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- Welcome to "In Wisconsin" at our new time.
I'm Patty Loew.
This week, a rare sight indeed as a species
that experts didn't think existed in Wisconsin
makes an unexpected arrival.
- They never were in Wisconsin
before that we knew of.
- Plus an investigation into the heroin epidemic
now plaguing Wisconsin.
- I wish I had my son back.
- We'll look into why heroin is Wisconsin's gateway drug.
Also, why is it taking a researcher
from halfway around the world
to save one of Wisconsin's native languages?
- (Speaking Ho-Chunk language)
- Those reports and an eye-catching photo essay
from Parfrey's Glen you won't want to miss
next on "In Wisconsin."
- Major funding for "In Wisconsin" is provided by:
the people of Alliant Energy, who bring safe, reliable
and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes,
neighborhoods and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
Alliant Energy, we're on for you.
And the Animal Dentistry and Oral Surgery Specialists
of Milwaukee and Oshkosh,
a veterinarian team working with pet owners
and family veterinarians throughout Wisconsin,
providing care for oral disease and dental problems
of small companion animals.
With additional funding provided by Bike Wisconsin.
- We begin this week with something
that wasn't expected in Wisconsin.
One of North America's rarest species
has decided to call our state home.
It's so rare you'll find it on the endangered species list.
And now the goal is to give it
the habitat needed to survive.
"In Wisconsin" reporter Liz Koerner gives you
an exclusive look at the efforts underway
to protect this newcomer in Adams County.
- There he is. Right here. Right there.
- This group is on a quest to find an elusive animal
somewhere in the wilds of Adams County.
- You can probably all hear him, right?
That very loud ringing call over there.
- That right there? - Yep.
If he comes in the open,
I'll try to get him in the scope.
- You know, they never were in Wisconsin before
that we knew of.
This is a rare treat.
- They're looking for a tiny songbird
that only recently began nesting in Wisconsin.
- It's very exciting to look through that spotting scope
and, wow, there it is.
- The Kirtland's warbler is one of America's rarest songbirds,
so rare it's on the Federal Endangered Species list.
Because so few people know where to find them,
the Natural Resources Foundation offered a guided tour.
Their only request is that these avid birders
give the birds a break during nesting season.
- It's one of the few warblers on my North American list
that I don't have, so it's a lovely day.
- The first documented nesting of Kirtland's Warbler
in Wisconsin was in Adams County only a few years ago.
Before that, these birds were found in only one state,
our neighbor to the east, Michigan.
- The population hovered very low, around 200 birds
in the '60s and '70s, at which time there was
a concerted effort to implement management measures
to benefit the species.
- Due to these management measures,
the Kirtland's Warbler population has multiplied in Michigan.
Recent counts there have found about 1800 males.
- And the habitats there are pretty saturated,
and so they're expanding outwards and starting to nest
in new areas or what may have been traditional areas
for them prior to European settlement.
- Wildlife managers in Wisconsin are now using a strategy
that worked well in Michigan.
They remove a number of larger birds
called Brown-headed Cowbirds near the warbler's nesting site.
- The Brown-headed Cowbird is a nest parasite.
They always lay their eggs in the nest of other birds.
They tend to hatch sooner and they are larger
and grow faster and they tend to crowd out the other young,
in some cases pushing the other young out of the nest
and quite often the other nestlings die.
- To attract the cowbirds, they use a decoy trap.
- It's called a decoy trap, because in order to catch the species you want
you have to start with the species that you want to trap,
so you put in a few cowbirds
and food and water and it attracts other cowbirds
and they can fly in, but they can't fly out.
- The trapped cowbirds are euthanized,
a practice that wildlife managers say is essential
to the Kirtland's survival.
- The Brown-headed Cowbird is an abundant species
that's very widespread.
The Kirtland's Warbler is very rare and very localized
and we're trying to recover the Kirtland's Warbler
to a population level where it can persist on its own.
- In 2007, the first year Kirtlands nested here,
they only built a total of three nests.
Two of the three were lost to cowbirds.
