(upbeat music)
- Hello everyone and welcome to our summer season
of In Wisconsin.
I'm Fattie Lowe.
We're joining you from Blue Mount State Park
home to 15 miles of hiking and biking trails.
Throughout our program we'll be introducing you
to some of those trails.
We'll meet two sisters who are trying to solve
through the competition in what's traditionally
a male dominated profession.
Paddle through the Mississippi backwaters
with a man who calls the river home
and find out what's a bit uncommon
about these rather ordinary looking birds.
All this plus we'll introduce you to one of World War II's
greatest aviation heroes who grew up right here in Wisconsin.
- Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the people
of a lion's energy who brings safe, reliable
and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes,
neighborhoods and life in Wisconsin running smoothly,
a lion's energy offering energy saving ideas on the web.
And by the University of Wisconsin Comprehensive
Cancer Center providing cancer research,
education and treatment, UW Comprehensive Cancer Center,
comprehensive as designated by the National Cancer Institute,
information available on the web.
- Our first story this week takes us to the wooded areas
of Rusk and Sawyer counties.
That's where we met two sisters who own and operate
a logging business.
That in itself is pretty unusual in that logging
as a male-dominated business.
But these two sisters are further trying to
set themselves apart by getting certified
as master loggers.
- There wasn't blowdown right here.
- I don't believe there was any blowdown right in this section
in here, it was that way.
- Jenny Pasinan and Jackie Kenzley are loggers,
and they're spending the day with a pair of inspectors
who'll be scrutinizing their work.
Pasinan and Kenzley are going through Wisconsin's
master logger certification process.
The two women who are also sisters
own Butler Forest Products, a small logging company based
out of the town of Winter in Sawyer County.
The sisters got into the traditionally
male-dominated business through their dad.
- He had no boys in the family, so it was up to us
to help him out, grease equipment, move equipment
on weekends for the crew.
- As far as we know, we're the only two
women actually running a logging business.
- Sometimes they look at us and they're like,
"Oh, two women, they don't know what they're doing."
But then when we show them, and we can go and order
parts or move the equipment or do any of that stuff,
and they see that we can handle it, then they back off.
- Pasinan and Kenzley are going through
the master logger certification process
in the hopes of gaining respect.
- We've always done everything the way we're supposed to do.
We've always followed all the rules,
and now we're gonna actually be recognized
as one of those that are following the rules
and doing everything right.
- Getting recognized is doing everything right.
That's a sentiment master logger field inspector,
Don Peterson, here's echoed a lot from Wisconsin Loggers.
- Out of the 26 that went through last year,
one of the questions I asked in the interview is,
what are you most frustrated about with the logging industry?
And 21 of them answered lack of respect.
- Respect was one of the main reasons
the Wisconsin Professional Loggers Association
began the state's master logger program in 2003.
- This program will give us an opportunity
to prove through independent third party certification
that they're doing a good job on the land.
- Master logger applicants have three
of their logging sites inspected.
Then the inspection report goes to a certifying
panel for review.
To receive master logger certification,
applicants must meet strict performance standards
in seven categories.
They must protect water and soil quality,
comply with government logging regulations,
practice acceptable silver culture
and utilization standards, participate in ongoing training,
employ aesthetic techniques, follow a management
plan for the site, and use sound business
management techniques.
- I was saying I wonder why the stump was so high,
but it looks a lot older than when you guys--
- Oh yeah, that's definitely older.
- Jenny Pasanen and Jackie Kinsley say
they've seen first hand the work of loggers with
poor work practices.
- They let their equipment leak oil all over the place
if they have a spill they don't pick it up.
We've seen basically all of it.
I've seen crews go on with beer and they're lunch for
the lunch, you know?
And that's, we just don't allow that.
Hopefully by keeping those that are gonna pass the master logger
certification will have a good crop of loggers out here
and hopefully they'll get rid of all the nasty ones
that aren't doing the job right.
- The first stop in Pasanen and Kinsley's inspection
is an active work site in the Flambo River State Forest.
Field Inspector Don Peterson begins
by checking out the logger's safety practices.
- Are things in here?
Are safety policies in here?
- Okay.
- Field Inspector Collierriksen inquires about
oil spills at the work site.
- We haven't had anything big out here.
Normally on the hose goes, they shut down right away
and shut everything on.
