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.

A morning with hummers

Park-to-Park portage just a bump in the trail

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com

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A helping attitude and a small strip of carpeting made all the difference.

July 4th weekend — two weeks before the Park-to-Park Paddle, the state’s largest day paddle event that has drawn as many as 350 kayaks and canoes — we read that a gate on the Menasha Lock was broken, then fixed, then broken again.

The Park-to-Park takes those hundreds of paddlers through the Menasha Lock. In fact, the iconic image of the P2P is hundreds of colorful boats packed into the lock.

Do we shift the launch to below the lock, or do we portage around the lock? As one of the organizers of the event, I initially favored sacrificing the length of the paddle to avoid what I expected to be the pandemonium of 200-plus paddlers trying to scale the rocky shores on the Menasha Lock basin.

But a few factors changed my mind.

History revealed in what the saw sees

By David Horst  sandhill7@gmail.com


The great thing about history is it doesn't just live in books. Sometimes, history is just hanging there on the wall.

Setting out from Newport Park.
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In the best of the essays in his must-have classic work "A Sand County Almanac," pioneer environmentalist Aldo Leopold tells the story of he and wife Estella sawing through a large, old oak tree. He uses that event to frame the natural history that was happening as the tree was putting on the growth rings they are transecting with the two-man crosscut saw.

As we paddled down the Wisconsin River on June 21 as part of the Fox-Wisconsin Heritage Paddle series, I was describing the essay to fellow paddler Daren Barrett in more detail than you would expect to be tolerated by someone who easily could accelerate away from me. Barrett was unfamiliar with Leopold and how his environmental legacy was tied so closely to Wisconsin history, but was genuinely inquisitive about it.