Each year since then, wildlife managers have trapped
and euthanized between 200 and 300 cowbirds.
This year, the Kirtlands built a total of 16 nests.
Six were lost to cowbirds.
Another six were lost to ground predators.
- It's going to go extinct if we don't do that kind of management.
- The Kirtland's Warbler faces another significant survival challenge.
They only nest under one type of tree, the jack pine.
- This is a jack pine.
This species is typically native
of these kind of large, flat, sandy ecosystems.
- The birds nest on the ground under the protection
of the lowest branches of the jack pine,
but as these trees mature, they shed these bottom branches.
In less than a decade, the Kirtland's Warbler
will have to move on from this site in Adams County.
The land is owned by an investment company
called Plum Creek Timber.
They currently plan to replant only red pines
because they're more profitable,
but the company hasn't ruled out interplanting jack pines.
- We are the largest private landowner in Wisconsin
and the U.P. of Michigan
and we do have wildlife biologists on staff
that are working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
and I'm sure down the road that some specific habitat projects
are not out of the question.
- Many counties in northern Wisconsin
have stands of jack pine.
Some of it is on publicly-owned land.
Joel Trick and Kim Grveles are hoping to convince
property managers there to plant jack pine periodically
so there would always be younger trees
needed by the Kirtland's Warbler.
- And we have a lot of interest on the part of
some county foresters and some state property managers,
but we're a ways yet from having
a formal management plan in place.
- So the race is on to secure future habitat
for this endangered species.
And for those who are fortunate enough to see them
while they're still in Adams County,
it's been a day to remember.
- To see one that's so rare and endangered in Wisconsin
is just really a thrill.
- The most recent census of Kirtland's Warblers
in Adams County turned up 20 males and 11 females
and resulted in between 12 and 18 fledglings.
They've also turned up in Marinette, Bayfield,
Washburn and Douglas counties,
but no nesting activity has been confirmed.
We want to thank Bill Krouse, one of our viewers,
for suggesting this report.
He volunteers as a citizen scientist with the DNR,
adding more eyes and ears to annual bird surveys.
If you'd survey Wisconsin's native cultures,
you'd find many are losing their languages.
The Ho-Chunk are no exception.
Learning any new language is tough,
but doing it without a grammar textbook
makes it next to impossible.
"In Wisconsin" reporter Art Hackett shows you how
a researcher from halfway around the world
could help save this native language in the Wisconsin Dells.
(Littlegeorge speaking Ho-Chunk language)
- Several days a week, Kenneth Littlegeorge
instructs students at Wisconsin Dells High School.
About half a dozen students from Black River Falls
attend by way of a two-way TV hookup.
The subject? The Ho-Chunk language.
- I am a language apprentice.
I worked with a fluent speaker.
- Littlegeorge is still in the process of
fully learning the language from native speakers
who supervise the class.
(Littlegeorge speaking Ho-Chunk language)
- One of them is Carolyn White Eagle,
Littlegeorge's mother.
- I greet you all, this morning.
- (Student speaking Ho-Chunk language)
- What they were saying is that they greeted you
or greeted everyone and then they told
a little bit about themselves, their age,
where they're from, what clan that they are.
- (Student speaking Ho-Chunk language)
- The learning materials include a vocabulary book
and posters showing the months of the year.
- (Student speaking Ho-Chunk language)
- He is the artist for the language program.
He and the other speakers
came up with the first words book, that's called.
- But there is not a book you would find
in a Spanish or French class, a grammar text.
- (Littlegeorge speaking Ho-Chunk language)
- Soon, there will be.
- Is that a long oo or a short oo?
- These students at the University of Wisconsin
in Madison are using a draft version of the text.
- So if I leave off the definite article,
if I'm saying just (speaking Ho-Chunk),
this is grammatically correct.
- This class is part of the evaluation process
necessary to certify the material for use in the public schools.
- So how would I say, "Did you put something on your foot?"
- Irene Hartmann wrote the textbook.
She warns this is one of the easy conjugations.
