[Music]
Hello and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Lowe.
This week could the biggest threat to our state's health
population be humans, humans who are trying to
help these animals?
Find out how the waste from
this combine might have a sweet, sweet payoff for you
at the gas pump and take a wintry walk in search
of a bitter sweet history with our state's poet laureate.
All that plus more on the Jensen Shulls trial
and a visit to the largest natural tall grass prairie in
Wisconsin. Major funding for In
Wisconsin is provided by the people of a lion's energy
who bring 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.
The University of Wisconsin Comprehensive
Cancer Center providing cancer research, education and
treatment. UW Comprehensive Cancer Center Comprehensive
has designated by the National Cancer Institute
Information available on the web.
Wisconsin's Technical Colleges providing
local education for the crucial occupations
essential to our communities.
Wisconsin's Technical Colleges Communities First.
What if you discovered you were hurting the very thing
you were trying to help?
Well, in our first report this week, Wisconsin
Department of Natural Resources officials say that may be
the case.
We're revisiting a story producer Liz
Kerner first brought us two years ago.
The reintroduction of elk to our state.
Now, wildlife officials say the herd is thriving
but also facing real challenges that may have
been created by humans.
Driving along the highway near Clam Lake, you might
glimpse what appears to be a deer in the distance.
But while seeing deer is quite
common in the north, the sight of this animal is
still somewhat rare.
Elk are at home again in the
Shawamagan, Nikolay National Forest, a home lost to
loggers and hunters before the turn of the 19th century.
25 elk were set free here in 1995.
Today the Department of Natural Resources
estimates there are just over 100 animals in the herd.
It's Lane Stowell's job to keep an eye on these
large but elusive animals.
It's the best job in the Department of Natural Resources.
Stowell, along with other DNR staff, keep track of
the elk by trapping them in winter and outfitting
them with radio collars.
He's in a cow 56 but she's in a different direction.
She's in that direction.
He tunes in their movements on a receiver, tallying
the elk calves born each year and the number of elk
that die.
Stowell says that the herd has increased at a
healthy rate an average of 15% a year.
That is until last year.
From mid-May of 2003 to mid-May of 2004 we had four
mortalities. From the same period from 2004 to 2005 we
saw 14.
That's a 350% increase.
A 350% increase in elk deaths in one year, a rate
that if it continues would decimate the herd.
So why are the elk dying?
A few elk crashed through river ice and drowned.
In a dramatic rescue last year Stowell got a rope
around one animal in time.
Because the animal had struggled for half an hour, 45 minutes
I was able to get up to the animal, slip the goose over
its head and then with the help of the three other people
who were able to quickly pull the elk out of the water.
One elk was saved but four others have drowned.
As a scientist Stowell is supposed to remain
emotionally detached.
Something he admits is sometimes difficult.
You know some of these elk calves I found just hours
after they were born and so I guess I'd have to honestly
say that it's disappointing and frustrating when
you see animals die and then also in cases where
you see animals die that are human-related and avoidable.
Stowell's frustration is fueled by his belief that these deaths
came about because of handouts from humans.
He believes that people who feed the animals in
their backyards are drawing them into danger.
These elk are crossing a river ice
and they become more at risk of falling through
that ice of drowning.
State law limits what's called
recreational feeding.
You can recreational feed small animals, reviewing you can
recreational feed birds but it is illegal to feed elk or bear
in Wisconsin.
Attracting animals to backyard
feeders might have another unintended negative impact.
The spread of parasites in the herd.
Shelley Dubay is a wildlife biologist
at UW Stevens Point.
Anytime we have a potential disease situation concentrating
animals is not a very good idea because the transmission rates
will increase among those individuals at the feeding site.
Dubay is working with Tim Jeanette, another wildlife
biologist at UW Stevens Point.
They're just starting a two-year study to find out how
problematic the parasites are.
What we would like to do is to figure out what the
incidence is in the herd, you know what percent of
these individuals are infected with those.
And so the way we do that is
look for eggs or larvae in the feces.
According to Jeanette, parasites
don't often kill elk but could make the animals more
vulnerable to predators like bears and wolves.
Menendial worms are one of the parasites plaguing the
elk. I have a menendial worm infection can
cause some impairment of nervous system function
in animals may not be able to obtain the energy
they need and the protein that they need.
Researchers will also investigate
the impact of another parasite called liver fluke.
There are other things that may happen particularly
with heavy liver fluke infections as we may start
to see some impacts on reproductive rate or
even just the thriftiness of the calves that are
born. The parasite study will provide answers down
the road but another deadly threat hits the elk
at highway speed.
Collisions with cars and trucks
have claimed the lives of more elk than any other
killer. The danger zone is highway 77 which runs
right through the elk's territory to limit their
loss the DNR posted elk crossing signs but one sign
has already been stolen.
