Wild_Places_Transcript (2002)

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- Announcer: "Wild Places" is supported in part by a grant from Friends of WHA-TV, viewers supporting Wisconsin Public Television and inviting you to join them.
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- Narrator: They are rare places, pure places. They are our wild places.
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We have nearly 400 places like these, all part of our state's Natural Areas Program.
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Join us as we explore our wild places.
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There are nearly 400 of these special places. Number 285 is within the Dells of the Wisconsin River, a place of water and rock millions of years in the making, carved an inch at a time over the centuries. It is a sanctuary for fauna and flora.

- Tom Meyer: This little plant's on our rare species list. It's called 'arctic primrose', sometimes called 'bird's eye primrose.'

- Narrator: A rare plant. A plant best approached by water. Tom Meyer, of the state's Natural Areas Program, extols the arctic primrose, a rare beauty in this rare place. This wild place.

- It's got a grip, friends.
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- Wild places, when nature comes first. This is just one of some 400 places that are part of this innovative trailblazing model housed within Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resources. There are state natural areas in nearly every county in the state. They range from the modest-- a small woods, foothills of the Baraboo Hills-- to the mighty-- a native prairie called Avoca. The largest left standing east of the Mississippi River. They hold stunning vistas. They hold small delights. Take a look. Take a look at Baxter's Hollow. Chiwaukee Prairie.
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Beulah Bog.
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Frog Lake and Pines, different in every season. Saved forever.
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Cliff Germain, the program's first director.

- Natural areas are tracks of land or water in a natural or a near natural state to be set aside, preserved to protect the plant and animal communities and to preserve them for research, educational use, and just simply for future generations.

- Narrator: For research, education, for future generations.

- Is he fuzzy?

- Child: Yeah.

- He's fuzzy.

- Bye, moth.

- Bye, moth.
[child laughs]

- Narrator: This farsighted program began here in 1952 with the designation of Parfrey's Glen in Sauk County as the first state natural area. It began at the urging of Wisconsin's Aldo Leopold.

- Cliff Germain: Aldo Leopold was on the Wisconsin Conservation Commission Board at that time and he convinced the commission that they should spend some money, not just on parks and wildlife areas, but also purchase some natural areas. And he had a token amount, I think $35,000 was set up so that they could buy Parfrey's Glen as the first area.
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- Narrator: Parfrey's was the first. The first of the wilderness places. The first of the wild places. Over time, other natural areas were designated on state land.
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But it wasn't until 1965 that the program first received two essential items: money for support and money for a staff, a staff of one that is, then staff and staff director, Cliff Germain.

- I recall that I had one assistant, a student, and I had a canoe and a station wagon and a pair of binoculars and that was about my equipment.
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- Narrator: One man, many acres. This is what Germain and the program set in motion; nearly 400 natural areas, over 150,000 acres saved. Places like Whitefish Dunes.
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Bear caves.
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Creek sand prairie.
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Some natural areas are on state lands, like Kohler-Andrae State Park. Some, like the Mink River Estuary, are owned by nonprofit groups like the Nature Conservancy and jointly managed.
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Some, like Battle Bluff, were purchased outright. All are protected forever. The program provided a model, an innovative model that's been imitated by nearly every other state, a model that changed the mindset with this land mission, a mission different than that of state forests, wildlife refuges, and state parks. A mission best described as, "Leave it alone."

- In other words, don't put any pheasants on these areas. Don't put food patches. Stop trying to create wildlife habitat, but try to protect the entire community of plants and animals and mostly leave it alone. That was the best way to do it is just don't do anything. Just let nature do the work. You're managing to try to keep that area in as near a natural state, as near as it was before white settlement, Many times you can drive by a state natural area, and if it doesn't have a sign, you may not realize you're driving by one. But if you get into the area and start walking in it, I think you can recognize that there's not much human disturbance.

- Narrator: Wild places. Places like Pewits Nest.
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Tom Meyer of the state's Natural Areas Program.

- Tom: Pewits Nest is a small sandstone gorge carved by a skillet creek, which flows over a series of little benches. It has a cool microclimate, cool and moist. It harbors a unique geological feature in that sandstone gorge.

- Narrator: Nature has been left to do its work. The seasons shape the landscape.
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State natural areas can be stunning, but they were saved for reasons other than their beauty. They're kind of like seed banks. A sort of landscape bank, a collection of different kinds of natural communities. Different plants and animals from conifers to cacti. Different natural communities that make up the mosaic of the crazy quilt called Wisconsin. For we are amazingly rich in variety. Randy Hoffman of the state's Natural Areas Program.