- (Cecil speaking Ho-Chunk language)
- Native speaker Cecil Garvin and his son Henning demonstrate. Hartmann explains.
- (Cecil speaking Ho-Chunk language) - Did you catch that?
Okay, the word for: to put on any other garment
than something you put on your head.
- (Cecil speaking Ho-Chunk language)
- Did you catch the second and first person, by any chance?
- (Student responds) - First person, okay.
And you can see that the plural is
fairly similar to what you've seen before.
- Ho-Chunk is not Hartmann's native language.
Nor is English, for that matter.
- I was a linguistics student in Germany
and the professor, he had an fellowship in Chicago.
He has been doing some work on Ho-Chunk on and off,
trying to get smaller grants.
Then, he finally applied for a larger grant
with the UW Foundation out of Germany.
- So it is that a Native American language
is among many being preserved by a foundation
created by the people who brought America small cars.
Here is the website maintained by
the Max Planck Institute in the Netherlands.
Here's the page of documentation for Ho-Chunk.
- I got interested in the language and I did a lot of the field work.
So, we're working on a dictionary database,
and a text collection.
I got to work with a lot of different speakers
and I got to know the language fairly well.
I would never claim that I'm fluent, but I do know a lot of words
and I can break down the structure pretty well.
- (Cecil speaks Ho-Chunk language)
- At UW-Madison Hartmann has been working
with the father and son team of Cecil and Henning Garvin.
- Ho-Chunk was spoken in our home, nothing but Ho-Chunk.
So, we learned it as a first language
and that went until we were in the 1st grade.
Then, we had to begin to learn English.
Even through high school,
though, at home we spoke Ho-Chunk.
Of course, they expected us as home to learn English.
- Henning Garvin is a linguistics major at the UW.
- Yeah. I learned it taking classes.
I didn't learn it as a child.
No one in my generation has.
That's the real problem,
is it's not being transmitted to the younger generations.
- Cecil and Henning Garvin are among only
200 to 300 fluent speakers left
within a tribe of 7,000 members.
- At this point, we've got the elder generation that's still speaking.
We got some very young guys.
But then, we've got the parent generation,
but in-between generation who are not speakers.
So to them if you want to teach them the language,
they don't acquire it naturally anymore.
They need tools to learn the language.
So we're trying to give them a tool.
- [Cecil] 50 years from now,
in the event we have no speakers left,
that is the only source that our young people would have to learn from.
I don't feel we'll lose the language.
But, we're nearly there.
- Ready. Go!
- Some of the UW students are Ho-Chunk. Some are not.
One of the exercises involves an adaptation
of the game Pictionary.
- (Students speaking Ho-Chunk language)
- We have a lot of prefixes.
You have infixes that are inserted into the verb.
You have a whole range of suffixes.
You can express a whole sentence in one verb, in Ho-Chunk, if you need to.
- Sometimes you need more than a verb.
- (Classroom discussing in Ho-Chunk language)
- This is television. This is picture.
And, this is moving, so moving pictures,
and this is a box, so box of moving pictures.
- In the Dells High School classroom
where the "box with moving pictures"
offers learning by hearing,
those who speak the language
and want to teach it to others
say the grammar textbook can't arrive soon enough.
- You know, time is not on our side right now,
and that's why they started this apprentice program.
It's only a handful of people trying to save our language.
- (Cecil speaks in Ho-Chunk language)
- According to one Ho-Chunk teacher,
out of the 7,000 member tribe, only about 300 people
can still speak their native language.
Since we first aired this report, Henning Garvin,
who is one of the native speakers we interviewed,
has taken out a job with the tribe's cultural affairs unit.
As a result he has not been able to teach the UW
Ho-Chunk language class for the past two years.
Talk on the street is focusing on a resurgent
drug addiction problem in Wisconsin.
The state justice department describes it as an epidemic.
Heroin is no longer limited to the back alley urban junkie.
It's now spread to small towns and to counties
all across our state.
In Wisconsin 's Frederica Freyberg joins us now with her findings.