Somebody thought that elk crossing sign would look
better on their wall at home or something.
Certainly that's very dangerous for certainly
for the elk but also for motorists on that highway.
Even though some 14 elk have been killed on
the highway since 1995 no one has reported
personal injuries.
In fact according to Stowe only
four drivers have even stopped to report their
accident. He says this fact added to evidence at the scenes
indicates that large trucks hit the elk and just drove away.
Stowe says this highway death toll also points to people who
feed elk in their backyards.
People live next to the highways.
You draw elk near the highways and
you have greater risk of vehicle collisions with
elk. Recently Stowe and his staff went door to
door asking people to stop backyard feeding.
How are you doing?
Ron DeVal lives along the highway in Clam Lake.
He's been putting out food in his backyard
for years because he loves to see animals especially elk.
It's not a good shot.
DeVal spread Ophelpha on the
ground for the elk in the past.
This year because Stowe stopped by he reluctantly
agreed to stop.
This year I see the red pine needles and they've
got them stripped already and they're eating a
lot of balsam needles and when they was getting
a little treat out here they weren't doing that
and I see them in the yard here and they don't
look as good a shape as they did last year.
Elk learned to cross the highway
for food over the years.
Stowe admits that past DNR actions added to the problem.
Their trapping location, baited with sweet smelling
food, was too close to the highway.
He's convinced that by closing that
trap and getting people like DeVal to stop backyard
feeding fewer elk will be killed.
DeVal doesn't agree.
I'm not feeding.
I don't know about the rest of the neighborhood
but as far as the elk crossing the road that
hasn't ceased.
The DNR hopes that by simply notifying
homeowners that feeding elk is against the law
they can convince them to comply.
But in cases where feeding continues the DNR
says that district attorneys in the affected counties
are willing to prosecute.
Stowe says he's optimistic that local residents like DeVal care
enough about the elk to follow the rules.
There are some individuals in any
instance where they don't follow the rules and there
are still a few in the clam lake area but the vast majority of
people in the clam lake area are helping us in this issue.
And with the support of the clam lake community Stowe
will continue to advocate for the elk.
That's 286 degrees.
Doing what he considers the best job in the DNR.
[Music]
The DNR is working with the National Forest Service
to explore limiting ATV use on Memorial Day weekend
in the clam lake area.
That holiday weekend is the peak of the elk calving
season. ATV use in the area has gone up dramatically
in recent years as has the number of tourists
trying to get a glimpse of the elk.
[Music]
Last week we reported on the background of the
legislative caucus scandal.
We also brought you details from the beginning of
the trial of Representative Scott Jensen and former Assembly
Republican caucus staff member Sherry Schultz.
There are two of the people charged with felonies as a
result of the caucus investigation.
Here's reporter Art Hackett with more.
Republican State Representative Scott Jensen is on
trial on felony charges of misconduct in public
office. Former Assembly Republican caucus staffer
Sherry Schultz is a co-defendant.
Both are accused of doing or authorizing
campaign work using state resources.
Earlier this week, Jures heard from several
of Jensen staff members.
One of them was Lee Heimbaw Seryl.
Seryl testified Jensen would bring campaign
checks to his capital office.
Seryl testified she kept records of
the checks for Jensen's campaign organization
taxpayers for Jensen.
Seryl testified that even though she was paid by
the state, she eventually was moved to an office at
Republican Party headquarters.
What percentage of your time was working?
Was spent working on taxpayers for Jensen?
100 percent.
No work in the Jensen office
whatsoever. Correct.
No one gave you any state work.
No. In other testimony, lobbyist Patrick S.
he testified he and other lobbyists met with Jensen
to discuss fundraising goals during the 1999
budget session.
Sherry Schultz would follow up to
collect the money.
She would have direct information
as to where the checks would be coming from
and who they would be going to.
Those checks being checks you to previously
discussed with Mr.
Jensen. Correct.
There was also a preview of Jensen's
defense when a witness for the defense was called
early due to a scheduling conflict.
Chad Taylor, who was Jensen's deputy legal counsel,
testified there was a policy against doing
campaign work in Jensen's office.
On one occasion, Taylor said he told
another staff member who was copying campaign
checks in Jensen's office, doing so seemed unseemly.
Taylor said he didn't consider it a violation of
state law or ethics rules.
When was that you recall?
Art Hackett will have another report on the
Jensen Schultz trial on the program here and now.
Here and now airs Fridays at
7 and Sundays at 10 30 a.m.
Beyond following the news of the week, Art has
also been looking into issues relating to ethanol.
In fact, Art's been reporting on
ethanol since his days as a young radio reporter
30 years ago in Nebraska.
