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Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Lowe.
This week, discover how this endangered dragonfly
survives thanks to one of its biggest predators.
It seemed like the last most unlikely place to go.
Why would you go into the burrow of a
crayfish that's probably going to kill you?
Fire is a destructive force,
but find out how these flames are rejuvenating the
land. We hear a lot about how the candidates for governor
raise money, but do you know how all those dollars
are eventually spent?
We also have a walk through some fall foliage that will
bring you to new heights in Wisconsin.
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Our first report takes us to Door County for a race
against time.
Research your Dan Solick is trying
to learn enough about the federally endangered
Heinz Emerald Dragonfly to try to save it from extinction.
Dan Solick is doing something that for most people
would be against the law.
He's trying to catch a Heinz Emerald Dragonfly.
The Heinz Emerald Dragonfly is a federally endangered
species once thought to be extinct.
And even though it's an endangered species,
more of them live near the shore of Lake Michigan
in Door County than anywhere else in the world.
Many people who work with dragonflies hold their wings
backwards over their body, but we found that this way is
a way that puts less strain on them.
You can see the green eyes.
Solick has a permit to catch a few dragonflies
because he's doing research that may help save them
from extinction.
He began his research in the early
1990s. It was quite a challenge because nothing, you know,
here you have a species which is very rare, which
almost nothing is known about.
One thing was clear from the beginning, when it comes
to four wheeled predators, dragonflies don't stand a
chance. Usually find at least one or two on a day like
this. This one has just been killed very bad shape.
Sometimes there's such bad shape that we can't even tell
exactly what species they are.
His research shows that the deadliest stretch of road
is County Highway Q north of Bailey's Harbor.
The highway is currently posted
at 45 miles per hour.
Solick is trying to get the speed limit reduced for two
months during the summer, but dragonflies are on the
wing. He's been working with Kathy Carnes from the
US Fish and Wildlife Service.
We have been advocating that speed limit signs
be put up and we feel that going 15 miles per hour
or less in these areas would prevent vehicle
collisions with dragonflies.
Adult dragonflies only live for about two months, but
they spend up to five years in the immature
stage called larvae.
They're looking like a little hairy dirty
tennis ball is behind the animal dragonfly.
Solick and his students are trying to find out what the
larvae need to survive, but when they first began looking
for them, no one knew where they lived.
We looked lots of different places, we tore apart saidges
and roots and we rooted around the dirt and everything
else. They finally found them underground in the
muddy burrows of what's commonly called the devil crayfish.
The research team developed a technique to safely
collect dragonfly larvae by pumping out the
crayfish burrows with a bellows and a hose.
This technique is a good one, but it does annoy the
crayfish. They'll often cap their burrows after we
do this.
So we have to sometimes open them up again.
Shira. If we want to place the hinds, the back of the burrow.
I think you can imagine if you had somebody
put a big back and clean or in your front door and
sucked up the contents of your house, you might do the same.
The most amazing part of this discovery is that
crayfish actually eat some of the dragonfly larvae
in their burrows.
A fact solace learned by video taping
an experiment with infrared light.
It seemed like the last most unlikely place to go.
Why would you go into the burrow of a
crayfish that's probably going to kill you?
But that's where they work.
Dragonfly larvae go into crayfish burrows to survive
the dry season above ground.
So here we have an endangered species that is somewhat
dependent on one of its predators to survive.
Solic points out how important it is to understand these
complicated relationships between predator and
prey in order to help endangered species survive.
The first thing that would have occurred to anybody who knows
that crayfish are predators on an endangered species like the
hinds emerald would be, well, we got a common crayfish.
Let's get rid of crayfish.
I think illumination of crayfish from an area is likely to
lead to the illumination of hinds emeralds from an area.
The hinds emerald dragonfly depends on the devil
crayfish to survive.
It also depends on the unique type of wetland where
the crayfish set up house.
Most of their habitats where they do well,
actually the surface water actually disappears.
And it's drawn down in a natural sort of cycle every year.
Mike Grimm is a biologist with the Nature
Conservancy in Door County.
For almost 60 years the hinds emerald was
thought to be extinct.
It was rediscovered here on the Conservancy's Mink River
Preserve in the late 1980s.
What's interesting about the hinds emerald is that
the water that they need is sort of hidden away in these
little rivulets that run through this the segmental.