- Randy Hoffman: Wisconsin is uniquely placed because we have the northern forest, the coniferous forest coming in from the north. From the east, we have the deciduous forest coming in from the eastern part of North America. And then from the west, we have the prairies and all the plants and animals that are associated with that. So that real combination of these major, major biomes coming together in one spot really helps create a lot of diversity for Wisconsin.

- Narrator: Wisconsin has over 60 distinctly different natural communities.
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Places like the pine barrens. 100, 200 years ago, pine barrens like these were part of the north. Now only small pockets remain of this particular landscape, a landscape shaped by peculiarity, it requires fire.
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- It's kind of evocative of the west. It's kind of this rolling sandscape with scattered trees out there.

- Narrator: The Solon Springs Sharptail Barrens. State natural area 65 on a rainy day in fall.
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Seasons will pass and this place will stay, held forever as part of the state's Natural Areas Program. 50 years ago, we began this dazzling collection. That's 50 years and counting.
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Wild places. They are places that are sometimes thick with color, places that hold amazing plants, places that sometimes sing with flowers. They sing with flowers, and some are very rare. The dwarf lake iris in The Ridges Sanctuary in Door County. The northern monkshood clings to the walls of Parfrey's Glen. A tiny orchid on the floor of Devil's Lake Oak Forest. Over 90% of Wisconsin's rare plants can be found in the state's natural areas. Often, these plants require these places.

- What I wanna know is how he chooses. Why not just go to the next one that's closest? He marks every flower on the--

- Woman: Yeah, that's what it looks like.

- There are no other places on the planet where this thing grows. It's called Fassett's Locoweed. This plant is on the federal list of threatened species and it's also on our state's endangered species list.

- Wisconsin is it for Fassett's Locoweed, and this state natural area in Waushara County is the motherload.

- This is it. There are probably maybe a hundred thousand plants total, but the bulk of them are-- We're standing pretty much in the middle of the bulk of them.

- Narrator: The local weed is here in part because this lake is here. It's a rare tunnel channel lake formed at the bottom of a glacier. No inlets, no outlets. When it rains, water levels can soar 10 feet or more, washing over this area. It floods; you can see the telltale signs. It floods, which Locoweed loves. This plant needs two things to thrive: a lot of sun and no competition.

- And when the lake levels go back down with drought, the plants sprout up again. The first thing that comes up is Fassett's Locoweed, all the other plants in the meantime have been killed.

- Narrator: All that Fassett's Locoweed, which has very long life seeds adapted to the life cycle of a tunnel channel lake. This plant needs this place.
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And these birds need this place: Audubon Goose Pond in Columbia County.

- Tom: This is what's known as a prairie pothole, kind of shallow water, maybe seasonal. Sometimes they'll dry up in the summertime. So during the spring and fall, it's a great place to go to see swans and thousands of geese just packed into that small area. But in pre-resettlement times, we had lots of these little prairie potholes, places where the glacier had kind of scoured out a little area that filled with water and was surrounded by prairie. And this is a place where mostly water birds would come.
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- Narrator: Natural areas are a place of sanctuary. They are also a place of study. In fact, they used to be called state scientific areas. Thousands of scientists and researchers have used these lands as their lab.
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- Not very well. I get it better off to the left. The receiver is temperature sensitive, so the pulse rate tells me what the temperature is.

- Narrator: Rich Sajack is among them. His beat is a mid-state natural areas in the bluffs of the Mississippi River in a multi-year research project sponsored by the Milwaukee Zoo, the Zoological Society of Milwaukee, and the DNR on a very threatened animal, the timber rattlesnake.

- Okay, what we have here is a female timber rattlesnake. We call her "number seven." She's had a transmitter in her since 1999, a year that she gave birth. She gave birth to seven babies, and since then she's been out in the summers hunting and she'll just simply coil up and lay in ambush. And if it takes-

- Sajack, who has studied snakes all over the world, is after basic research on this Wisconsin native.

- Sajack: Oh, don't go in the hole.

- Narrator: The state natural areas are essential to his study.

- To do any kind of long term ecological study, one of the primary things you need is to know that your area will be there, that you're not going to come out here in the spring and find a road and markers up because somebody has bought it and is subdividing it for lots. You have to have someplace where you can learn things that you need to learn.

- Narrator: These bluffs once held hundreds of timbers.

- I've asked a number of the old time snake hunters if you couldn't take your grandson out and show him a timber rattlesnake sitting up on the bluff on a May morning. I said, "Would that be a good thing?" I mean, it's part of our heritage. It's part of our wildlife.

