[Music]
Hello and welcome to our summer season of In
Wisconsin. I'm Patty Lowe.
This week follow the trail for some of the best bird
watching in the country.
Unravel the mystery of why an entire community disappeared.
And come aboard for a spectacular voyage
through the clouds.
All that in Wisconsin.
[Music]
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by
the people of a lient energy who brings safe, reliable,
and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes,
neighborhoods, and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
A lient energy offering energy saving ideas on the web.
The University of Wisconsin Paul P.
Carbone Comprehensive Cancer Center providing
cancer research, education, and treatment.
UW-Paul P.
Carbone Comprehensive Cancer Center Comprehensive
is designated by the National Cancer
Institute, information available on the web.
And Wisconsin's Technical Colleges providing local
education for the crucial occupations essential
to our communities.
Wisconsin's Technical Colleges.
Communities first.
We begin with one of our state's natural treasures.
It's a trail, statewide in scope, stunningly
beautiful, and a moneymaker.
A big moneymaker.
Join us for a tour of the great Wisconsin
birding and nature trail.
[Music]
It's here.
[Music]
All the plans are now in motion.
[Music]
The word is out.
[Music]
About a wonderful trail that's blazed its way into Wisconsin.
[Music]
A trail based on feathers.
[Music]
And flight.
[Music]
A trail that offers some of the best wildlife
watching in the world.
[Music]
The name of our wildlife trail is the great Wisconsin
birding and nature trail.
Susan Foot Martin of the DNR is the coordinator of the trail
and the project's creative push.
She's a perfect fit, equal parts bird fan and marketing whiz.
That's right, marketing.
I think that one of the things that we really
want to do through this project is to show the value
of the natural world that surrounds us and that we
often take for granted.
There's money on the wing.
Birdwatching is big business.
Birders are estimated to spend anywhere from $100
to $140 per day per person.
Mark Dahlberg is the village president of Grantsburg
in Brunette County, which is less than 10 miles
away from a mecca of migration.
Cracks Matters state wildlife area.
30,000 acres filled with birds.
And in turn, attracts over 100,000 birders every year.
People like to come and watch birds.
And they will spend money.
They'll spend money on souvenirs.
They'll spend money on hotels, food, gasoline,
convenience stores.
And maybe even have a glass of wine.
The birds bring them in.
And 100,000 visitors at $100 a day.
Well, it adds up.
You can hurt set in a king room or two queens, okay?
Which is why Lisa Habby, who manages the best
western hotel in Siren, which is about 12 miles from
Cracks as the crow flies, was there in force.
For the grand opening of Phase 1 of the trail at
Cracks Matters headquarters in spring of 2004, there
was a ribbon cutting.
It's done.
And an unexpected and well-received flyover.
Wings up.
The northern loop of the bird trail is done.
83 different sites in the 18 northernmost counties.
Selected by input from local communities,
they call the best in birding and nature sites.
These 83 sites of the trail can be found on the DNR
website or printed maps.
If you build it, they will come.
That is the fervent wish of the local supporters of the trail.
People likely say Habby.
We thrive on tourism up here.
And people will travel to see their birds.
Just how far they'll travel was brought home to Habby
when a rare owl was spotted in Burnett County.
And people are flying in from Virginia in New York and Texas
just to see this owl so they can check it off their list.
That's when I really thought, gosh, these
people are really excited about seeing their birds.
So obviously we should be excited and welcoming them
with open arms because it's only going to help us.
I think the sky is really the limit.
The sky is the limit because Wisconsin is so limitless
in different terrains.
15,000 lakes, 30,000 miles of rivers and streams,
including the Mississippi flyway, used by so
many migrating birds.
Wisconsin has more than 400 birds that use the state
as their home for various parts of their lives.
Wisconsin is well placed to take advantage of a trend.
Nationwide, the number of birders is soaring.
Wildlife viewing across the nation is a growing phenomenon.
And in Wisconsin, we are actually considered the
third largest destination state for wildlife viewing.