The Nature Conservancy is working in partnership with
Salic and others to save this endangered insect.
Because this watery habitat is critical to its survival,
they're trying to find out where the ground water
that bubbles up to the surface here comes from.
Grimm says the source could be well beyond the border
of property protected by the Nature Conservancy.
People will make the analogy to sort of pipes in the
ground so you can have one sinkhole two miles away.
And if there's a direct dolomite fissure coming right
to this outlet here, that could be the way it gets
here through just one pipe.
And if that one pipe is shut off by developers who sink
new wells, the downstream effect could be devastating.
The results of the water flow research will help
the government protect this endangered species
by identifying areas off limits to development.
Anyone that may be doing an action that could affect the
habitat or the dragonflies themselves should be
consulting with the US Fish and Wildlife Service on
any permits they may need.
Doing research to understand and save an endangered species
like the Heinz Emerald Dragonfly takes time and money.
Although some may question the value, others like Salic
feel it's well worth it.
I think sometimes we struggle to find explanations for some
economic value and the only reason that it's any good is it
has some economic value to us.
And I don't think that's a really good way of thinking
about it.
The adult stage certainly is a beautiful animal.
It's been around for a long long time doing just fine
before we ever came around.
And I think we do have a responsibility.
We have a responsibility to be good
stewards of the land and we shouldn't just sort of
abandonly let these species vanish through our activities.
You can find more information about the Heinz Emerald
Dragonfly on our website at www.wpt.org/inwasconson.
You'll learn about the US Fish and Wildlife Services
Recovery Plan for the Dragonfly as well as a proposal that
would mark more than 9,000 acres in Wisconsin as critical
habitat for the Dragonfly.
We turn now from the work to save and endangered species
to the heavy lifting of running a political campaign.
We turn now from the work to save and endangered species
to the heavy lifting of running a political campaign.
Both major party candidates for governor are currently running
ads attacking each other for how they raised money.
Money that they mostly use to pay for
the ads they use to attack each other on how they raised money.
Seem confusing?
Well campaign fundraising and how it's
done gets a lot of attention.
But producer Art Hackett says it's only half the story.
Running for governor isn't cheap.
According to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign,
Democrat Jim Doyle, Republican Mark Green and Green Party
candidate Nelson Isman have raised a total of 12
and a half million dollars.
But that's only one side of the ledger how the candidates spend
all the campaign cash they rake in gets far less attention.
If you want to find out where the money goes, you have to
work for it.
We don't spend nearly as much time looking at
how the money is spent because our focus is almost purely on
where the donations are coming from, who these interests are.
That's true in academia as well.
We focus on how much a candidate spends.
A lot less focus now where the money actually goes.
But we care and since some people want public financing
of campaigns, maybe you should care too.
As the saying goes, if you want a job done,
you have to do it yourself.
The spending totals from the first of the year to the end
of August, Jim Doyle had spent $2.3 million, Mark Green had
spent about $1.5 million and Nelson Isman less than $5,000.
But you ask, spent on what?
If you switched away from public
TV for only a few minutes, you can already guess the
biggest expenditure.
TV time.
So most candidates will spend two thirds, the three quarters
of their budget, ultimately on running TV ads.
We also know that about two thirds of
voters say they're not even aware of someone is running in
a race until they see a TV ad.
So at the very least, you have to have some visibility.
Doyle is out spending green in that category by a three
to one margin.
Half of Doyle's money has gone to TV.
You can repeat messages in TV in a way that you
is hard to do with male circulars or newspaper ads.
But retired campaign advisor Bill Kraus of Madison says
ignoring print may be a mistake.
You should put new ads in their weeklies.
They're cheap and they last a week
and you typically get some coverage in the wake of it.
But the consultants absolutely say no print.
What surprises me is how much money they spend
on consultants and all the consultants tell them is spend
everything you've got on TV.
And if you have anything left to over spend that on TV too.
As it turns out, green and Doyle spent nearly the same
amount of money on consultants over $300,000 each.
Even Green Party candidate Nelson Eisman
spent nearly half of his minimal money on a consultant.
One area where Mark Green outspent Jim Doyle is on printed
material, literature, t-shirts, bumper stickers and ER ads.
Green's printing tab was $125,000.
Doyle's was more than $58,000.
That's squares with what you see when you travel around the
state of Wisconsin.