At that time, fermented corn was being used to create
a fuel called gas hall.
Flash forward to the present and Art has a report for us on some
research that could sweeten the pot for ethanol producers
and anyone else who gases up at the pump.
The ethanol fuel industry and corn growers are joined at the
hip. The letters on the side of this ethanol tank in the
Columbia County Community of Freesland stand for United
Wisconsin green producers.
Bill Herman of Columbus raises over a thousand acres of corn.
He's also vice president of the corporation which owns the
ethanol plant.
It's been working out real good
both for me as a investor, I think, and also as
a corn farmer for delivering corn up there.
The Freesland ethanol plant buys 15 million bushels of corn
a year.
Some of it arrives in tractor-drawn wagons, combined
minutes before in a field a mile and a half away.
Right now the month of November, we've got probably
80 percent of our corn coming from within 10 to
15 miles.
Well, the ethanol plant buys from both
farmers and elevators and I think everybody in
the area farmers and elevators alike are thankful
that that plant is there.
We're going to use 15 million bushels of corn.
That means 15 million bushels of corn would have
to be hauled out of state.
So that's a big savings.
Most people are realizing at least a 10 cent
increase in their prices.
A bush, per bush.
Four ethanol plants are already operating in
Wisconsin. Two more are under construction.
A seventh plant at a former
multi-operation in Jefferson is in the planning stages.
It would be three times as big as any of the
existing facilities.
Demand for ethanol from these
plants would increase if a bill pending before the
state legislates your passes.
The bill would mandate all gasoline sold in
the state be an ethanol blend.
The Department of Natural Resources estimates
that currently only about a third of the gas
sold contains ethanol.
Even though most ethanol produced today comes from
corn it doesn't have to.
In fact, while reporting the
story I learned something about that ethanol I saw
being pumped into cars in the braska 30 years
ago that I never knew.
It didn't come from corn it
came from paper mill sludge.
In fact, if you talk to our researcher here in
Madison, he'll tell you the future of ethanol is not in the
fields. It's in the forests.
Yeah, because if this runs too long without having
any nutrient in it the cells get sick.
They'll just die.
They'll starve.
Dr. Tom Jeffries is talking about yeast cells.
The yeast feed on glucose,
the same type of sugar found in cornstarch.
At ethanol plants yeast turns glucose from
cornstarch into ethanol.
But the yeast in Jeffries lab are not ordinary yeast
cells. They have names.
She 21 and she 38.
But what we've done is we've
knocked out one of the respiratory enzymes and you
see how they are genetically engineered mutant yeast designed
to crank out more ethanol.
What that does is that by knocking out the capacity
for respiration we force these cells to become far
more fermentative.
They have to grow in order to grow they
have to use fermentation.
And the mutant yeast are special in another way.
They don't just ferment glucose.
When they ferment xylos they ferment xylos to ethanol.
Xylos is a different kind of sugar.
It's not only found in the corn
kernels that are fed into ethanol plants.
Xylos is also found in corn stover.
The stalks, husks and cobs spewed out the back
of the combine and left to compost on the ground.
And xylos is the second most
abundant carbohydrate in nature.
It's found just about everywhere you look.
You go for a walk in the woods and xylos makes
up about 20 or 25 percent of everything you see.
And if you look out on a corn field, xylos makes
up about 25 percent of all the corn stover.
And so what we're trying to do
is we're trying to develop technologies that will enable us
to convert the xylos that's in corn stover and wheat straws and
soy residues and in hardwood residues into
ethanol. Tom Jeffries is looking for uses for waste
from the forest products industry.
After all he works for the U.S.
Department of Agriculture's Forest Products Laboratory.
It could be trees too small to turn into lumber
or paper mill sludge.
The brown broth in this beaker is from the wastewater
of a fiberboard plant.
Jeffries is fermenting wood residues currently going unused
to see if they can be sources of ethanol for your fuel tank.
In many parts of this country we
have such abundant wood residues that we don't know what
to do with them.
This is a big problem.
This is one of the reasons this
research is being conducted here at the Forest Products Lab is
because every year, every summer our country is ravaged with
forest fires because of overstock stands because
of small diameter timber that in fact is so abundant
that there is not enough water to sustain its growth.
And so what we would like to be
able to do is to use some of those small diameter
trees trees that are currently overstocked in
regions where it is very arid and use those for
renewable fuels.
And our technology will contribute
to that.
Well today's ethanol economy can
function on corn grains.
The future may be an ethanol from other sources.
The ethanol industry is ramping up the
marketing of an almost pure ethanol fuel E85.
85% ethanol, only 15% gasoline.
Jeffries says its production will bump up against
the supply of corn.
Can we run the United States on E85 only using no way?
No, the demand is far too great.
