Woodcock nest

The American woodcock (Scolopax minor) has been characterized as a shore bird that lives in forests.

According to the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology: "The male American Woodcock has an elaborate display to attract females. He gives repeated "peents" on the ground, often on remaining patches of snow in the early spring. After a time he flies upward in a wide spiral. As he gets higher, his wings start to twitter. After reaching a height of 70-100 m (230-328 ft) the twittering becomes intermittent, and the bird starts chirping as he starts to descend. He comes down in a zig-zag, diving fashion, chirping as he goes. As he comes near the ground he silently lands, near a female if she is present. Then he starts peenting again."

We have seen woodcocks occasionally in early spring, and this year we flushed several. Our first encounter was during our burn of Toby's Prairie. Someone in the burn crew stepped into the adjacent woods and flushed one. The bird returned several times during the burn. A week later, the three student interns were planting seeds in the savanna and flushed another.

Yesterday, while brush cutting, they scared the female off a nest. Today, Chris and I returned to the area and flushed the bird again. It did not move until we were only six inches away from the nest, which had four eggs (see the Wisconsin DNR photo at right). The nest was well hidden among a fairly large bramble patch in an area that had not been burned this year.

These birds are not too rare; Wisconsin has a fall hunting season and each hunter is permitted to kill three birds. According to the DNR, there are about 15,000 woodcock hunters in the state, and Wisconsin ranks third in the country in the woodcock harvest. Wisconsin and its two neighboring states (Minnesota, Michigan) are conducting research to determine why woodcock populations are dropping. I'm not sure why anyone would want to hunt such a small bird, but according to several reports I have read, woodcock hunting is quite addictive, probably because of the challenge of killing such a small bird on the wing.

Really the last burn of the season

I kept thinking that our controlled burn work at Pleasant Valley Conservancy was over and then we kept doing more burns. However, I am sure that today's burn, in part of our wetland, really is the last of the season.

About a month ago we burned a fairly nice strip of wetland along the southeast corner of the Conservancy. This was done the day we burned our south-slope prairie and savanna remnants. Since it was done late in the day, there was not enough time to burn all the wetland area. We planned to return to this area once all our other burns were completed. However, the weather refused to cooperate.

Finally today the conditions were fine and our three student interns, Kathie, and I carried out a very successful burn of some nice sedge meadow areas. We used our Kawasaki Mule (with 65 gallon pumper unit) to great effect. This vehicle is maneuverable enough so that I could drive right out onto the wetland, and we could "wetline" to confine the fire just to the sedge areas. We moved slowly through the area in order to keep the fire under control. It took us two hours to finish an interesting but uneventful burn.

 

Control of cool season grasses in a planted prairie

Cool season grasses are often a problem in planted prairies. We have had considerable success with a technique originally suggested to me by Jim Sime. The procedure is to carry out a real early season herbicide treatment with glyphosate, timed to happen before any prairie (warm season) plants are visible. Our work using this procedure on the Valley Prairie is described in this link.

Early flowers

Now that our burns are finished, we can enjoy watching plants grow. With good soil moisture and some sunny days, it doesn't take long for early flowers to appear. In the wetland, our first plants are marsh marigold and skunk cabbage. In the prairie remnants we are seeing violet wood sorrel, and bird's foot and dooryard violets. In the savannas we are seeing early buttercup and wood anemone. In more wooded areas we are seeing spring ephemerals such as dutchman's breeches, jacob's ladder, and bloodroot. Of course, there are lots of species recognizable in the vegetative state, such as shooting star, tinker's weed, golden alexanders, and stiff goldenrod. From now on until late October, we will be enjoying a continuous show of native species. It makes all the work worth it!

All seeds planted

Today we finally finished our spring planting. We had already done most of our planting, but still had a few odds and ends to plant. These were species that we had in only small amounts and did not want to put them into the large seed mixes, since they would essentially disappear. Species such as purple milkweed, yellow pimpernel, upland boneset, and prairie violet. These were available in only small amounts, and in addition live in rather special habitats.

We finished planting about lunch time and then it started to rain. Great timing, because the rain will help hydrate the seeds. Since they had all been stratified, they should start germinating soon. Perhaps we'll be seeing results in a couple of years. Patience!

Prairie burns at Goose Pond Sanctuary

Although our burns at Pleasant Valley Conservancy are finished, the burn season is not finished. Today, Kathie and I helped a group of volunteers from Madison Audubon Society burn planted prairies at Goose Pond Sanctuary, a fine restoration near Arlington, Wisconsin.

The area around Goose Pond was part of the original Empire Prairie, a vast tall grass mesic prairie north of Madison. By the mid 20th century, the fertile prairie sod here had been almost completely obliterated by agriculture. Since the late 1970s, the Madison Audubon Society has had an extensive program of restoring some of this land to its original state. To date, over 500 acres of land is owned by Madison Audubon, and most has been restored. It is thrilling to observe acres of corn monoculture turned into high diversity mesic prairie.

