Prairie Views

"White dewdrops hang to wild grass,
as seasons flow by fast and change.
Autumn cicadas rub their wings in trees.
Where have black swallows migrated to?"
        – from the Han Dynasty







From Brices Prairie the Wisconsin
horizon is a barn roof and bluffside.
Clouds mute the palette of prairie
to rich yellows of goldenrod.
At the ninth month purple coneflowers
have turned to seed and now serve
as towers for hordes of grasshoppers.
As we walk near the edges of field
the stems begin to click in thousands.
Fewer bumblebees than month
previous clasp and sip at thistle.
Sounds of fall turn brittle but clean,
no birdsong but the hawk's scream.
The full-winged Monarch now
caramel glass heaving-up abdomen,
soon but a beautiful brown dust.

Monarch Chronicles

"I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse." – Edward Abbey, from Desert Solitaire









One of the things that I've learned this summer as a citizen scientist for the Monarch Monitoring Project is that you have to be careful getting to know your prairies, for once you do you will ask a very simple question: why aren't there more and why aren't they everywhere? You become attached, so to speak, to the biotic community, how the broad looking tangle interweaves clearly above ground but invisibly under.  How thistle and bee balm heads, the brown-eyed and purple prairie clover, the blazing star and compass plant serve as a veritable playground for bees and butterflies.  You learn that the fear of the perceived thicket of prairie is nothing that can't be overcome by long denim and cuffed sleeves, that those bees, when busy, as they always are in prairies, are not one-third as dangerous as you are as you tromp through the milkweed leveling stems in your path. As you follow your transect through this now unfortunately exclusive kingdom, preserved by not a little

Albany Wildlife Area

effort, and set yourself in the very middle of the shoulder high foliage, you are not of a separate piece, but of it, another color, another long stem wobbling in the wind.  The wind that grooves through the sumac nearby is not a foreign sound but built there inside the mind merely waiting to be uncovered.  How the red-wing plays sentry at is chosen outposts is nothing more a slight warning against trespassing, the very instinct that, no matter how hard we try, can't rid ourselves of as we move around our own yards and wonder where those fresh people tracks come from across the mowed grass. You come to love the sun again, as hot as it might be, trapping in the sweat from the long sleeves, because it dries out the air and leaves the mosquitos back into the depths of the forest underbrush across the highway road.  And if you let yourself stand there in the center of the tall prairie long enough, eyeing the horizon for the incidentally flying Monarch, another rush might run up through you that feels something like the history of land and there you will see the hands of the pioneer thinking many of the same things but for toil not observation.  To some degree, then, the prairie is everything that was or can be. The only thing lacking is either no human feet or a voice if need be.

Arboretum Diary

"Nearly every farming operation offers chances either to conserve or to destroy the wild plants on which game, fur, and feather depend for food. There are many of those wild plants, and each needs its own conditions of soil and light in order to prosper and bear fruit. Each has its own 'customers' who like its products."  – Leopold, "Wild Foods'






The evolution of farming -- as hunting and gathering turned to planning plots for sustenance up to modern mega-ag model -- is as fascinating a topic as any other.  The linear model is fairly easy to track: grow more more easily for the sake of high production, sales, and the hopeful arrangement that yields support populations.  Nothing moves forever in a linear direction however.  Leopold, even back in the 30's, was asking (no, demanding, instructing) that farmers still consider their plots as dynamic communities that do more than one thing: plant for the security of the wildlife on your farm, for they too are a critical player in the health of the land.  His famous story that without the wolf the mountain suffers by the teeth of the unchecked deer herd, is a symbol of this relationships.  Let one strip of the corner of your farm turn back to prairie will offer up much more than a wild palette of color. Pollinators return, top soil recharges, water is filtered, and species survive.  In other words, the linear model of farming that leaves us with one crop, worn soil, chemical water is not sustainable because it will eventually deplete and collapse, which is what is happening to soil around the world today.  If Leopold kept an eye out for the friendly creatures of the back pastures, today the call for a more dynamic approach to planting might be for the sake of all those above, but also for the sake of carbon farming.  Good healthy soil is a natural vehicle for absorbing carbon and other climate altering gases such as methane and nitrous oxide.  As the farmer over tills and under rotates, the soil loses its capacity to hold naturally occurring nutrients and its ability to 'sequester' co2.  As of right now agriculture contributes basically half of all emissions that contribute to climate change.  Leopold had already used the term climate change back in the early part of last century, but had not yet conceived of the changes that we now witness, yet his call for reserving time, space, and energy for better farming practices completely apply to carbon sequestering through "crop rotation, cover crops, and contour hedgerows, as well as what is called silvopasturing, which is a way to allow livestock to more freely graze instead of isolating it to one place that then becomes completely depleted of all regenerative energy.  All of this takes mindset change and it takes support from consumer.  For the farmer to willingly make the leap from large-ag monoculture to dynamic rotation and carbon sequestering is not in any way automatic.  A view into the future might show investors becoming farm restoration specialists, groups willing to replant strategically and organically for the sake of chemical free crops that also serve as carbon absorption.  If large farms were broken into smaller portions, the work to yield quotient would be more manageable; if the consumer knew she was buying from a carbon farm, she might very well be willing to either invest, similar to a CSA, or to at least demand that the grocery carry this kind of produce.  There is no such thing as a one-way route to ag-success. If the ethical minded farmer who restores his land is not met by an informed consumer, the efforts won't be affordable.  If the consumer merely demands that their vegetables come from a small organic local farm, it won't be enough for large scale carbon sequestration.  Leopold had it right that conservation education is of course the beginning of everything. We're still waiting to see if the call will be heeded by farmer, consumer, educator.