We've got main switches on there so they can shut the tank off
so it doesn't leak any more than the ones in the hose.
- The inspection team also interviews
some of the logging companies' heavy equipment operators.
- Fire extinguisher, you have set.
Could I just see that?
- Sure thing.
- See that?
- I'm gonna give in, yep.
- Okay.
- Is there a sprinkler system?
- Okay.
- Next, the inspection team moves to a
privately-owned forest in Rusk County.
The owner also raises wild mustangs
and places a lot of importance on trails and aesthetics.
Peterson says the master logger program
gives private forest owners a known quality they can trust.
It gives them something to look at on paper.
And in the past, a lot of land owners have had qualms
about having timber sales just because of horror stories.
They've heard from neighbors or relatives
or even their own experiences in the past.
And this just gives them a level of comfort.
- Yeah, something like that.
- I'm come back.
- Jenny Pasanen and Jackie Kenzley were
hired a few months back to log this 50 acre site.
The job required salvaging blown down timber
from a wind storm, something that can pose
a challenge.
- We got a question for you.
We're running into a few high stumps
and Polly said a lot of what you see
and looks like they cut it when it was laying down.
And then probably fly back up.
- Yep.
Okay. - Now there was a lot of that.
As soon as you cut it off, they'd pop back up.
- Okay.
And most of those were cut with the chainsaw
or if you could, you got in the right browser.
- Some was chainsaw and most of it out here
was all processing.
- Okay.
- As storm clouds move in, the inspection team finishes
the second site and moves on to the third,
a rescue county on site.
Right away Peterson has concerns about a culvert,
something that could affect the safety of the road.
- So what's okay over there, Polly?
It's kind of odd.
It's washed out right here and I can't really figure out why.
Is it doesn't come off of the road?
- Field Inspector Kully Erickson takes pictures
of a drainage culvert.
The photos will become part of the team's final report.
- This time goes along.
We're gonna have to have some more going here.
- The team works the area quickly,
but rain overtakes them as they sum up their findings
with Pasinon and Kensley.
- And there was one area where there was a drainage
coming into the creek.
I couldn't tell if they crossed it or not.
That's a good thing.
If they didn't cross it, then that was good.
If they did cross it, they did it so well I couldn't tell.
So... - The deer get in the house.
From here, the inspectors write up their final field reports
and forward them onto the Master Logger Certifying Panel.
- It was all slashed over the line.
- No slashed over the line.
- All Pasinon and Kensley can do now is wait.
- It's capable of crossing.
I like that.
- Three months later, the Master Logger Certification Board
meets in Wassa.
The panel is made up from a wide spectrum
of groups interested in logging practices,
from foresters and experts in the logging industry
to private forest owners and environmentalists.
Panel member and state representative Don Frisky
says, including environmentalists
in the process, is crucial.
- I think having individuals who are
belonging to environmentally sensitive groups
or groups that that's their focus,
make sure that that is a consideration at the table.
And I think that's a voice that needs to be at the table.
It certainly needs to be at this table.
- A certifying panel begins by assigning a number
to the 18 applicants in order to preserve anonymity.
The application for butler-forced products,
the company owned by Jenny Pasinon and Jackie Kensley,
is assigned number 582.
- My initial impression is that this applicant
has a lot of above average or excellent rates.
- Well, I had one or two that were on a negative side.
- The panel debates the pros and cons
of the application for almost an hour.
- Finally, the certifying panel is ready to call for a decision.
- A lot of the group feel about this.
About 582.
We have a master lover now.
- Two weeks later, Bob Hess contacts all
of the master-logger applicants to give them the news,
a thumbs up or a thumbs down on their application.
Meanwhile, Jackie Kensley and Jenny Pasinon
have been told to expect a call today
with a decision on their application.
- Hello, how are you?
- Good morning, butler-forced products.
- Good morning.
This is Bob Hess from the Master-logger program.
- Hi, Bob.
How are you?
- Oh, I'm doing pretty good.
Who is this?
Jenny or Jackie?
- This is Jackie.
- Jackie?
Hey, nice to talk to you this morning.
Is Jenny there too?
- Yes, she is.
- Well, okay.
Well, this is what we've been waiting for,
I guess, for about the last six months.
- Yeah, I'll be nice to know.
- Okay, and I really pleased to tell you
that you passed with flying colors.
- Are we good?