Controlled burns are a major management tool at Goose Pond. Today was the first day of burning for the year, and we burned several parts of the Kampen Prairie complex. The weather was warm and sunny, with light winds out of the southwest. A group of ten volunteers, under the direction of Sanctuary Manager Mark Martin, worked efficiently and uneventfully to burn these prairies.

Kathie and I had participated in the initial planting of these prairies in 1999 and 2000, when they were predominantly corn stubble. It was interesting to see what these fields had turned into, and to watch them burn.

In all, a great day!

North woods burn

We have been wanting to burn the north woods for several years. The last time it was burned was October 1999, a very successful burn under unusually favorable conditions. Oak woods are much more difficult to burn than savannas, and you need just the right conditions. We had put in the major fire break last fall in hopes of burning then, but the weather did not cooperate. Today turned out to be the day. The wind was out of the northwest, the humidity was around 25-30%, and the temperature in the upper 60's F.

Around 1 PM we burned the quarry and Unit 14 with a crew of 5. At 4 PM our contractor came with three more people. Since the whole top ridge (and almost everything else) was already burned, this was a very safe burn. After a black line was put in down the east side (to protect the small house), the whole burn was conducted as a headfire from County F. Since the fuel was almost exclusively oak leaves, the fire front moved slowly up hill. The whole burn was finished before dark. Since some areas had not burned as well others, the next day Kathie and I returned and lighted some of these areas. We had almost 100% covereage in Unit 14 and the quarry, about 70% coverage in Unit 15, and around 30% coverage in Unit 16. (Unit 16 is a lot shadier and moister than Unit 15.)

My rough estimate of area covered this burn year (fall/spring) is 92 acres.

Map of areas burned

Burn line procedure

When we did our big savanna burns on 9 April 2007 we were faced with the problem of burning one of our hilly savannas without burning the adjacent (neighbor's) land. You don't do such a burn without an adequate crew, which fortunately we had.

The photo shows the set up.

April snow

We had a nice wet snow (4 inches) today. Such a snow in early April is actually a good thing for the vegetation, but it puts another crimp in our restoration plans. We had plans to plant seeds in areas we had burned two days ago, but the snow put these plans on hold. We aren't able to see where the best burned (bare) areas are until the snow melts.

But such a snow is beneficial to the plants, as the water soaks gently down into soil as the snow melts. There is no erosion to wash any topsoil away.

We are promised sun soon, which should quickly deal with the snow cover. Hopefully, in a day or two we will be able to plant. Let's hope, because we still have a lot of seeds waiting.

Another great burn!

Our burn strategy seems to be working. Even with this very difficult spring burning weather, we have been able to complete almost all of our planned burns. Today we burned well over 20 acres of savanna and planted prairie. Most of the savanna areas burned were ones in which we had carried out intensive brush control this past winter.

Our strategy (which frankly involves a modicum of luck) is to burn as large amount as possible when the weather is suitable and the burn crew is available. Today we had three experienced volunteers, two interns, and four paid contractors. We had two ATV's with pumper units, a full sized pickup truck with pumper unit, three drip torches (we could have used four or five), and six backpack water tanks.

The weather has been unusually cold for this time of year. However, there had been no rain for six days, and several extremely windy days had dried off the vegetation. Also, the absolute humidity was quite low. The sky was partly cloudy, with some sun, but by mid afternoon the clouds had dissipated and we had full sun.

Details of this burn, with a burn-accomplished map.

We still have two small areas yet to burn, a savanna and a wetland. Hopefully, a bit more good weather will develop!

Record of plant species at Pleasant Valley

For the past five years I have been taking careful notes of plant species in the various management units at Pleasant Valley Conservancy. I jot these down in a small field book as I see them, noting date, unit name, and approximate location in the unit. At the end of the field season I enter all these data into an Excel spreadsheet, using a lookup table routine given to me by Merel Black. Each year's data ends up being about 6000 lines of Excel code.

The Excel file includes the following data: six-letter code for the particular species; Latin name of the species; common name of the species; month; day; location; comments. The location is the particular management unit, and the comment column contains details such as flowering or seed production, commoness of the species on that date, and any unusual characteristics. This file is the master file from which check lists are created.

A check list is a species list for a particular unit (or for the whole Conservancy), and represents only a small subset of the database. I have prepared several kinds of check lists. One kind is an alphabetical listing of species (by Latin name) with a separate line for each management unit in which the species was found. Another check list is a series of pages for a particular particular unit which lists (alphabetically) all species found in that unit.

These check lists have been prepared for each year from 2002 through 2006. The next step was to pool the data from all five years, adding a year column. This is much too much data to print out, so I then sorted the whole list by Latin name followed by year, thus providing data on the year that the species was first seen.

Finally, five-year check lists were prepared organized by Latin name (with units) and by unit (with Latin names). These have now been printed out and will serve as reference for changes that might occur in the future. Each print-out is essentially a small book, which I have placed in a binder so that it can be taken in the field.

My final goal (not yet accomplished) is to acquire a Tablet PC which will have the thousands of lines of code of the complete database. I can either take this PC in the field, or use it in our field office. I also plan to add to this PC all the files from this web site. This will make it possible for me to look up detailed information from the web site. (We don't have Internet access at Pleasant Valley, and probably will never have it. I have no interest in staring at a computer screen when I am in the field!)