Arboretum Diary

"Just why the prairie plants stood up under the grazing by buffalo and elk, but now succumb to cows, is a mystery. Perhaps the answer is barbed wire, which keeps the cows too long in one place." – Leopold, "Roadside Prairies"








Just how much history the old prairie empires of Wisconsin upheld for their end of the evolutionary bargain is awfully hard to say, but as Leopold points out, unfortunately they didn't stand much of a chance up against roadway encroachment, the thorough blade of the till or boxed-in conditions of the hungry cow. At Curtis Prairie we can see how nature would prefer itself, a system of biota tightly woven together, each species expanding, contracting, dominating, or submitting to the course of water or nutrients, creating for us, at the very least, a visual display "unlike books, which divulge their meaning only when you dig for it, the prairie plants yearly repeat their story, in technicolor, from the first pale blooms of pasque in April to the wine-red plumes of bluestem in the fall."  The near eradication of prairies is a story that might have been written by the fate of expansion, but it is one that has more chapters left to write. If not for the preservation of a few of these remnants, we might not have had the historical archive to see and study but because we do, 'restoration' no doubt needs to be a common theme of this century: "we have thousands of miles of roadside, the outside edges of which are often too steep or rough to mow, already fenced against cows, and kept cleared of brush to prevent snowdrifts. Most of this potential prairie garden is being faithfully stirred up by roadside machinery, after which it goes over, for keeps, to quack grass and sweet clover. Why not let these edges alone and replant them to prairie?" It is the work of a lifetime of the likes of Leopold to try to get passers-by to consider a prairie or a farm something other than the flashing image that is seen by car driver. The massive passing images of monoculture corn are seen as symbols of feeding the world and let pass. The technicolor of the remaining prairie something of an oddity, a sort of painting by the hands of concerned citizens. To reverse the logic, one might see the lost acreage and topsoil of corn crops as potential for proper rotation or carbon farming permaculture; the prairie not as exotic gem, but as should be.  Sometimes the old is mistaken for the backwards and left for dead by the modern. What is a more novel thought, and one that sees forward, might come to think that in some cases the past is the future.

Arboretum Diary

"These are my suggestions for the farm arboretum: Tolerate foreign trees when they behave, but admit only natives to full citizenship. Let the arboretum be not a single segregated spot, but all odd corners where the soil fits the needs of some tree. Attach ten times more value to the tree that came in on his own steam than to the tree you had to plant." – Leopold, "The Farm Arboretum"





A swift walk along the more narrow paths cutting through Curtis Prairie is an exercise in quick picture taking. Even if rain has not fallen in some time, the Prairie here holds a handful of little creeks that fill-in the heart of the undergrowth and therefore serve mosquitos as one of the greatest foliage hideouts known along any of the five lakes shorelines. Wear long clothes, spray, or move quick to create your own breeze, which you can only hope replicates the real thing. At points there will be need to stop and take the picture that you came for in the first place and you may have to sacrifice that last uncovered square inch of neck flesh for the sake of tuning in the iPhone camera selection.  Near the east end the Orange Jewelweed is any interesting catch. Orange pouch like flowers hang from stalks "like so many windsocks," says the author of the Prairie Plants of the Arboretum.  Looking further into the data, located as it is along one of the more subtle streams of low-growth creeks, the Orange touch me not, or Impatiens Capensis more technically, is sitting right where it is supposed to be, in its "odd corners where the soil fits the needs of some tree."  Here is as good a spot for the novice prairie puzzle solver to stop and appreciate what it means to actually restore a habitat, prairie in this case, but that could be applied to virtually any disturbed, encroached or saturated parcel of land in one's home state: what fits this soil type, and will it thrive here as it once might have, and in fact belongs.  This very concept is one of the more amazing features of the restorations here – the foresight of seeing that a parcel of land has been extremely disturbed (think Leopold's own Sand Co. farm), to research what grows well in like-situated parcels, then plant and watch the co-evolution of plant and habitat do the rest of the work.  The Orange Jewelweed is said to be "abundant throughout, on stream banks, lakeshore, marshes, fens, swamps, wet thickets, moist spots in upland woods, around springs and seeps, ravines, and ditches; wet or damp soils."  At this point, I now know that when I see the orange windsocks, either it was planted by accident -- not very likely -- or it is thriving because of good wet earth. I now know that when I am near the plant that "Bumblebees, honeybees, and the ruby-throated hummingbirds appear to be good pollinators." As such, I would champion the native plant, knowing as I do that bees could use all the help they can get a time when their standard fare has been eradicated or sprayed.  I now know that its namesake, jewelweed, makes as good of sense as butterfly weed, one of the great feeders of Monarchs, but threatened in the state of Wisconsin.  So much to see with one click of the camera.

