Mistreating wildlife for grins: Who thinks like that?

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

Driving west on State 96 short of Medina recently, I saw an impressive turtle sitting just across the centerline.

Whooping crane training at the White River Marsh, Princeton.

Based on its size and the height of its rounded shell, I’d guess it was a Blanding’s, a threatened species in Wisconsin.

I watched in the rearview mirror as a pickup truck bore down on it and then edged over to avoid the turtle. Once I shed the traffic around me, I turned around and went back to do the Boy Scout routine and help the turtle across the highway.

When I got to the spot, the turtle was gone, apparently already helped to the shoulder by someone else. Faith in humanity restored.

My opinion of some of my fellow Wisconsinites had been flagging after reading about two instances of interaction with wildlife.

Wolf hunt grey areas addressed

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com 

Not many people are neutral on Wisconsin’s wolf hunt. They represent nature free and wild to you. Or they are a threat to be feared by you.

What if you owned livestock in an area where wolves roam? What if your cultural traditions held them to be sacred?

These and other points of view will be explored fully at a program on Wisconsin’s wolves 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 13, at Mosquito Hill Nature Center, N3880 Rogers Rd., New London. It is a chance to harden your position on wolves or better understand the other side of the issue.

Ideas on roads, wolves need rethinking

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com 

From time to time, a columnist needs to purge his notebook and produce a mishmash of this and that from bits too little to be a column but too much to be ignored.

Complete streets
I attended the annual meeting of the trail advocacy group Fox Cities Greenways and
heard a presentation by Jack Zabrowski of the La Crosse County Health Department,
who coordinates the county's "complete streets" efforts.

It is a term I had not heard before. The concept is to commit to designing streets not just for automobile traffic, but for all of the functions they serve — safe routes for bicycles, pedestrians and school children. That means more than adding bicycle lanes, Zabrowski said.

It may involve building in such features as bump-out crosswalks as in downtown Appleton, raised crosswalks that serve as low-grade speed bumps, curb cut ramps at intersections, shared bicycle and parking lanes and bike-only lanes. In rural areas, it may be as simple as paved shoulders and 14-foot-wide traffic lanes.

Area communities have done a good job of insisting on recreation trails as part of major highway projects. This is the next step.

Sturgeon cam

Had enough of watching baby eagles? Check out the Wolf River Sturgeon Cam. Beware, it's R-rated.

At the wolf's door

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

Twenty-two people ride a darkened school bus down back country roads in search of what all of their childhood fairy tales warned them against. 

Up front is Cindy Mueller, a naturalist at High Cliff State Park and various other area nature centers. The evening's activity is a typical fall Saturday night for Mueller. She's a wolf howler.

Normally a more solitary activity, Mueller has agreed to take a group from the Northeastern Wisconsin Audubon Society to her assigned howling grounds. She had to clear it with the top biologists in the state wolf recovery effort.

We have agreed to a series of strict rules, including wearing no fragrance, exiting the bus in total silence, no coughing or throat clearing, and should you be inclined otherwise, no urinating outside of the bus.

We also agreed not to disclose where we were, so it must suffice to say we were within a three-hour drive of the Fox Cities.

The plan is to make several stops, where we are to climb down from the bus by the light of the moon and stand silently as Mueller lets loose with her well-practiced wolf howls. At an orientation at Fallen Timbers Environmental Center near Black Creek, she offered no guarantee that we would hear wolves, and all but assured we would not see them.

Where do they go?

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

I mourn the loss of habitat every time I see a subdivision sprout where a farm field used to be or a woods come down for a big box store.

That said, I also am amazed at what wildlife can do with the scraps of habitat we’ve left them.

Folk singer Greg Brown wrote a song that asks: “Where do the wild geese go when they go away?” Putting aside that there are so many geese now that they never really go away, the lyric expresses my wonder about where all of this wildlife is when I’m not watching them.