- Hi Patty. The number of heroin cases seen by the state crime lab
have jumped nearly 400% in the past five years.
So where is it all coming from?
It's known as Wisconsin's gateway drug.
Here's a look at how the battle is on
against heroin in Janesville.
- If it can save one person's life,
I guess that's my goal. Heroin is overlooked.
People say it can't happen to them.
And, I believe I'm a person who always thought that.
- This Janesville mother does not want to be seen on camera.
She does not want her son's name used.
He was 18 when he fatally overdosed on heroin two years ago.
He had been college-bound.
- How did you find out that's what he was doing?
- The day he died. I didn't know he was using heroin.
I had no clue. I knew he had smoked pot.
I had no clue.
- Authorities call this an alarming trend,
young people jumping from marijuana directly to heroin.
And, the strength and purity of the drug today
make overdoses more likely.
- Our overdose death statistics would be
unfortunately through the roof if it wasn't
for the quality EMS that we have in Wisconsin.
- The next thing I know my dad's breaking down the door,
I'm laying on the floor, blood and stuff
coming out of my nose, fighting for breath.
- Adam says he overdosed, nearly fatally, twice.
He had been a good student and a high school athlete.
- If you're going to spend $20 on a bag of pot
or $20 on a bag of heroin,
because the school is flooded with both.
If you're looking for that bang for your buck,
heroin is going to get that for you.
- Adam is clean and has been for nearly three years.
He says as a teenager pot smoking progressed to pill-taking,
oxycodone pain prescriptions
he found in medicine cabinets.
Soon he said he was snorting heroin.
- The drug no longer has that stigma of being an inner city,
back alley intravenous drug user.
Now, for a $10 or $20 bag of heroin,
you can get a significantly longer high, unfortunately,
and you don't have to inject the heroin anymore. You can just snort it.
- It went from snorting heroin every other day
to every day and then a year later to starting to shoot it.
- Heroin use is up nearly 400%
in the last five years in Wisconsin, coming in by car,
where at any given moment along the interstates,
drug runners could be bringing heroin in
from south of the border, like from Rockford, Illinois,
which along with Chicago, has become a heroin hub in the Midwest.
Police there say the drug comes directly from Mexico.
- I believe it was 2009 in Winnebago County
there were 48 heroin deaths. That's a lot.
- That deadly trend is not isolated.
Its spread runs directly north into Wisconsin
and fans out from there.
- It's really amazing that there's areas in the state
that I wouldn't suspect would have a heroin concern
that are popping up all over the state.
- A state crime lab map of cases by county
shows heroin on the move.
But one county made up of small cities
and large tracts of farmland
is taking a direct hit by virtue of place.
- When you look at the geographical location
of Rock County, it borders Illinois,
within 30 minutes of Rockford.
- Rock County has recently been included
in the federally designated
high-intensity drug trafficking area
along with Dane and Milwaukee counties.
The program provides resources
and coordinates drug control efforts
among local, state and federal law enforcement.
That inclusion is especially meaningful in these economic times.
- I think that considering the limited resources that we have,
that right now, we're all being asked to do more with less.
- But Rock County officials recognize
that they cannot arrest their way out of this problem.
- We try to find ways to help people get better
without incarcerating them and locking them up
because that doesn't seem to work,
just locking people up without treatment.
- Marv Wopat is a county supervisor
and on the human services board in Rock County.
He's also a drug counselor, himself 30 years sober.
He knows Adam from local support group meetings.
- We need to put money where it's going to do the best,
and locking them up isn't where it's at.
- Especially not with the squeeze on government budgets.
In 2006 in Rock County there were calls
to build a new jail to house inmates,
many of them drug abusers whose numbers pushed
the jail to 30% over capacity.
Today, the jail is under capacity
and required only a remodel.
- Good morning.
This is a session of Rock County drug court.
- Because instead, the county started a drug treatment court.
- Any urges or anything at this point?
- This day, six of the participants,
including this woman, were there because of heroin.
