Wisconsin Public Television

Transcript: In Wisconsin

Original Air Date: September 28, 2006

Patty Loew:

Hello, and welcome to "In Wisconsin." I'm Patty Loew. This week discover how this endangered dragonfly survives thanks to one of its biggest predators.

Man:

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?

Loew:

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."

Loew:

Our first report takes us to Door County for a race against time. Researcher Dan Soluk is trying to learn enough about the federally endangered Hine's Emerald Dragonfly to try to save it from extinction.

Reporter:

Dan Soluk is doing something that for most people would be against the law. He's trying to catch a Hine's Emerald Dragonfly.

Dan Soluk:

There we go. Caught one.

Reporter:

The Hine's 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.

Soluk:

People who work with dragonflies hold their wings backwards over their body, but we found that this is a way that puts less strain on them. You can see the green eyes.

Reporter:

Soluk 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.

Soluk:

It was quite a challenge, because nothing -- you know, here you have a species which is very rare which almost nothing is known about.

Reporter:

One thing was clear from the beginning. When it comes to four-wheeled predators, dragonflies don't stand a chance.

Soluk:

Usually you find at least one or two on a day like this. This one has just been killed. Very bad shape. Sometimes they're in such bad shape that we can't even tell exactly what species they are.

Reporter:

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. Soluk is trying to get the speed limit reduced for two months during the summer while dragonflies are on the wing. He's been working with Cathy Carnes from the U.S. Wildlife Service.

Cathy Carnes:

We have been advocating that speed limits signs be put up. We feel that going 15 miles per hour or less in these areas would prevent vehicle collisions with dragonflies.

Reporter:

Adult dragonflies only live for about two months, but they spend up to five years in the immature stage called larvae.

Soluk:

They're looking like a little hairy, dirty, tennis ball is the Hine's Emerald Dragonfly.

Reporter:

Soluk and his students are trying to find out what larvae they need to survive. But when they first began looking for them, no one knew where they lived.

Soluk:

We looked lots of different places. We tore apart sedges and roots, and we rooted around in the dirt and everything else.

Reporter:

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.

Soluk:

This technique is a good one, but it does annoy the crayfish. They'll often cap their burrows after we do it. So we have to sometimes open them up again, if we want to place the Hine's Emerald back in the burrow. You can imagine if you had somebody put a big vacuum cleaner at your front door and sucked up the contents of your house, you might do the same.

Reporter:

The most amazing part of this discovery is that crayfish actually eat some of the dragonfly larvae in their burrows, a fact Soluk learned by videotaping an experiment with infrared light.

Soluk:

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 were.

Reporter:

Dragonfly larvae go into crayfish burrows to survive the dry season above ground.

Soluk:

So here we have an endangered species that is somewhat dependent on one of its predators to survive.

Reporter:

Soluk points out how important it is to understand these complicated relationships between predator and prey in order to help endangered species survive.

Soluk:

The first thing that would have occurred to anybody who knows that crayfish are predators on an endangered species like the Hine's Emerald, would be we've got a common crayfish, let's get rid of crayfish. I think elimination of crayfish in the area is likely to lead to the elimination of the dragonfly.

Reporter:

The Hine's Emerald dragonfly depends on the crayfish to survive. It also depends on the unique wetland where the crayfish set up house.

Mike Grimm:

Most of their habitats where they do well, the surface water actually disappears, and it's drawn down in a natural sort of cycle every year.

Reporter:

Mike Grimm is a biologist with the Nature Conservancy in Door County. For almost five years the Hine's Emerald was thought to be extinct. It was discovered here on the conservancy's Mink River preserve in the late 1980's.

Grimm:

What's interesting about the Hine's Emerald is that the water that they need is sort of hidden away in these little rivulets that run through this sedge meadow.

Reporter:

The Nature Conservancy is working in partnership with Soluk and others to save this endangered insect. Because this watery habitat is critical to its survival, they're trying to find out where the groundwater 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.