The first place state is Virginia, followed by Minnesota.
And Wisconsin and Alaska are tied for third
place in destinations for wildlife viewings.
You know, why do people travel to Alaska?
It's not to golf.
They go there for one reason and that's to see the wildlife.
They're tied with them, so that says a lot about us.
Foot Martin sees a huge future for marketing
Wisconsin's wildlife.
There is a business in nature and that there is an
economic component which has really been kind of ignored.
If you want to get a sense of what bird-based
business has already accomplished in the state.
Nice to meet you, how are you?
Check out Eagle Days in Sock Prairie.
A weekend event held every January.
Eagles congregate, mass here, every winter.
Because of the open water below the dam.
The Eagles come, the birders come, of all
sizes and abilities.
Can you see him?
No. He's pretty much the
right center of where you're going to look.
He looks like just a little white bump out there.
I don't see it.
Well, that would explain it.
No, he flew away.
The birds bring him in.
Leslie McFarlane of the Sock Prairie Chamber of Commerce.
We're expecting 10,000 both days.
All these people equal money.
In 1993, Sock Prairie commissioned a study to
find out exactly how much money the birds brought in.
That, you know.
Well, the Eagles need generally to consider
mid-December to mid-Fitbury.
So in that 20, half three month span, it was $800,000.
Now that was like $93.94.
So our best guess today is it's over a million
dollars with a revenue.
The value of wildlife.
Yeah, she just come down into the water, pulled the fish up.
In today's world, money talks.
And we have to assign a value now to the things
that we really care about in order to save them.
And if we can show that there's economic value in
wildlife, people will pay to come and see these things.
They won't pay to come and see development.
They won't come to see urban sprawl.
They have that already.
What they are looking for is the wilderness experiences
that only states like Wisconsin have to offer them.
And they can find them on the great Wisconsin,
birding and nature trail.
[Music]
We travel now to the Kikapoo Valley Reserve, north of
La Farde in Vernon County.
If you hike through the valley, you'll come across
things that look like remnants of a community.
What happened?
Sit back and discover the mystery of the reserves passed.
The Kikapoo Valley Reserve, north of La Farde, has
much in common with Wisconsin's state parks.
Pretty scenery, trails to hike or bike, and some interesting
geological formations.
But the reserves directors says don't expect to
park the camper here.
Cell phones don't work here.
You have primitive camping where you're not tent
to tent with other folks.
Horseback riders love it because of the rough terrain.
The reserve holds a winter festival every January.
The Ho-Chunk, which owned part of the land in the
reserve, erected traditional shelter called a Chipotake.
Tribal member Bill Green Deer says the land was
a popular wintering area for his ancestors.
You have whole villages down in the valley, near enough water,
near enough where you could do a little bit of hunting.
It was easier to be in on an open marshes.
But the Ho-Chunk were displaced by farmers,
farmers who eventually were displaced themselves.
Some things you see and find in the reserve don't make sense.
Well spout water, but there's no house or farm nearby.
There's a concrete obelisk.
It's not a silo.
It's not a grain elevator.
It's just there.
And if you wander into the darkness of the woods,
you'll find stone structures.
They appear to be steps leading to a clearing, surrounded by
plants which are out of place.
There is some day lollies.
Wouldn't be native species at all.
And some pine trees that are not native, so there would
have been a house here.
Brian Bufton knows the story.
The story of how the houses and the people who
lived in them disappeared.
Once it started to happen, it just happened very
quickly. People that I went to, to grade school with.
People used to ride the same school bus as I did.
Suddenly they were gone.
And not only were they gone, but their homes were gone.
The story begins with the Kikapoo River, which
meanders through a valley once filled with dairy
farms and tobacco fields.
I know you see the tobacco meager, but this is an
excellent tobacco garden.
But the Kikapoo frequently jumped its banks.
This is a brand new channel.
It guards out the field.
We lost the field.
About two acres of the farm were
lost going down the hill.
It was a sad, sad, sad thing.
See, when you have a flash flood, it gets out of control.
