When the Oaks are in Bloom

Birds of the Sterling Barrens                              26 May 2018

Purple Finch

Golden-winged Warbler

Aldo Leopold wrote,"Poor land may be rich country, and vice versa".  The Sterling Barrens of Polk County, Wisconsin are a fine example of Leopold's verse.  The landscape, sculpted of glacial sands, stands in stark contrast to all around it.  To enter the Sterling barrens from the east is to drop down from high, fertile, black soil farm fields into an ancient lake bed of arid, golden sand that spans for miles and miles.   The agriculture quite suddenly stops, and the wildlife dramas unfold endlessly there after in the sand country that supports blueberry, sweet fern, and the most durable and adaptable species of trees.  It is a place of jack pine, pin oak, red oak, Hill's oak, choke cherry and hazel brush.  In wet areas, aspen trees grow and wildlife oases flourish.  Because it borders the Saint Croix River, and because it is nourished by the Trade River, animals are remarkably abundant in the barren country.  Service berry, hazel nuts, aspen buds, and acorns feed an incredible diversity of birds and mammals.  From the sand, life abounds. 

In the Sterling Barrens, land is valued in many ways.  Forty-acre blocks of private land are sprinkled into the plat book here and there, many with small deer shacks and two-rut sand roads leading into mature and even sterile stands of jack pine and oak.  Other places are public lands' battle grounds against an invasive killer known as oak wilt, and big sections tell the tragic story with stump fields and slash piles.  Those places are infants in secondary succession, promising a world of hazel, aspen, and young forest in the years to come.  Some places, especially those fed by water, have always been difficult on people.  They are as wild as they have always been, crossed over by hundreds of game trails and rich in sedge meadows, low aspen forests, alders, and pockets of deep wetland.  Because of its vast acreage, this region functions contiguously as an important, highly functioning forest ecosystem, providing well for many uniquely adapted specialist species.  The birding is simply amazing.

Golden-winged Warbler

The two birds featured here do very well in this landscape.  Purple Finches thrive in areas with older jack pine and openings with dead trees, especially near the rivers. Golden-winged Warblers nest in the more open habitats adjacent to older forest, and the Sterling Barrens provides all of the best examples of this warbler's ideal.   In wet areas, Golden-winged Warblers utilize aspen and alder wetlands adjacent to islands of older trees.   In managed forest areas and oak wilt management areas, Golden-wings use sunny openings filled with Hill's oak, service berry, and chokecherry, especially in openings adjacent to older forests of the Trade River and the Saint Croix River.  In the world of Golden-winged Warblers, the Sterling Barrens represent a rich and valuable stronghold.  Nearly 25% of the world's population of Golden-winged Warblers breed in northern Wisconsin, and some of the highest breeding densities in the state are found in the Sterling Barrens.

To spend a dew-soaked morning in the barrens, greeting the sunrise and dawn chorus with a mug of coffee, wet pant legs, and a relaxed and happy yawn is good living.   Awake at 3 AM, arriving to the chorus of Whip-Poor-Wills in the dark, and watching the indescribable beauty of daybreak in this birding paradise, I realize that days of this quality are all too easy to count and should happen so much more often.  As the sun climbs higher into the sky, I return to the sand roads with soggy shoes and vow to return soon.

All images were made using a Canon 7D Mark I with a Canon EF 400mm f5.6 L lens.  I was able to shoot hand-held in the direct front-lighting of a clear and pure sunrise. The birds, while photographed well, own an even more impressive canvas in my memory. 

A Future for America's Wildlife Across Political Aisles

This is How Democracy Works!                                     7 April 2018

To My Elected Official with Sincere Respects,

I am writing to you as a constituent in order to express my thoughts and views on the integrity of legacy environmental legislation and on the importance of public lands, the Endangered Species Act, clean air, clean water, and other historic, hard-fought measures of our National strength, National integrity, and National security.  As you now stand in a position of responsibility and ambition, I am asking you in my 48 years of wisdom to consider the deep, unfailing and historic precedence set by legacy legislation as envisioned in the last 100 years as a means of protecting our livable environment and thriving economy for those "yet unborn to the womb of time."  The environmental wealth of our times did not happen by accident, and we owe those of the past who dedicated their lives to conservation and those of the future who depend on it the common decency to respect the work that has been done.  We do not wish to lose what has been so diligently restored, recovered, and reclaimed over the last century.

Our long-term, durable, economic health, security and stability rest squarely on the broad back of our ecological health and human health.  It is a balancing act that is attained through service to others before self, not through selfishness and cronyism and serving the very few.  Wilderness, public lands, clean air, clean water, and healthy ecosystems are a great and durable investment into the wealth and health of our nation and no less ever.

We live in good times! My kids drink water directly from the lakes of Northern Minnesota! Luxury of good living gives the strength of longevity in reason! I am asking you at this time, my elected official, to be a person of vision.  Consider the science of sustainable energy, the science of modern economics in a world of finite material resources.  I want it to be known that many of us want to protect the strength of our Endangered Species Act, to protect the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and its waters from the dangers of mining within the watershed, and to prevent the divestment of our Federal and State public lands to private interests.  We are living in times of plenty, but we seem to have forgotten.  America is truly great, truly strong, and has the economic and human resources to move forward sustainably and without peril while still showing ethical restraint.  Fear politics and cronyism, waged by a few, are real threats to the American democracy.