The work described above has obviously taken a lot of time. Even though it is winter "down time", there were other things I could have done with my time. I am hoping that the work will prove useful. Also, the database should be of great value for long-term monitoring at Pleasant Valley Conservancy.

One summary that I can make now is the number of species present at Pleasant Valley, at any particular management unit, or in the sum of each type of unit: prairie, savanna, woods, wetland. The total number of species at Pleasant Valley Conservancy is a bit over 400. The greatest diversity is in the savannas, followed by the prairie, wetland, and woods. There is some bias here, because we have concentrated our work on savannas and prairies.

Another interesting analysis was to plot the relationship between area of a particular unit and the number of species in that unit. Not surprisingly, the smaller units had fewer species than the larger ones. However, the curve relating area to number of species is more or less linear for areas less than 10 acres, but tends to level off for units of higher size. This is not surprising, because these larger units do not contribute new niches that are not present in the smaller units. Another limitation here is that the unit delineations have been somewhat arbitrary, as can be seen by a study of the management map.

Other uses for these data (see links for details):

1. Phenology (flowering times)

2. Seed collecting times

3. Coefficient of conservatism

4. Floristic Quality Index calculations

5. Flower photos

 

Seedlings of endangered species

For the past two years Kathie and I have been growing plants of some endangered species from seed. The goal here is to understand how these plants grow and to introduce them into new locations at Pleasant Valley Conservancy. One of the species we have been working with is purple milkweed (Asclepias purpurascens), a State Endangered Species that popped up at Pleasant Valley after our first savanna restoration work.

Purple milkweed is a handsome plant (see photo to right) that is quite uncommon in southern Wisconsin. Even where it is present, it does not form large populations. Even when it flowers, it sets seeds only poorly, and last season I was able to obtain only three mature pods. Fortunately, seed viability is fairly high, and we have been able to raise a number of seedlings.

The seedlings produce quite long root systems, and we have been raising them in long tubes, the sort used by foresters to raise tree seedlings (see photo at right). Right now we have several dozen seedlings growing in the greenhouse, and plan to set them out near the end of May.

We set out our first purple milkweed seedlings in 2002 and among the dozens that we transplanted, only a few became established. Of those that did establish, so far only one plant has flowered. Obviously, we need persistence!

What does it cost to cut brush?

We now have two years experience cutting small brush in oak savanna habitats. This small brush represents almost exclusively regrowth from the seed bank that had developed during the years when heavy growth of invasive shrubs had taken over the area. Getting rid of these large shrubs was relatively easy, but the small brush was much more of a problem.

The techniques for cutting and treating this small brush have been outlined in other entries of this journal. The summary here represents an analysis of hours spent. Most of the brush was removed by teams of workers, one operating the brush cutter and two to four (most often three) workers following along with the herbicide. The hours worked were recorded. After a relatively large area had been cleared, its acreage was measured using GPS.

The hours spent were 408 in 2006 and 900 in 2007. The acres cleared in 2006 were 10.7 and in 2007 were 19.0. These leads to an average for the two years of 44 person-hours per acre. Plug into this total your hourly wage (be sure to include employee benefits and overhead) and you can calculate how much this sort of brush cutting would cost you.

Although this sort of work is not cheap, I think it is an essential part of the restoration process. If the brush is not controlled, it continues to expand. Annual burns may help, but will not eliminate the problem, and if a year or two of burns are missed, you will be on your way back to ruin again.

My feeling is that brush control of this sort is a perpetual commitment. Not annually, perhaps, but at least every three years, and with burns every year (if possible). It is probably better not to burn in the year when brush is to be cut the upcoming winter, since this gives the brush a chance to grow larger, making cutting and treating easier.

Controlled burn at Black Earth Rettenmund Prairie

Among other things, Kathie and I are the managers of Black Earth Rettenmund Prairie, a State Natural Area that is owned by the Nature Conservancy and managed for it by the Prairie Enthusiasts. We organize volunteer work parties, work with outside contractors on brush and weed control, and plan and schedule controlled burns. Today was "burn day", and we had a very successful burn.

The burn was carried out by a group of skilled volunteers under the supervision of Rich Henderson, the burn boss for the Empire/Sauk Chapter of the Prairie Enthusiasts. Rich has over 30 years of experience running controlled burns; you can't have anyone better!

The weather this spring has been challenging, with lots of rain complicating the burn schedule. Fortunately, there was a brief burn window today, and Rich's burn crew was kept busy.

About 15 people were involved in the burn. Equipment included two pickup trucks with pumper units, lots of backpack water cans, flappers, drip torches, two-way radios, etc. etc.

The day had started cloudy but by 10 AM the sun was shining, and we had sun most of the day. Because the burn area was a short grass prairie remnant, it dried off quickly, and by 3:30 PM, when the burn began, the fuel was dry.

By 5 PM, the burn was finished and the crew moved on to do another burn. No rest when the weather is cooperating!