But if we'd had some dams above, it would have
kept it under control.
So the people in the valley talked to the US
soil conservation service about a program to build
small flood control dams.
That was in 1962.
There were going to be six different small dams in the
area spotted small dams.
Three years later, plans had changed to one really
big dam and a lake.
People thought a lake would spur economic development.
People like water, they're going up north for a week and so,
but it'd be right here.
This would be the development here.
I think it was about evenly divided.
The people that were looking at this as a place to make
a living and everything.
I think they saw it was exciting.
Mary Buffton, Brian Buffton's mother, was
teaching school at the time.
She and her husband, Rex, lived in this house near
where the lake would be.
For some people, this is such a beautiful place to live.
This is where we thought we would always live.
And now suddenly we can't, we probably
aren't going to have it.
They wouldn't have that place to live because expanding
the dam to create a lake would flood most of the valley.
The Army Corps of Engineers bought the Buffton's farm
and 140 others to make way for the lake, which
would form behind the dam.
It was terrible.
It was terrible to sit and
see your husband cry.
It was good as it was going to do everybody.
They'd just make a playground.
And it's already a playground.
Even though the Ho-Chunk had been moved out of the valley in
the 1830s, the Indians weren't crazy about the dam either.
Bill Greendeer was a teenager when the dam was proposed.
His first concern was for the remains of tribal
members buried in the area.
They talk about different places where the people would have
been moved out of a flood area and they would they flood out.
It's like they bring up caskets.
What are they going to start doing?
They start bringing up bodies out of the place.
We have bodies buried everywhere.
But it wasn't just Bill Greendeer's ancestors
who were affected.
We were about 148 different families.
So the population estimates vary.
But with 8,600 acres and 148 families, it was a significant
change to the local economy.
Even the schools report losing over half of their students in
some of the grades at the time.
Construction began in 1970.
The tower, which was part of a dam's discharge structure, grew
as did a long earth and levy.
An environmental battle developed at the same time.
To build a road, to build a dam through this area is
like having a hot dog stand in the cysteine chapel.
I mean, you don't do certain things.
This is Wisconsin's Grand Canyon.
Butnist Hugh Elthus was especially concerned about
the rare plants that grow on the cliffs along the river.
Environmentalists had a new forum for those
concerns. The Kikapoo Valley project had the misfortune
to begin construction.
The same year, Congress passed a law requiring projects
such as this to complete an environmental impact statement.
But the project eventually was killed by a
study of soil erosion.
The dam project was justified economically because the
lake would provide jobs.
The soil erosion study showed the lake was in effect a mirage.
The silting is going to be horrendous.
If I remember correctly, at some time, the
article in science said it was 40 tons per acre on the
worst farm that they studied.
Now that's one hell of a lot of soil.
And if that gets dumped into the Kikapoo Valley,
that dam will be a marsh within 30 years and a nice
wet prairie within 50 or 60.
So the whole thing doesn't hold any water.
The core of engineers had spent 18 million tax period dollars
on the dam.
Nonetheless, the project was stopped in 1975.
The community and all the people that lived here had
sacrificed for something that never happened.
The tower and the partially completed dam just
sat there until 1992.
It was just a difficult thing to watch.
Yet being unmanaged, it became almost
a wasteland.
And people would actually dump trash on it.
The area of citizens started to put aside differences
over the project in the early 90s.
They felt they could manage the property better
than the core of engineers.
A group of citizens after 30 plus years of battling about
whether the dam was going to be finished or not said
we've got to do something.
And so they tell the story of sitting around in somebody's
living room with Senator Brian Rude and saying we're going to
protect it, but we're also going to allow people to enjoy it.
In 1997, the federal government turned the property over
to the Hochunk and the board of local citizens.
The core of engineers offered to tear down the
concrete tower, but the residents wanted to keep it.
Got it?
At the Winter Festival, the residents shoot
half-frozen vegetables at it with a sling shot.
One, two, three.
[Screams]
Some people see the tower as a symbol of a federal boondoggle.
