shade around them,
and you don't want the banks of those little ponds
to erode, so leave some trees around them
for shade and erosion protection.
All right, so you got the basics now, right?
You're ready to figure out the next step,
and the next step is to ask yourself what it is
you want on your property.
Which wildlife do you want?
What do you want it to look like?
Do you want to manage for a specific species, like turkeys?
Or maybe certain groups of species.
Maybe you want woodpeckers,
or you want wildlife that are found in prairies,
or maybe a mature forest, that's what you're looking for.
Or maybe you just want a real variety,
a good richness.
Think about that before you do anything else.
What is it I'm looking for? Do some research.
There's all kind of resources out there,
and I'll talk about those in a second,
but here's the steps for getting to where you want to be
for your wildlife:
you identify your objectives, create a map of your property,
inventory the wildlife, get some assistance,
finalize and carry out your plan,
and then monitor and evaluate your results.
Okay, that's it, we're done for the evening.
No, I'm kidding, I'll go through these more in details.
But setting those objectives is the key.
You have to know what you want,
what goals you want to accomplish.
If you don't have that really thought out
and spelled out as specifically as you can,
you're not gonna be as happy
with the results as you could be.
And some people balk at the idea of,
ah, I don't want to spend all this time creating a plan,
but it's a good way to think about this in the long term,
because you might be out with your chainsaw,
looking to harvest some trees for firewood,
and you might think, there's some nice oak out here.
I'm gonna harvest those, but those might be
the best trees that you have for wildlife,
and if you've either harvested a few trees
and pretty soon you realize, oh, I took to many,
I wish I'd have thought about this beforehand.
If you have a plan, you can think about that.
You can think about, well, I need to harvest
this many trees to get this many cords of wood
for firewood that I need every year.
I'm gonna do that here next year,
over here the next year, you can plan that all out,
so that you can think about, I'm not gonna
make the habitat decline by taking out too many trees,
because I know where I'm going and I know
where the trees are I want to save.
So think about these long term impacts
of everything you do, and that's why you create a plan.
That make sense? Did I make a good argument there?
I hope so.
And there's all kinds of resources.
I encourage you to do your research
on a species that you're interested in.
Now, again, I don't get any kickback from Peterson,
for putting a picture of their book out here.
They're one of those companies that produces nice books
on different species.
There's all kinds of them out there.
You don't have to go with Peterson,
and the DNR and us folks in extension
have some great resources too.
Do your research.
Find out what it is about that wildlife
that they like to have or that they need
to survive and flourish.
Whatever it may be.
It could be frogs, it could be snakes,
it could be turkeys, whatever it is,
there's all kinds of resources out there.
What do they need in the way of those four basic needs
I've already talked about?
And so, identify your objectives.
There's a great publication, I think I had some copies
out there, "Putting Pen to Paper",
it helps walk you through how to create a good plan
based on your objectives, and here's an example
of what it might look like.
So the overall goal could be manage for wildlife viewing
and hunting.
Great, they've got some short-term goals identified
and some tasks or projects associated with those.
Long term goals identified
and projects associated with those.
And if you look in detail, this plan, they've got
the projects spread out over a number of years,
so they don't have to do them all
the first year, so it's not as daunting.
The first year might just be small clear-cut,
the next year might be putting the food plot.
Spread over the entire property over a number of years.
Simple, right?
It doesn't have to be too complex.
It can be pretty simple.
Next step is to create a map of your property,
and this is an important one, because it'll help you
to see what all the resources that you have
on your property are.
You might think, well I've walked around my property,
I know what's there.
There's some oak trees, there's some snag, blah, blah, blah,
but without doing this mapping and inventorying
your property, you won't know how much of those there are.
You might think you have a lot of oak,
and find out afterwards there's only like two,
and I need two every acre, so it's not nearly enough,
or I've got a lot of snag trees, and you do your research,
and you're like, well, I've got too many snags.
Something like that.
And what other resources are out there?
You might discover things that you never thought you had.
So take this step of creating a map.
It's not that hard.