Grimm:

People make the analogy to sort of pipes in the ground. So you can have one sinkhole, you know, two miles away, and if there's a direct, you know, fissure coming right to this outlet here, that could be the way it gets here, through just one pipe.

Reporter:

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.

Carnes:

Anyone that may be doing an action that could affect the habitat or the dragonflies themselves should be consulting with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on any permits they may need.

Reporter:

Doing research to understand and save an endangered species, like the Hine's Emerald Dragonfly, takes time and money. Although some may question the value, others like Soluk feel it's well worth it.

Soluk:

I think sometimes we struggle to find explanations for, you know, some economic value, and the only reason 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 is certainly a very 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 offhandedly let these species vanish through our activities.

Loew:

You can find more information about the Hine's Emerald Dragonfly on our Web site at wpt.org/inwisconsin. You'll learn about the U.S. Fish & 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.

Loew:

We turn now from the work to save an 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 used to pay for the ads they used 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.

Art Hackett:

Running for governor isn't cheap according to the Wisconsin democracy campaign, democrat Jim Doyle, republican Mark Green, and green party candidate Nelson Eisman have raised a total of $12.5 million. 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.

Mike McCabe:

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.

John Coleman:

That's true here as well. We focus on how much a candidate spends, a lot less focus on where the money actually goes.

Hackett:

But we care. And since some people want factual basis 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 Eisman less than $5,000. But, you ask, spent on what? If you switched away from public TV for only two minutes, you can guess the biggest expenditure, TV time.

Coleman:

Most candidates will spend 2/3 to 3/4 of their budgets ultimately on running TV ads. We also know about 2/3 of voters say they don't know someone is running in a race until they see the TV ad. So, at the very least, you have to have some visibility.

Hackett:

Doyle is outspending Green in that category by a 3:1 margin. Half of Doyle's money has gone to TV.

Coleman:

You can repeat messages in TV in a way that's hard to do with mail circulars or newspaper ads.

Hackett:

But retired campaign advisor Bill Kraus of Madison say ignoring print might be a mistake.

Bill Kraus:

You shut put ads in the weeklies. They're cheap and they last a week, and you typically get some coverage in the wake, but consultants absolutely say no print. What surprises me is they say how much money they spend on consultants, and all consultants tell them is spend everything on TV.

Hackett:

As illustrate turns out, Green and Doyle spent 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 Doyle is on printed material, literature, t-shirts, bumper stickers and yard signs. Green's printing tab was $125,000. Doyle's was more than $58,000.

McCabe:

That 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.

Coleman:

And there has been academic research on that that says it actually does matter. It seems like an old antiquated notion. But there are these neighborhood effects where people see lots of signs up in particular areas, and it creates a bit of a kind of social solidarity almost.

McCabe:

Green is in a sense running a more of a throw-back 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 farmer's fields and that sort of things.

Hackett:

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 it costs to bring in national figures like President Bush and Vice President Cheney for fundraisers. Doyle spent $64,000 in this category. Eisman $333. Green also outspent Doyle when it came to office overhead. We tallied $99,000 in office expenses for the republican: rent, telephone, combs, supplies, and so forth. Doyle spent only $63,000. Some of that money went to fund shared facilities with other democratic party candidates. Eisman's office total was $1,500. But Doyle is ahead when it comes to paid staff. Doyle is spending nearly $429,000.

Kraus:

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 republicans' reputation is they're better at that than the democrats are.

Hackett:

Mark green's staff totals $266,000.

Coleman:

This is because he had a preexisting staff from his last statewide campaign. A lot of those folks got inherited in, and simply -- 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 advertisements.

Hackett:

Or spending on travel. Green led in that category. Much of the expense went to pay for an R.V. that took him around the state. Green's travel tab was $78,000 to Doyle's nearly $45,000.

Kraus:

Doyle gets a lot of free rides. He can mix business with campaigning, and Green doesn't have that opportunity.

Hackett:

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.

McCabe:

Doyle got a third of his money in the last reporting period from out of state. So he has mined both coasts. He has looked far and wide across the country for campaign money.