It's a reminder of the people in farms the valley lost.
Others are glad that the tower is still there.
You have people now coming to visit the reserve and it's hard
to explain what happened here.
I've told this story to people and had them really honestly
not hardly believe me, but this had actually taken place there.
The tower is a handy way to prove to visitors that the
story of the Kikapoo Valley Dam isn't just some tall tale.
[Music]
We thought it would be fun this summer to take a
look back at some of the stories Wisconsin Public
Television has brought you over the past 30 years or so.
We call it Wisconsin Retro.
This next story came to us in 1989 and features
a very uplifting theme.
[Music]
The beauty of unpowered flight, a drift, at the
mercy of the wind, floating over pastoral landscapes.
A romantic vision in the mind of a dreamer?
Actually, a common sight over Wisconsin's St.
Croix Valley.
Here joyous bursts of color frequently float across the
sky. A near mystical experience created in part by human design.
Just the fact that it was a balloon up my wife and I built
together is a real proud moment.
It really is a pretty balloon.
It really is.
[Music]
With understandable pride, balloon artists Dave and Sue
Johnson experience a special excitement whenever one of
their creations sails overhead.
But one design stirs their emotions more than any other.
This recreation of the Mongol Fier balloon, the world's
first manned flying machine.
It was to be a celebration of ballooning of man's first
flight. November of 1783 was the first manned flight and it
was with the balloon and it was the hot air balloon concept.
So there is a real history in that respect.
[Music]
The invention of the first practical hot air balloon
is credited to the Mongol Fier brothers Joseph
and Etienne, two paper makers from Ananay, France.
The aerostatic machine, as it was known, carried two
aeronauts high above Paris.
The flight was fueled by burning damp straw and ended
in an emergency landing as the balloon caught fire.
The only visual records of the event were found in collections
of etchings from that period.
There were a lot of different conceptions of that, an initial
balloon done by various artists and reporters at the time.
So we really had to get to a point where we kind of took
an idea from this particular etching and from another one and
our develop what we felt would accommodate what we had in mind.
What we were doing was taking historical designs and
adapting them to the shape of a modern hot air balloon.
We also were working within the limitation of what fabric was
available in aircraft fabric.
The original color, from most of the drawings we saw
was probably a dustier blue.
The Johnson's apply a unique combination of
skills to the actual construction of the balloon.
Dave's training in the fine arts and experience
painting billboards and Sue's expertise from years spent
working as a seamstress.
Over a period of four months they designed, cut, painted
and sewed in or inlaid the desired artwork for their 77,000
cubic foot canvas in the sky.
I really enjoy the large scale aspect of it.
I enjoy working alone which I do a
lot and working on really long term large scale projects.
It's real satisfying to finally complete a project
and it's six stories tall.
Almost all of the surfaces covered in artwork in
some form or the other.
And so it's a lot of elements that we've had to create a
certain balance between and have enough space in between
so that each aspect of it is able to be appreciated.
We could have gotten a lot more ornate in our approach,
tried to dazzle people up close with a lot of detail
but we felt that we'd be better off if the painting
end of it was simplified.
Again, narrowing the colors and saw the ability to create
an envelope, a balloon that was not only colorful and
attractive from the outer view but also could be seen from
inside as you're flying it.
It's like a cathedral inside.
I mean the pilot is the one that
really gets to appreciate that balloon because they can see
everything at the same time.
And it really is like being inside a stained glass atrium
that's 55 feet diameter.
I don't care if people know I have done this or not.
What I enjoy is being there and hearing
people, owing and I, I mean that makes it worth it to me.
The fact that I have created something that is
really visually pleasing.
That's our program this week, our thanks to Ulbrich
Gardens here in Madison for playing host to us.
We leave you with a trip to Devil's Lake State Park
in Sock County.
Devil's Lake gets 1.4 million
visitors a year making it Wisconsin's busiest state park.
For In Wisconsin, I'm Patty Low.
We'll see you next time.
[Music]