You don't need a lot of experience doing it.
You can do it on the back of a sheet of paper.
I was gonna say back of an envelope, but that's not cool.
Just take a sheet of paper and make a drawing, it's not that hard.
It could look as easy as this.
And look at what's going on on your neighbor's property too,
and identify that.
So, in this map, they've identified where the corn is
in the upper left hand corner.
They've identified where the mature forest is.
They've got kind of an age of what it is.
They've put the roads in, they identified the wolf trees
and snags, put in where the other crops are.
It's not that hard.
It's easy to do, and doesn't take a lot of time.
It'll help you to plan for the future,
what you're gonna put down in your plan
to help you achieve your goals.
You can also utilize, there's resources at your county
that can help you with this, there's resources online
that you can get aerial photos.
All right, I'll mention Google.
Google Maps, Google Earth are great resources
to get to see what your property looks like from the air,
and then do an inventory, and this is an important step too
that you don't want to skip, because without
this information, a baseline of what animals are there now,
you won't know if the changes you're making
are having any impact, so you need to know
what's there now, and it can't be annecdotal.
It can't be, "Oh, I saw a turkey one year" or, "I saw a bear one year."
That's not the information you need.
You need really as much detailed information as you can get.
There's a great publication that I brought, it's called
"How to Inventory Monitor Wildlife on Your Land."
It gives you a lot of great ways to monitor wildlife,
and there's a ton of different ways, for birds,
mammals, or reptiles.
You can do all kinds of different surveys for birds,
drumming counts, brood surveys.
For mammals, snow tracks, what's pictured here
is a track station.
It's a pretty complex thing to build.
You put down some sand, you put something in the middle,
you walk away, you come back later,
and look what tracks are there.
Shall I go through that again?
Put down some sand, spread it out.
It's a little bit more complex than that.
You have to smooth out the area,
you want to use like white sand that's used for concrete,
something that's easy to clear or lighter colored,
you need to mix in some kind of liquid
usually like mineral oil, 'cause the wetter the sand is,
the easier it is to see the tracks, identify the tracks,
and then you want to put something in the middle
that's going to attract wildlife.
Some people put a can of sardines in the middle.
Cool.
Or they might spray a scent,
you can buy those different kind of scents
at hunting stores, on a rock in the middle,
whatever's gonna attract wildlife in there.
You leave it out, come back the next day or week,
or whatever, see what's been there.
It's fun, easy thing to do, relatively easy,
and you can even put a camera there to see
what wildlife may be coming near, but aren't
going into the tracks.
Simple right?
It's not that hard, and it's fun.
Kids'll love doing it. And then get some advice.
No one is an expert on this. None of us are.
I'm not.
But there are people that are already
being paid by you through your taxes that can help you.
There's wildlife managers from the DNR that work
in every county in the state.
They're there to help you.
There's foresters in every county in the state that can help you.
You can bounce ideas off them.
Hey, I want to get some moose on my property,
what do I need to do?
They might say, move up to Canada,
but there might be some good advice.
They can give you, if nothing else,
a reality check.
You say, hey, I'm really interested in getting
these certain kinds of salamanders on my property.
I think they're neat, and those blue salamanders
are really neat, I'd love to have them,
is it possible?
And they'll say, well, we're kind of outside their range.
It might be possible, but you need to do these kind of work.
That might be all you need, but you might be able
to get them out on your property,
and walk through your property and help you identify
individual things you need to do.
Save those trees, get more of those trees,
do a little harvest here.
You're paying them through your taxes,
you might as well take advantage of them.
There's folks in natural resource conservation service too
that can help, and there's wildlife specialists in extension
that can help you too.
Give them a call. All of their numbers are online.
You can find them pretty easily.
There's also conservation groups,
Ruffed Grouse society, Audubon Society.
Ruffed Grouse Society has wildlife biologists on their staff
that work with land-owners just like you
on managing for grouse, 'cause they want more grouse on the landscape.
They love grouse.
Or you could pay someone to help you.
There's plenty of consultants out there
that are happy to take your money.