Arboretum Diary

"One of the best ways to preserve prairie flowers in a wild hay meadow is to reserve an unmoved strip each year, rotating the location of the strip. This enables each plant to go to seed occasionally, and incidentally improves cover for prairie chickens and pheasants." Leopold, from "Wildflower Corners," from For the Health of the Land





8/28

Nearing the end of summer seems like a good time to begin thinking again like a prairie. Spring comes and the eye is dazzled by the new palette of color replacing the cardboard monotony of late freeze.  This is a time to ask what has grown well in the prairie, what are strategies for this next spring? Leopold was a master strategist, always thinking as if inside the mind of a farmer who he wished would take in similar account for the varieties not only of growth beyond the cash crop but for the sake of game management to come.  This was a holistic approach to farming before the term was in play and today, as readers seek solutions to the fact that topsoil erosion accounts for half of all climate change contributors, the concept has been renamed for a larger scale: carbon farming, a process in which the farmer can reclaim her land, and consider how to re-preserve carbon in the soil, by proper rotation, silviculture pasturing, horizontal moisture planting, etc.  In other words, common sense, repackaged in different terms, and a little more gusto for we now know that we are on a specific timeline for transformation. It leads me back to the simplicity of the recommendation above, for 'wildflower corners,' possibly the simplest way a farmer might have for beginning the long slow process of preserving soil and simultaneously lending a hand to pollinators, who lose habitat daily by encroachment and pesticides.  My assigned plot this past summer for the Monarch Butterfly Monitoring Program was a small four acre parcel inside the Albany Wildlife Area, essentially a mono crop and hunting area in southwestern Wisconsin.  The 4-acre  parcel had been set aside as a 'wild flower' corner and stood out, along the roadside, as a near jungle of diversity up against the green stalks of the cash crops.  Milkweed was abundant. All other wildflower standards, like the yellow cone, brown-eyed, field thistle, purple prairie clover, etc. were abundant, and the non native in sparse appearance.  On my last trip through the prairie I spotted 19 monarchs either in flight or nectaring.  The experience would be something like walking through a distinct 4-acre plot that was lined with redwoods, while all the surrounding area in sight was shrubbery.  It stirred up some awfully common sense. What would happen if every farm had its own 'wild flower corner?' The fact that it could be rotated, as Leopold suggests, would mean that the alley way of new growth wouldn't dictate future plans for the farmer.  In the meantime, save a portion from the same spray that eliminates the milkweed which eliminates the butterfly and bee.  Does such a preservation need a subsidy, or is it possible that the land ethic, as incentive, is enough? As I walked the Curtis Prairie this morning, a wild three-prong Rough Blazing Star reached out over the narrow trail.  Shooting out of the predominate big blue stem and late summer goldenrod, it looked just like its name, a meteor of purple wisps and seeds. I wondered, how long had that particular shape and function take to co-evolve with the moist soil of the native prairies? Somewhere in that line of thinking, I wondered if the wild flower corner was a way to preserve time itself, the physicality of species, the origin of color, the invisible attraction between it and the butterfly?

Arboretum Diary

"Science has not yet arrived on the Gavilan, so the otter plays tag in its pools and riffles and chases the fat rainbows from under its mossy banks..." – Leopold, from "Song of the Gavilan"










8/27


We find out most of what we know about nature at the edges of things – the edges that we walk past along the trailside leading to Picnic Point at Lake Mendota, where the planting of a prairie, as it lunges out into the trail, is most certainly there, but what is inside? In the other direction, the great edge of the shallow bank of the lake, where soft sand leads to hard rock for several feet as far as we can see but most certainly gouges hundreds of feet deep beyond at shelves around the lake. Invasive buckthorn and basswoods serve as the green surroundings with the occasional pine climbing high seeking its own share of sunshine in soil that it is not always kind to its species.  A short walk at Wingra Savannah is the city edge of things, a boardwalk trail system that passes by one of the great springs bubbling out of the sand, preserved to roll along as a creek into the manmade pond that its itself at the edge of the Lake. The edges of things how we get to sneak a peak into the daily idiosyncrasies of the natural world. Take a few hundred steps off path along Monroe Street and there is a wide cut-out of grass that leads to a stand of dominant goldenrod which serves as a sort of gate to the pond. Behind, the harsh crackles and roars of steady course of cars, a helicopter above in the background, maybe a jogging party collective footfall along the asphalt trail. Yet, in nearly undetectable waves, the quieter footfall of the grasshoppers come into play and it is no longer a mere visual feature but a city habitat – it doesn't take much.  Geese slowly move through the muck of the pond below and deeper yet, not visible, the quieting chorus of a few fall birds on the island shore. Only months ago, along this same path, nature had taken more of its share as the songbirds arrived and the foliage around the boardwalks were still toe high at the edge of things.  Soon, the muffler of sounds, snow, will take over those same edges, but for the adventurer also offer up a path across the frozen pond and onto land otherwise unknown. What is the view like at the other side of the island, when the city is no longer visible?