A good friend of mine, now lost to time, served as a pilot in World War II.  He often spoke of how disappointed he had become in the modern political system.  This was a man who had been personally invited to presidential inaugurations, had shaken hands with General Patton, General Eisenhower, and England's Winston Churchill.  He said that the political system was lost to corruption and corporate greed, spawning a lack of intelligence, service, and reason.  Moving forward, let us do our best to prove him wrong.  Please prove that good man, that friend of mine, wrong in those thoughts through  political actions that speak of the rich integrity of a future America, confident in strength and resourceful in conservation.

Our natural resources belong NOT just to you and me, but to our unborn great grandchildren.  For the "American experiment" to move into its greatest reality, we must remain dedicated to an America that serves the health of our future.  Showing ethical restraint, we must invest in the health of our common ecology and humanity.

Sincerely,

Brian M. Collins
Saint Croix Falls, Wisconsin

Working Habitat's Soft Edges for Images

A Walk Into Aldo Leopold's Edges                     23 July 2018

Black-throated Green Warbler in the big leaves of young aspen

Wisconsin has a rich legacy of conservation thinkers. While we have imported great minds from elsewhere and nurtured them in our ecosystems and have equally exported great minds from their birthplace here to places more geologically magestic, the connections between landmark conservation biology and Wisconsin is unmistakable.  John Muir and Gaylord Nelson, both Wisconsin-born greats, are joined in good company and in our collective memories by Wisconsin greats such as Frances Hamerstrom, Emma Toft, Aldo Leopold, and countless others.  Thinkers, teachers, and activists, they trail-blazed the conservation movement in the era of industry, fossil fuels, and information technology. 

I find two things interesting as I perch on the top of my hill of life, seeing my 48 years from an equal amount of youth and wisdom.  First, I find my perspective on conservation is both widening and deepening, pulling in perspectives of economics, water protection, air quality, and human health.  Secondly, I find that the youth of today lack perspective as I did (and often do), and must be reminded of what was saved from the brink, encouraging our future leaders to find sustainable solutions to economic demand.  As always, we are in the best of modern times, teetering on the brink of the worst of times all over again.

Hermit Thrush, bathed in sunlight at the forest's edge

I find that the lessons of wilderness, still running blood red in my veins, are now feeding into the capillaries of my superficial flesh, gentling nourishing my aged acceptance of those land practices that induce vigorous change.  I have come to understand the responsibility of wilderness preservation in areas of spectacular quality and water sensitivity as being balanced squarely upon a necessity in maintaining a healthy economy through sustainable practices. As part of this economic health, we must see logging in our national, state, county, township, and private forests in order to better protect the larger environmental-economic status quo.  Our founding Mothers and Fathers in conservation understood this, and, many essays written and laws enacted, the discoveries still remain to be read, explored, and understood with momentum into the future.   Balance is key.

Aldo Leopold's lesson on Illinois and the missing prairie soils, plowed over and replaced by dollars, serves to steer our gaze into the future as well as the past.  Will the Boundary Waters be the next Illinois? Sure, there are places to mine, but, more importantly and very clearly, places where it will never be acceptable to mine, ever. In an era of "jobs, jobs, jobs", we must still show restraint with respect to the future.  Aldo Leopold made a great, calculated patriotic risk during World War II, confronting his own fear of appearing less than patriotic and acting with great bravery when he appealed to congress to spare the Porcupine Wilderness. It was a time when resource harvest meant victory overseas and the United States was nationally rationing everything possible. Well, we won the war long ago, and we did it without logging the Porcupine Mountains! The Porcupine Mountains still embrace an ancient forest that was spared by a patriotic appeal and stand as testimony of calculated restraint for a better future.  Wisconsin's own Gaylord Nelson understood this well, so many of his ideas reflecting the Indigenous ideals of considering the future, the yet unborn children who have equal right to the health and quality of the land and water.

Aldo Leopold loved grouse and woodcock, two species that depend upon forest disturbance through storm, wind, fire, and human machines.  Indeed, fire, wind, storms, tree disease, and industrious beavers create sunny openings in even the most contiguous, old growth forests within wilderness.  In areas of less protection, we make these openings too, often rapidly and with a lot of commotion.  These sunny openings are places where nutrients return to cycling and photosynthesis is jump-started.  They are thriving hubs of biological diversity where edge species thrive and interior species curiously calculate variables in long division along the razor's edge of "better-living-in-the-moment" divided by "catastrophic-exposed-vulnerabilities."   Perhaps there is poetry in the way we consistently refer to these ecological areas as "edges".  They are physical edges, species aggregate edges, and, for many, the edge of the survival equation.   They also represent the edge of conservation thinking.  There are places to protect, and there are places to harvest. 

Chestnut-sided Warbler, a bird of young growth, carrying a shield bug (Hemiptera)

Leopold wrote often of the edge effects, the biological physiognomy of habitat edges where transitions became hubs of life.  Lessons in basic wildlife management or wise poetic prose on how to better find a grouse were so often based on the transitional edges between habitats.  As a hunter, as a wildlife photographer, and as a nature enthusiast, I  hear the words of Aldo Leopold when I see sun-dappled forest ahead and find my feet moving enthusiastically toward a sunny edge.  When I see the young aspen poking up, the stumps and slash piles, the story of localized destruction that used to turn my stomach, I now find I am old enough to see the beauty and the promise of renewal.  I now see the ecological edge that nurtures a rapid pace of life and sends that pulse in shock-waves deep into the older, shaded forests, much like a heart sending life blood through a body.  There are places to protect, and there are places to harvest.  Wisdom in conservation is to know the difference.

All images were made at the edges of logging operations in the public lands of Wisconsin, amid the mosaic of forest management practices.  I used a Canon 7D Mark I with a Canon EF 400mm f 5.6 L lens.