Good. - I'm being Master-loggers.
- Good, I'm glad to hear that.
- We're really glad to have you in the program.
Welcome aboard.
- Well, thank you.
Cool, we're in.
- Good news for Kensley and Pasinon,
but no time to celebrate as it's business as usual
and there's work to do for the newly named Master-loggers.
- We've always been very conscious of the environment
and do things the right way, and it's nice now to
get the recognition.
(upbeat music)
- As we just learned in that last story,
Wisconsin is blanketed by forests,
especially in northern Wisconsin,
home to the man in our next story.
Dick Bong grew up in Poplar about 18 miles southeast
of the city of Superior.
He loved airplanes and eventually
entered the service during World War II.
He became America's all-time ace of aces
downing 40 enemy planes.
His story is part of a new documentary,
Wisconsin World War II stories, legacy.
Here's the next, served.
This week, a hero fell in our ranks.
The army of horses, aces, aces, major Richard Ira Bong.
Age 24 from Poplar, Wisconsin.
A town you probably never heard of,
till a P-38 lightning fight of plays
its name in White Hot Live across South Pacific skies.
(upbeat music)
Poplar was Wisconsin population 461,
then 64 of her sons to war.
One of them was Richard Ira Bong, a stocky farm boy,
who was first to crack Captain Eddie Rickenbacker's record
of the last war.
Dick Bong, a sandlocked ball player
who shot 40 enemy planes from the sky.
Dick Bong, clear-eyed youngster with puppy red cheeks
and turned up nose, who was to become the army
airfathers ranking ace of World War II.
Tonight, Dick Bong is no longer with us.
He leads a great formation of other brave airmen
into the infinite.
Flyers who gave their life so that the army airfathers
might spread strong protective wings around the world.
Perhaps the person most fitted to pay tribute
to his achievement in this war is the man who attained a
similar position in World War I.
Captain Eddie Rickenbacker.
Here with us tonight is Captain Eddie in person.
In thinking of major Richard Bong,
I find it impossible to regard him
in the narrow aspect of an individual.
When I think of Dick as a friend who is no longer with us,
he ceases to be just one man who died.
Instead, he becomes every American
whose road to war was a one-way street
to the Supreme Sacrifice.
And when I think of his mother, wife and father,
my heart goes out to them because to me,
they represent at this moment every American family
that is helped to buy victory with the precious life
of a father, husband or son.
You see to me, major Bong, like every American
who has met his death in this war,
is an example of the tragic and terrible price we must pay
to maintain principles of human rights,
of greater value and life itself.
We cannot mourn the death of one without
mourning the death of all.
Richard Bong, by virtue of his courage and skill
as a flying fighter, attained a truly heroic statue
that will remain an everlasting inspiration.
Dick Bong survived his overseas war experience unharmed,
but ironically, he died in a plane crash
just six months later when he returned home
to work as a test pilot.
You can watch the entire documentary,
Wisconsin World War II Stories Legacy.
This Wednesday, August 31st, at 8 p.m.
on Wisconsin Public Television.
You can get more information about the special
by logging onto our website at www.wrg/inwisconsin.
(gentle piano music)
- We're gonna stay in Dick Bong's
neck of the woods for our next story.
Wisconsin's Lake Superior Shoreline is home
to the two nesting colonies in all of the Lake Superior Basin
for an endangered bird.
The bird is called the Common Turn,
but wildlife experts say it's anything but.
(gentle piano music)
- What I have like about the bird,
the color, the gracefulness, the agility,
the tenacity.
When they have eggs and they have youngs,
they are extremely tenacious and protective
when we're out there monitoring them.
- 26, just two.
- We wear hard hats because they pick you on the head
and if you don't have a hard hat,
they pick you hard enough to bleed.
- Number 22 with three.
- The bird is the Common Turn.
- Number 10 has one egg.
- The focus of wildlife manager, Fred Strand,
and avian ecologist Sumner Madison,
both of the Wisconsin DNR.
- In Wisconsin, we classify them as an endangered species
and in the Lake Superior Basin, the entire basin,
including all of Canada.
There are only two nesting colonies of Common Turn.
- In the largest lake in the world,
Common Turn are anything but common.
- They like coastal areas, beaches or peninsula's
and we humans also like that for industry,
for recreation and for housing.