I can't recommend any, that's not my job,
but there are people out there,
so if you really want someone to be your agent,
to work for you, to help you manage for certain wildlife,
you can find people that'll help you do that.
And then get advice from a number of different disciplines.
You might get a forester to help you
and a wildlife biologist.
Great, because they don't necessarily,
many of them have knowledge of both forestry and wildlife,
but it's better to get as many opinions as you can,
and think about what are the outcomes?
What is it I need to do, to get to where I want to be?
What's the impact of doing these different things?
As I said, if you can get them out on your property, great.
Some of them, you might have to plan
a few months out, don't be surprised
if you get that kind of response.
But if you have to wait a few months, that's okay.
You're not in any hurry.
So, put it all together and then develop your plan.
And it might look like this.
The goals for this is to expand red cedar and pine
windbreaks around the house to five row
shelterbelt for wildlife.
The goal is to provide nests and winter shelter
and food sources.
They spread it out over three to five years,
and identified three tasks associated with it.
It's not that complex.
It doesn't have to be that complex.
And it's something you can do yourself,
with the right research and getting the right knowledge
from professionals.
You might develop a plan that looks like this,
a map of your property that looks like this.
In this case in the upper right hand corner,
they've broken up the woodland into different blocks,
and do a harvest like every ten years
to create a patchwork of young stands and old stands.
Cool, right?
All kinds of wildlife like that.
They put in food plots.
They've got a pond, and they've got a duck
loafing platform in the middle of it.
Wouldn't you like to have a duck loafing platform?
Wouldn't you like to see ducks out there?
Go for it.
You can do this stuff.
It looks like a lot going on, but it's not that much,
and if you spread it over ten years,
you can accomplish all of this if you want to.
You can have a really rich diversity of wildlife
on your property with just a little bit of work
and a little bit of forethought.
And then, keep an eye on what's going on.
Monitor and evaluate the impact you're having.
An important step.
Can't not do this, can't not do this.
You have to do this, because otherwise you won't know
if the things you're doing are having an impact or not.
So, it's things like putting out small mammal traps
like what's in the top photo,
or putting down a cover board to monitor for salamanders,
and it's another complex piece of equipment.
Put a board down, walk away, come back later,
lift it up, see what's underneath.
Should I go through that again?
Put a board down.
There's all kinds of things like that in that
inventory wildlife publication,
all kinds of things like that you can do.
Monitor and see if you're having an impact.
If you're getting more wildlife,
if you're getting what you're looking for, great,
continue with your plan.
If you're not getting what you're looking for,
maybe you need to modify it so that you can
get what you're looking for in the way of wildlife.
So let's talk a little bit about some specific wildlife.
Some people are interested in deer.
There might be a few people interested in deer.
They want more deer on their property, cool, whatever.
What are they looking for?
They're looking for a dense escape cover, and food sources.
So you can create those conditions
by doing small clear-cut operations,
maybe a shelterwood harvest.
You're creating those non-linear clear-cuts,
maybe 10-20 acres in size, and then do some planting,
put in some conifer for shelter and food sources
in the winter.
They like aspen stands.
If you've got aspen, great, if you don't,
any kind of fast-growing young stands will work too.
They love oak,
I think I mentioned that on the second meeting.
They love oak. They love oak seedlings.
They'll eat the whole thing down to the ground
if they can.
Maintain some openings, and put in some,
there's some wildlife packagings you can get
from the DNR nurseries, private nurseries,
that have a variety of shrubs in them
that deer like or grouse like, or turkey like
to feed on or eat the fruit, so plant those
kind of things in openings or in areas that you have
like food plot.
If you're interested in songbirds,
diversify is the key.
You want diversity of songbirds on your property?
Diversify your woodland habitat.
Openings, young forest, old forest,
all that structure, where you have young trees,
middle sized trees, old trees, conifers,
broad leaf trees, you've got ground cover.
The more diversity the better, especially for nesting
habitat, because all different birds have different needs
in the way of where they're putting their nests.