- Narrator: Sajack calls them the patriarch of the bluffs for they may slither through these woods for up to 30 years. They are an integral part of this place. Integral, but not always loved. Their PR is lousy, and Sajack feels it's a bad rap.

- They are, in my experience, very laid back animals. I have in the course of my study, inadvertently stepped over them. I have stepped next to them. I have stepped on them and I've never had one try to bite until I have tried to restrain it. She also has the tongue that she flicks out, which is a sensory organ. It's sort of halfway between smell and taste that lets her know what's going on around her. So, if you ever see a snake and it flicks its tongue, it's not actually threatening you, it's just trying to find out what's going on around.

- Narrator: What's going on? The question is asked by both species.

- It's, to me, the biggest mystery of the area is how they navigate. I mean, their chin is right down on the ground, so I don't know what they could use for landmarks. People talk about them using scent trails and things, but who's laying the scent trail and what kind of scent trail? So I personally think that as long lived as they are, that they probably have just over the years learned the woods the way we do. But all of that stuff is just a mystery.

- Narrator: Mysteries abound here. These special places, sanctuary nearly 75% of Wisconsin's endangered or threatened animals are protected within the state's natural areas. Thousands of others call them home.
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These are rare places. These are old places.

- Randy: The is a hemlock hardwood forest here in Iron County.

- Narrator: Randy Hoffman of the state's Natural Areas Program.

- What's really amazing about a place like this is these hemlock trees that are part of this system can live to be five, six, seven hundred years old, an individual tree. Most of them will die much younger, but even after that tree dies, falls over, it starts lying on the ground, it takes 100 to 120 years for that tree to totally decompose. It can turn back into the soils that enrich the area again.

- This is a nurse log, or a nursery log. We call it that because it has just the right habitat for different tree species to get started. Little seedlings, these are yellow birch trees.

- Randy: There's whole groups of insects and fungi and other molds that are part of that decaying wood ecosystem that need that stuff on the ground to survive.

- Narrator: These plants and animals need this place.

- It's a decomposing hemlock.

- Narrator: In a logged forest, these fallen trees might be salvaged. Here, they stay fulfilling another function.

- The whole tree here is basically a community. So these lichens are part of it. The mosses here are part of it, flowering plants, and then whole communities of insects that live in there. This is a long life community, could be a hundred years old right here.
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When the first settlers, the missionaries first came to Wisconsin, there was millions of acres that was very similar to the land behind us. There's maybe 8,000 or 10,000 acres of this remaining.

- Narrator: What remains are wild places, and the living and dying, the processes, that are part of these places.
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- We need more than just food and shelter to really be humans, to provide some essence to life.

- Oh, there are places that lift your spirit. There is a peacefulness that comes over me when I come into a place like this.
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- Narrator: The dells of the Eau Claire River in Marathon County on a winter day in February. Full of motion, light, and change as water, ice, and time work to shape this place.
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Water and time work the landscape. Over 100 miles to the south in Adams County, another place carved by water, by the glacier thousands of years ago.

- Fantastic place.

- I love this place. You look that way, you can't see anything but natural land. I can't see a road. I can't see a city. I don't see a cell tower. I don't see a house. There aren't too many places that you can do that. That's what makes this place wild and special. I like it.

- Narrator: It's one of the largest State Natural Areas, Quincy Bluff and Wetlands.

- But what's special about this place is it's big. Quincy Bluff and Wetlands Natural Area spans about four miles. The project boundary includes almost 10,000 acres of land. Well, I'll tell you a story. The majority of those wetlands out there were this close to being a cranberry farm. And the Nature Conservancy worked very closely with the owner of the property to buy it. And I think negotiations went on for at least a couple of years before we finally, we finally tipped the scale, but we could be looking over developed cranberry beds with a large flowage 'cause you need all that water to supply the cranberry beds and this place would not be here. It would not be a natural area. We were that close to losing it.
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Land, especially in central Wisconsin, is being chopped up into little 40-acre blocks. People are using it for hunting, for second home development. Yeah, I think we dodged a big bullet on this one.

- Narrator: It took years of negotiating and money to save this place, years of hard work and persistence. It takes a lot of hard work to save wild places.

- You gotta come in and just start hand pulling this stuff and hanging it up in a tree, and if it's too close to seed, then you have to hand pull and put it in a bag yet.

- Narrator: A crew spends a day yanking out garlic mustard, an invasive species, by hand.

- What did I say? The future will be somebody will be making millions of dollars on garlic mustard, putting it in on chicken or...

- Man: It's pretty widespread.

- Woman: It's outta here.