- The idea was, let's try drug court
that will keep people out of jail, save money on that end,
save the county the need to build a jail
to house these folks and if it's successful
also provide for opportunities to give treatment
to become drug and alcohol-free and do other things
to take responsibility in their lives.
- You've worked hard to be where you're at
and I'm very proud of what you've done.
- Judge Richard Werner describes the court as a success.
Counting 92 graduates, only seven of those
subsequently charged with crimes.
- I truly believe that this program saved my life.
Going on nine months, completely sober.
The first time since I was probably 12 years old. It's been that long.
- And still, even with the success stories,
law enforcement on the front lines...
- So she basically went there and shot up at the trailer.
- ...are scared by the continuing flow of heroin
into their communities.
- I'm scared because the drug ravages the youth
and it started off with kids in high school
experimenting with different drugs
and once they get hooked on this stuff,
it's a lifetime addiction. - Or worse.
- I wish I had my son back.
I think some days if I could do it all over,
what I could have done differently,
I don't know. I don't know.
But I wish he was here, every day.
- In four Fox Valley counties, drug agents tell us that
so far in 2010 that area has seized
at least ten times more heroin than in all of last year.
Now, statewide the Division of Criminal Investigation
reports that 275 heroin cases last year
and this year cases are on pace to see a projected 10% increase.
- And I understand that there are some misconceptions
about who's using heroin?
- Well, it's being reported that,
whereas it was usually mostly men,
now more and more women are using heroin.
And of course that's in addition
to the young population of heroin users.
Now, next week our investigation continues
as we find out how legal drugs used illegally
are fueling this heroin demand.
- Really interesting report. Thanks, Fred.
New information this week
about the PCB clean-up in the Fox River near Green Bay.
The Wisconsin DNR has filed a lawsuit seeking
a final price tag for the removal of cancer-causing PCBs.
The original estimate of $500 million
could reach $1 billion.
The DNR wants those responsible to agree
to pay the entire tab.
PCBs were an ingredient some mills used to coat paper.
The clean-up process has at least six more years.
With less than two weeks before Wisconsin
elects a new governor, both candidates agree on one thing:
if elected, Scott Walker and Tom Barrett support
changing the state's film incentives law
to attract more projects.
The credits were in place when the Hollywood film
"Public Enemies" starring Johnny Depp came to Wisconsin.
As we first reported, Governor Doyle drastically
scaled back the film credits a year ago.
Now, here's a look at some of the other reports
we're working on for the next edition of "In Wisconsin."
- I'm "In Wisconsin" reporter Liz Koerner.
The bright and brassy sound of trumpeter Ansel Norris
easily carry in a crowded hall.
His trumpet may also carry him to the top
in a national young arts competition.
- We have what we think may be a hodag sighting.
- Oh, my, oh my goodness. That's wonderful.
- This is an actual photograph.
- I'm Art Hackett in Rhinelander
and I've got the real story behind the hodag.
- Hodag or not a hodag?
- That's a hodag. Definitely.
- And Michael Perry returns
with his unusual insights into raising chickens.
- That's what I called a twitter message.
- He'll show you how his chickens earn the right to
live the high life on his farm in Eau Claire County.
- Welcome to the rolling poultry palace.
- Join us for those "In Wisconsin" reports
next Thursday at our new time, 7:30,
right here on Wisconsin Public Television.
Finally this week, a viewer-inspired
to close our show.
Alan Craig is a Madison photographer
who captured the solitude of the picturesque
Parfrey's Glen in Sauk County.
We leave you with a look at some of his amazing pictures.
Have a great week in Wisconsin.
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- Major funding for "In Wisconsin" is provided by:
the people of Alliant Energy, who bring safe, reliable
and environmentally friendly energy to keep homes,
neighborhoods and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
Alliant Energy., we're on for you.
And the Animal Dentistry and Oral Surgery Specialists
of Milwaukee and Oshkosh,
a veterinarian team working with pet owners
and family veterinarians throughout Wisconsin,
providing care for oral disease and dental problems
of small companion animals.
With additional funding provided by Bike Wisconsin.