You see a lot more Mark Green signs
than you see Jim Doyle signs.
And there has been academic research on that that
shows that it actually does matter.
It seems like an old antiquated notion.
But there are these neighborhood effects where people see
lots of the same sign up in particular areas.
And it creates a bit of a kind of
social solidarity almost.
Green is in a sense running a more of a throwback campaign
where he's emphasizing the parades and the events a
lot more.
And is paying for yard signs and signs that
they put up in farmers fields and all that sort of thing.
Green is also spending more to enter into parades.
He even built a campaign web
commercial around them.
We call this category "events."
Green spent $150,000 on events.
The figure was inflated because it includes tens of thousands
of dollars at cost to bring in national figures like President
Bush and Vice President Cheney for fundraisers.
Doyle spent $64,000 in this category.
Isman $333.
Green also outspent Doyle when it
came to office overhead.
We tallied $99,000 in office
expenses for the Republican, rent, telephones, copies,
supplies, and so forth.
Doyle spent only $63,000.
Some of that money went to fund
shared facilities with other Democratic Party candidates.
Isman's office total was $1,500.
But Doyle is ahead when it comes to paid staff.
Doyle is spending nearly $429,000.
I don't know what they're doing.
I assume they're doing grassroots organizing
and get out the vote and mobilization, which would once
again be defensive because the Republican's reputation
is that they're better at that than the Democrats are.
Mark Green's staff expenses total $266,000.
This is partly because Doyle had a
pre-existing staff from his last statewide campaign.
So a lot of those folks obviously got inherited in.
I think this is simply the fact of having more money.
It wouldn't make much sense for
Mark Green to be trying to match Doyle on the size of the
staff and take that money away from, say, campaign advertise.
Or spending on travel.
Green led in that category.
Much of the expense went to pay for an RV
that took him around the state.
Green's travel tab was $78,000 to Doyle's nearly $45,000.
Doyle gets a lot of free rights.
He can mix business with campaigning and Green
doesn't have that opportunity.
But Green gets to have fundraisers in Washington while
he's there on congressional business.
Much of Doyle's travel total came from
fundraising trips to the coasts, which takes us back
to where the money comes from.
Doyle got a third of his money in the last reporting period
from out of state.
So he is mind both coasts.
He is looked far and wide across the
country for campaign money.
5% of Mark Green's money is from out of state.
Two thirds of Nelson Isman's money came
from one donor in California.
With the contribution data, you can say, we're looking
for significant donations by particular groups
and maybe that raises a red flag to some people.
But with the spending, if somebody spends X amount of
dollars on postage, do we really know that that looks odd?
Did you say postage?
We know how much they spent on that, too.
You can find more information about the candidates for
governor and all of the states, political races, by logging
on to WisconsinVote.org.
Once there, you'll find candidate bios, voter
registration info, and other election-related news reports.
Last week, we reported that a legislative committee
was deciding whether or not the butler's garter snake
should be on the state threatened species list.
The committee gave the State Department of Natural Resources
until October 1st to comply with management changes
drafted by the legislators.
Or the snake would be suspended from its protected status.
We also reported that a few weeks before the October
1st deadline, DNR officials met with developers and
environmentalists and came up with a plan to
present to the legislators.
This Wednesday, after four to five hours of debate,
the committee voted to pass a motion that extends the
DNR's window to create a plan until November 30th.
If at that time the committee feels the DNR has not
come up with a conservation strategy that makes
the snake less burdened some on property owners.
The butler's garter snake will be delisted.
The Prairie Habitat of the butler's garter
snake depends upon the destructive forces of fire.
But producer Joanne Garrett found that while most of us are
trained to be wary of fire, it's a force wildlife biologists
and ecologists welcome.
School days in one of the more unusual schools in Wisconsin.
Want to light some more fire?
It looks like an arsonist's convention.
But the official title of the curriculum is "Fire on
the Prairie", prescribed burning in land management.
You may want to separate you from the black as you can.
You may be really sure that the names of those are the names.
Most people know this two-day class as burn school.
The old infernals on the first day, maybe
the second day, but...
Jeb Barsen is the director of Field Ecology for the
International Crane Foundation, one of the school's co-sponsors.
I love doing fires, yeah.
Jeanine Richards is the coordinator of the Aldo
Leopold Foundation's Woodland School, the other co-sponsor.