Jeffries and his colleagues recently licensed
the use of the mutant easts to accompany with
two ethanol plants in Iowa.
Within three years they could be making ethanol
not just with corn kernels but cornstover as well.
Eventually they want to use this organism or
another organism that we are working on now
to produce ethanol commercially from cornstover.
Assuming corn farmers want to part with the
residue, Bill Herman in Columbia County says he
wouldn't be interested.
Much of our land is a clay land that's
a low and organic matter.
So the cornstox you see out here add to
the organic matter of the soil.
So I would not be interested in selling cornstox unless they
were off of some really low, higher organic land.
Else we'd be depleting our soil and have to buy
commercial fertilizer to increase the nutrients
in the soil.
Farmers elsewhere with better soils might feel
differently and there's always all of that wood waste.
It's abundant every every year.
We make many many many times more biomass
than we use in all your entire energy economy.
But we can't begin to tap into that for fuels
until we solve the problem of Zylos fermentation
because it's so abundant we can't afford to throw it
away. We have to use it.
The legislative bill that Art mentioned is still
pending if it passes at least 10% ethanol would be
included in all regular grade gasoline sold in Wisconsin.
We head now to the Green Bay area in search of some
history and some poetry.
Producer Joanne Garrett created a series called Poems About
Places where some of our states poets collaborated with some
of our videographers.
Together they fashioned visual poems.
In this chapter, Poet Laureate Denise Sweet paired with
videographer Everett Sotenga and spent the day searching
for red banks.
The place where John Nicolay is
believed to have first reached the shores of
Wisconsin. Beauty at its best is undisturbed in winter.
The white wings of ice and snow wrap around this
forest without so much as a whisper.
This dry oak savanna fills and fills
without warning, without witness and then one day
we're buried in our own mock amazement.
Where did all this snow come from?
As though drifts of snow and slates of ice would
not be here had we paid attention, had we not slept
through the howl of storm or let go of the rope
that tethers us to autumn.
I wander the wooded corridor on the way to red banks,
surrounded by silver maple, poppled and birch, slender
red cedar stemming skyward.
I'm left to plod and stammer through drifts of snow,
no tracks for me to follow or posted map with arrows
and stars to mark the spot on which I stand.
You are here.
The sky is all I recognize.
The star stories and the legends of naked eye
astronomers stir and sway within the wind as I whisper my real
name and reach through to the Anishinaabe at a socon.
In my third season of life
I have finally learned to be still.
I have finally learned to wait.
Here the people of the thunders
gathered around the stranger on the shore of this
inland sea.
They listened to the one who spoke
with eloquence and grand gesture, his splendid robe
or nade with feather stitching, folds of satin
and tiny beads.
The one who could throw lightning with
his hands and split open the sky with a crashing
report no one could remember ever hearing before.
A red tail hawk has begun to follow my curious
wandering. I tighten my shawl and wrap my thin coat
closer to me as I leave.
Beyond this stretch of forest is a highway and
the distressing sound of 18 wheelers and SUVs
sailing through this moment towards an urgent other
place. Some may be unaware of the slow searing stare
of the hawk or have not witnessed the mintsing
steps of a white tail deer before she leaves the
wooded grove before she races frantically back and
forth and then across the highway into an open field or
another stand of trees.
But we can imagine what moves, moves,
what moves within can bring us back to the remembered
earth, back to the shores of where we began
together. A star story sweeping through the sky
pours over us each dawn hoping to be remembered,
hoping to be told to the children of the seventh
fire. The story of the heart of the earth
shoddling like thunder beneath our feet with a pulse
who recognize as our own.
Artistic reflection on a winter day.
April is National Poetry Month will bring you another
chapter in our poems about Place the Series then featuring
Wisconsin Poet John Laman.
And that's our program for this week.
You won't find us on the air during the next few weeks.
We'll be taking a break while Wisconsin Public
Television features some special programming.
We'll be back with another new episode in three weeks
on Thursday, March 23rd.
Until then, enjoy this video postcard from Iowa
County of a winter day at a Voka Prairie State
Natural Area.
For in Wisconsin, I'm Patty Lo.
Thanks for joining us.
[Music]
Major funding for in Wisconsin is provided by the people of a
Liant Energy who brings safe, reliable and environmentally
friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods and life
in Wisconsin running smoothly.
A Liant Energy offering energy-saving ideas
on the web.
The University of Wisconsin Comprehensive
Cancer Center providing cancer research,
education and treatment.
UW Comprehensive Cancer Center comprehensive
has designated by the National Cancer Institute
information available on the web.
Wisconsin's Technical Colleges
providing the people of Wisconsin with the
knowledge and skills they'll need for the economy
of tomorrow.
Wisconsin's Technical Colleges.
Communities first.
[Pause]