And cavities too are a great thing to have,
so you want some dead snags on your property.
Pretty easy, right?
Nothing to it.
All right, let's finish by talking
about some resources that are out there
other than professionals, there's all kinds
of other things that are out there that can help you
figure out what's the best way to meet your needs
to get different wildlife to your property.
If you haven't heard of Wisconsin Nature Mapping,
it's a thing that land-owners like yourself do
on a regular basis, and what they're doing is reporting
what they've seen in the way of wildlife
on their property, so you could go
to the Wisconsin Nature Mapping website
and see what maybe your neighbor's doing
that you didn't even know about,
and see what things they're reporting, or you could do some reporting on this.
I'd give you the URL, but it's not as simple
as Wisconsin nature mapping.org.
It's a bit more complicated, but if you do a search,
using whatever browser you use,
I was going to say a Google search
but I said it anyways,
just do a search on Wisconsin Nature Mapping.
You can see what's out there in the way
of people reporting what they see
near to you or throughout the state.
And there are all kinds of books that you can buy,
from a number of different sources,
and you can pay a small fee for,
you can get a printed copy of some of these publications.
Many of them are free online as pdf documents
that you can read on your computer
or on your smart phone or tablet,
but there's a ton of resources out there.
Go to your library, if you can't find it online.
DNR has a series of publications,
including the ones I brought
"On Wildlife on Your Land," it's called.
"Getting the Help You Need."
Here's the rest of the publications.
There's "What I Want to Plant," there's "Critter Condos,"
if you've got water on your property.
"Rabbitat" is the one that has that description
of how to build that brush pile.
You go to the DNR website and you type in
"Wildlife on Your Land," or "Rabbitat," you'll find
these publications.
You can also find them on the website I manage,
woodlandinfor.org.
You type it in the search bar, "Rabbitat," you'll get
that publication, or any of these other ones.
There's a lot of information out there.
A lot of really good information.
We at extension have a number of publications
on managing for wildlife,
"Landscape Plants that Attract Birds",
"Shelves, Houses, and Feeders",
and "A Landowner's Guide to Woodland "Wildlife Management".
Some of these are out of print,
so you can only get an electronic version of them.
They're out of print because they're expensive
to reproduce, and so we just don't
have the money to do it, but they're
available online as electronic documents,
so you can still get them.
Really good ones.
The landscaping plants attract birds
is a really good publication.
Actually all of them are.
Produced by some of our extension specialists
over the past 20 years.
Now, not all wildlife is good.
I mentioned porcupines chewing on your house,
or red squirrels, there's publications out there
that can talk about what you can do if you have
wildlife that are being a nuisance,
whether they're in your garden or in your house,
or wherever it may be.
If you have flying squirrels in your house,
or owls in your house,
there's publications on how to control those.
These you can get also on the extension website.
Did I mention?
The learningstore.uwex.edu, you can find
a lot of these publications,
and all kinds of other stuff that comes from extension
at this website, so peruse around.
You might find other things you might like,
like how to make salsa.
Anybody make salsa?
Good, yeah. Okay.
So, here's your charge.
Get out there and inventory.
Take a look what's out there.
You've got that publication on how to inventory
wildlife on your property.
Get out there and try some of those.
See what's out there before you take that next step
in cutting your first tree to enhance the wildlife habitat.
See what's out there, and try to see
what you can figure out.
How many of those things are there?
What's the diversity like?
And then develop a plan based on that and your goals.
And keep a journal of what you see,
even if it's something, oh, I was walking through the woods,
and I saw a black squirrel, or I saw whatever.
It'll help you over time when you start to think about
well, I think I'm getting where I want to be,
but I can't remember where I saw that turkey
or that grouse drumming or something like that
on my property.
You can go back in your journal and you can see where you saw that.
Take a note of the location, when you saw it,
where it was, every kind of detail that you can.
It'll become a great resource into the future
when you're deciding if this is working or not.
And with that, I think we're ready.
So, thanks everybody.
We will do some questions here in a minute.
Thanks for coming.
(applause)