The instructors at burn school love doing fires,
not just because it's fun, but because of what fire,
properly prescribed, can do for landscapes like these.
Prairies require roasting.
They need a good burn.
The term used is "Fire Adapted", and
it's fundamental to our state.
Well over two-thirds of the ecosystems native to Wisconsin
are fire-adapted ecosystems, and yet most of that area
does not have prescribed fire operating on it any longer.
And that's causing huge changes.
The burning helps to keep the habitat open, keep it in
grassland, whereas if we stop having fire on the landscape, it
will tend to get really brushy and shrubby and turn forested.
Which is why ecologists use prescribed burning as a tool in
land management, and why for two days, in March of 2006, 24
students of varied backgrounds signed up for burn school.
At the International Crane Foundation, near Baraboo.
It's a requirement of my job.
I'm a soil conservationist with a natural resources
conservation service.
If you have a thick layer on, you may want to just
take it off.
It's going to get warm near the fire.
A landowner and want to use fires as a
tool, management tool.
Yeah, that's a lot better than yesterday.
Yesterday we spent in lectures just sort of talking about
what plants are out here, what responds to burning,
what doesn't, and it's been a great learning experience.
After a day of instruction on the intricacies of fire
behavior and how to plan a burn, they got into their fire
retardant Nomex suits, and settled up with their water
filled 50 pound pumpkins.
And they headed off to the hands-on portion of burn school.
They start the fire with the touch of a torch,
control it with water, and a tool they call a flapper.
And then they burn in a border, what they call a black
line to contain the fire.
That will back our check your line all the way back
to the point of origin.
Make sure you set out.
Then he'll fill up with water.
And there's a need for a fire break to go around.
You're a little bit of water to help your house.
There you go.
You got a much safer line to work with, right?
When you talk about prescribed burn, everything becomes fuel.
Or not fuel.
And the thing that directs how hot that
fuel is going to burn is how much moisture is in it.
The thing that directs how much moisture is in it is wind speed,
the wind direction, the amount of humidity that's in the air.
How long it's been since the last rain.
All those things have an influence on
moisture content to the fuel.
There are so many different factors that
you need to calculate out.
We'll go over there and work back into the wind.
It can be kind of like a puzzle to figure out.
To work with the wind.
It's just really hard to control.
You have to be thinking critically about what
you're doing at all times.
Everything matters.
Even where you place your feet.
Think about this is black because it's already
burned. There's no fuel.
So it is a lot safer place to be, rather than being out in
that stuff that still can burn.
It's all part of learning the patterns of fire.
Patterns that can be predicted.
Patterns that must be predicted.
You certainly can predict.
And that's the whole basis for prescribed fire is that you
have to be able to predict.
Or you better have your DNR fire ranger on speed dial.
Well, you're always scared to death that somebody will
make a mistake that's serious.
Anytime you're using fire on the land, there's a potential that
you could have a wildfire that gets away or somebody get hurt.
We also do a spot fire training to teach people some
suppression techniques where fire gets away from them.
It's the Night Room scenario.
A spot fire breaks loose.
To fight it, the fire team must stay in constant communication
to rotate each member in, each taking their turn, battle
against the heat of the blaze.
They're using a lot of water and they're in a hot place
and they're in a smoky place.
And you only can take that for so long.
This is the time when teamwork and training tells.
The better that that team is working together, the better
that you can accomplish the job.
You can burn an area that's 100 acres in size with
six people quite readily and quite effectively
if they're well trained.
Well trained fire teams.
That's the goal of burn school.
It's not an easy experience.
I mean, there's smoke in your face the whole time.
You have to figure out where you can stand
without being really hot and these packs are really heavy.
So there's that, but it's also fun.
It's also important if these prairies are to survive.
These prairies are just gorgeous in the spring.
When you see them after you've done a prescribed burn, you just
fall in love with them over again.
It's like being married.
You know, you just fall in love over and over and over again.
When you see butterfly weed, blooming in July or compass
plant blooming in August or that sort of thing, it's just grand.
We want to emphasize a control burn is not something you
should undertake on your own.
As you saw in Joanne's report, it takes a lot of training and
education to learn that skill.
And that's our program for this week.
We leave you now with a hike up to the
highest point in Wisconsin.
Tim's Hill in Price County.
Thanks for joining us, and for InWisconsin.
I'm Patty Low.
See you next time.
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