- We've pushed them out of their natural home,
but in an interesting turn of events,
we've also provided the two nesting sites
that they now have, unlike Superior.
- This is called Interstate Island up here.
- In the middle of the harbor of the city of Superior,
surrounded by enormous freighters,
gigantic grain elevators, and looming or dogs,
is Interstate Island.
- But this is the largest Common Turn colony
along the Wisconsin shore of Lake Superior.
- An island by default.
It's a dredge spoil, created when they carved out
unnavicable channel.
- There are Common Turns here, about 200 nesting pairs.
You can't see them, because they are obscured
by about 10,000 nesting pairs of ring-bill gals.
Common Turns rule the roost, however,
they are the only bird at the second site in Shwamagan Bay.
- The nesting site here in Ashland is at the
end of an old ordock.
The turns were fond of the old ordock,
but it was rotting away.
So wildlife officials built them a new nesting site
in the old place.
- We got a grant from EPA to rebuild this island,
and this is what you see here as a new,
the old piling from the former site
and then the new island itself right up ahead here.
- A new island, a nesting site, safe from people and predators.
- As of this year's count, there are about 600 Common
Turns, unlike superior.
- This is it.
Literally, we have all our eggs and two baskets.
This basket of Ashland Turn Island
and the other basket is Interstate Island.
- All our eggs.
The Common Turn.
So uncommon in Wisconsin.
Survives in only two sites total,
in all of Lake Superior.
Two sites, manmade, provide the toe hole for the Common Turn.
This uncommonly glorious bird.
- As comfortable as the Common Turn is nesting
along the Lake Superior shoreline,
the man in our next story is just as comfortable
along the Mississippi River.
Ken Salway makes his home in the back waters of the Big Muddy.
And as you'll see in this Wisconsin Retro selection,
that first aired 15 years ago, Salway believes we can all
take a lesson from the river.
- Water always tells a story.
Mississippi story is silt and of course pollution.
But to get off into the back waters,
there's still quite a little wetland left in
the upper Mississippi.
And that's precious.
In the back waters, I see the most beautiful place on earth.
You know, all the insects, the critters raised their young,
the wild follow, the fish all spawn in the back waters.
And if we keep losing our wetlands way,
we're soon to follow.
Everything is gonna be hurt.
I like to say that I live with the land
rather than off the land.
You don't live off it or on it or alongside of it.
You have to live with it, in harmony with it.
(soft music)
This time of the year, I've been digging quite a few roots
and cutting herbs.
And I sell those for medicine to make tea.
Correctly, yeah, bark.
For two things.
In western Wisconsin and South Eastern Minnesota,
there are 85 varieties of roots and herbs
that have medicinal properties.
That's why it's so frustrating to see
like the rainforest destroyed.
When we've only cataloged approximately 12%
of the medicinal plants that exist in the rainforest,
maybe there's a plant there that'll cure cancer.
We don't know that, but we go ahead and destroy it anyway.
To me, that's suicidal.
We're gonna have to do a few things different
in what we are or we're gonna go to hell on the handcart.
What we need is not necessarily more laws or more enforcement.
What we need is every citizen's participation
in the environmental war.
My name is Kenny Sawway and I make a living with nature.
I especially like to talk to school children.
They want to learn and they want to do something.
And they know that they can do something.
We must stop polluting the river.
Not only the river, but nature.
It's a funny thing.
Man is the only creature on earth that has to be taught
how to get along with nature, how to live with nature.
Well, I've chosen this kind of lifestyle because it's,
to me, it's one of the last places on earth
where there's solitude and peace and quiet.
This kind of a life isn't gonna go on forever
because the habitat and the environment
everything is changing.
You don't like to see a great river die.
Mississippi is one of the great rivers of the world.
We're not to the point anymore of saying,
"Well, I wish it would be nice until the point of have to."
Everyone has hope for the future.
The future lies in the children.
We do what we can, but it's gonna be them
that are gonna make or break the river.
Since we first aired that story 15 years ago,
Ken Salway has authored a book called
"The Last River Rat Detailing a Year in His Life."
He's working on a second, which should be published
this fall.
That's our program for this evening.
Thanks to Blue Mountain State Park for hosting us.
And before we leave you, here's another look
at the Mississippi River from Wild Loosing State Park
in Grand County.
For in Wisconsin, I'm Patty Low.
Thanks for joining us.
(soft music)