- We hope it's outta here. We'll keep working on it. And a lot of people are out in full force in the spring trying to control it. And we have our little crew here for the natural area.
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- Narrator: Hard work. It's taken 20 years to retrieve this prairie. The Spring Green Preserve, acre by acre, year after year, to get to this.
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- Yeah, we used to have two million acres of prairie in Wisconsin. We don't have that landscape. We can't go out and see a prairie changing color anymore except on these small net State Natural Area parcels. It's not there in large blocks, so if we ever want it again, we're gonna have to recreate it.
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- Narrator: And to recreate a prairie is a long, exhausting, tedious process.
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A process that requires hundreds of hours and hundreds of volunteers, volunteers who seem to have found their heart giving up time to save this prairie.

- The Nature Conservancy owns this property. It's called the Spring Green Preserve State Natural Area. There's about 900 acres here. So, the goal here is to cut off the red cedar trees, which weren't part of this original landscape. And a lot of people don't understand that sometimes cutting a tree is a good thing to do. And this is one of those times. Red cedar came in here when we stopped having wildfire, and when the Native Americans stopped burning these areas and when the settlers stopped the prairie fires from coming, red cedar got a hold. Over the years with a lack of fire, those red cedars started seeding down into the prairie area. They essentially shade out all of the native prairie plant species growing underneath them.
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So, this is really just a big preparation for the next part, which is a prairie fire.
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- Narrator: On a day in spring, they burn the prairie. This landscape has been without fire for over 50 years. Till now. Prairie plants can withstand, even thrive on fire; others cannot.
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After the smoke has cleared, the fire cooled, the work continues. There will be hours of cleanup. Just two months later. Renewal. In time, with work, the prairie will return. Our wild places are often fragile places. First rule: step lightly.

- Natural areas, state natural areas, can accommodate nature photography, hikes through this area. Nondestructive uses. A person going out here grouse hunting is not going to cause any problems to those natural functions. So, those types of uses are fully compatible with the establishment of these state natural areas.

- This way, come on!

- Narrator: Others are not. Consider the sand barrens, one of Wisconsin's most unusual landscapes.

- It's hard to keep fun-loving ATVs outta the sand barrens. Unfortunately, when one ATV goes through and leaves tire tracks in the vegetation, it may take a hundred or more years for that to revegetate 'cause there's a whole host of lichens and other small plants that grow on the sand barrens. And when those are disturbed, it's tough for them to get started again. So the damage wrought by ATVs and off-road vehicles on these fragile sandy environments can last for decades.

- Narrator: The damage can last for decades, damage to a very precious place.
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- Your state natural areas are usually just the jewels. Usually, the rarest of the rare.

- Narrator: Cynthia Olmsted is the director of the Mississippi Valley Conservancy, a land trust from La Crosse that has had two parcels designated as state natural areas, including this one, one of the state's newest.

- This is the Roe Preserve, or the official name is the Roe Unit of the Cassville Bluff State Natural Area. And I tell you, once I got here, I knew we had to save it.
[chuckles]

It was one of those sort of 'Aha moments' where yes, this is one we have to really save. Both places that we've worked with the DNR on, the minute I get on them, you know, you're able to see your results, which I think is really great. There's nothing more satisfying than thinking, "We protected that. "It's gonna be protected for future generations of Wisconsinites."
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- Narrator: Protected forever, through endless seasons, places like Toft Point in Door County.
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Avon Bottoms in Rock County.
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Toft Point in summer. Wild places. We have nearly 400 wild places, nearly 400 state natural areas totaling just over 150,000 acres. It is both a huge effort and a small step.

- In our minds, we're only about a third of the way there. We think we need 800 or 900 to do the job, to really protect our diversity and to have places like this everywhere so that people can come and experience what Wisconsin's landscape looked like.
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- Narrator: If they reach this total of 800 to 900 places, if the state's natural areas holdings were doubled from what we have now, that would equal just 1% of Wisconsin's land mass. Doubled, we would've saved just 1%.

- We're looking at this very, very long term. It's not just what's here today, but what's here 100, 500, 1,000 years from now.
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- They are going to be the remnants, the reservoirs, the last bastions of what things used to be.

- Narrator: Perhaps, there is something unique in the Wisconsin character that responds to wildness. Perhaps that's why this model of preservation first suggested by Aldo Leopold was pioneered here. We, in Wisconsin, recognized, as Thoreau once wrote, "In wildness is the preservation of the world." You can find it in our state natural areas.
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Our wild places.
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- Presenter: "Wild Places" is supported in part by a grant from Friends of WHA-TV, viewers supporting Wisconsin Public Television and inviting you to join them.