Hackett:

Five percent of green's money is from out of state. Two-thirds of Eisman's money came from one donor in California.

Coleman:

With the contribution data you can say we're looking for significant donations by particular groups, and maybe that raises a red flag for some people. But with the spending, if somebody spends X amount of dollars on postage, do we really know that?

Hackett:

Did we say postage? We know how much they spent on that, too. Doyle: $31,000; Green: $78,000; Eisman: $240.

Loew:

You can find more information about the candidates for governor and all of the state's political races by logging on to WisconsinVote.org Once there, you'll find candidate bios, voter registration info, and other election 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 1 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 1 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 30. If at that time the committee feels the DNR has not come up with a conservation strategy that makes the snake less burdensome 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.

JoAnne Garrett:

Schooldays in one of the most unusual schools in Wisconsin.

Man:

Do you want to light some more fire?

People:

Uh-huh. [Laughter]

Garrett:

It looks like an arsonists convention. But the official title of the curriculum is fire on the prairie, prescribed burning in land management.

Woman:

You may want to step into the black if you can.

Garrett:

Most people know this two-day class as burn school.

Jeb Barzin:

No infernos on the first day. Maybe the second day.

Garrett:

Jeb Barzin is the director of field ecology for the International Crane Foundation, one of the school's co-sponsors.

Jeannine Richards:

I love doing fires, yeah.

Garrett:

Jeannine 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 adapting, and it's fundamental to our state.

Barzin:

Well over two-thirds of the ecosystems native to Wisconsin are fire adapted ecosystems, yet most of that area does not have prescribed fire operating on it any longer, and that's causing huge changes.

Richards:

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 sh ruby and turn forested.

Garrett:

Which is why ecologists use prescribed burning as a tool in land management, and why for two days in March of 2006, 24 students with varied backgrounds signed up for burn school at the International Crane Foundation near Baraboo.

Woman:

It's a requirement of my job. I'm a soil conservationist with the natural resources conservation service.

Man:

If you have a thick layer on, you may want to just take it off. It's going to get warm near the fire.

Man:

I'm the landowner, and you want to use fire as a tool, management tool.

Woman:

That's a lot better than yesterday. Good. Thank you.

Woman:

Yesterday we spent in lectures, just sort of talking about what plants are out here, what responds to burning, what doesn't. It's been a great learning experience.

Garrett:

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 saddled up with their water-filled 50-pound pump cans. 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.

Barzin:

Double back out, check your line all the way back to the point of origin, then go fill up with water, and there's a need for a fire break to go around. Give it a little bit of water to help her out. There you go. You've got a much safer line to work with now, 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.

Richards:

There are so many different factors that you need to calculate out.

Barzin:

We'll go over there and work back into the wind.

Richards:

It can be kind of like a puzzle to figure out.

Barzin:

You work with the wind. It's just really hard to control.

Richards:

You have to be thinking critically about what you're doing at all times.

Garrett:

Everything matters, even where you place your feet.

Woman:

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.

Garrett:

It's all part of learning the patterns of fire, patterns that can be predicted, patterns that must be predicted.

Richards:

You certainly can predict. And that's the whole basis for a prescribed fire, is that you have to be able to predict. Or you better have your DNR fire ranger on speed dial.

Barzin:

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 could get hurt.

Richards:

We also do a spot fire training to teach people some suppression techniques for if a fire gets away from them.

Garrett:

It's the nightmare 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 battling against the heat of the blaze.

Barzin:

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.

Garrett:

This is the time when teamwork and training tells.

Barzin:

The better 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.

Garrett:

Well-trained fire teams, that's the goal of burn school.

Woman:

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.

Garrett:

It's also important if these prairies are to survive.

Barzin:

These prairies are just gorgeous in the spring. And 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 just fall in love with them 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.

Loew:

We want to emphasize a controlled burn is not something you should undertake on your own. As you saw in JoAnne's report, it takes a lot of education and training 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, Timm's hill in Price County. Thanks for joining us, and for "In Wisconsin," I'm Patty Loew. See you next time.