Conservation Leaders and Legends: John Muir

When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I’ve been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures. – John Muir

John Muir wrote the words above in late life, looking back on the forces that shaped him. They form the first lines of the autobiographical The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), and for me they perfectly capture the youthful enthusiasm for the natural world that never left Muir.

His work to preserve the Yosemite Valley, his push for a system of wilderness preservation that became our national parks, his leadership of the Sierra Club from its founding in 1892 until his death in 1914, and his beautiful writings have all earned the Scot-born Muir a place in the hearts of so many.

Ken Burns who made the widely seen 12-part documentary about our national parks believes Muir is even more important than his reputation suggests. Burns said that during the making of the documentary, “as we got to know him” Muir began to seem an equal to the “highest individuals in our country . . .people who have had a transformational effect on who we are.”

(The photo on the left, made by Francis M. Fritz in 1907, is from Wikimedia Commons.)

A Scottish Boy on the Wisconsin Prairie

Not surprisingly, some of Muir’s most ardent admirers today are here in Wisconsin – based in Marquette County where the Muir family settled when they emigrated from Scotland in 1849. John was a lad of 11 then and his official school days were behind him, but some of his happiest boyhood years still ahead. The family of Daniel and Ann Muir, including 3 sons and 5 daughters (the youngest, born in Wisconsin), faced long, hard days working to build a home and farm on the Wisconsin prairie.

As the oldest son, John in particular felt this burden,nonetheless he still managed to educate himself in geometry, literature and philosophy, and perhaps even more importantly, “to botanize.” That was a favorite activity of John’s and the term he used again and again, to describe his happy wanderings and investigations into the natural world he loved so much.

John Muir, c1875. (A Carelton Watkins photo, from Wikimedia Commons)

Sources for the biographical details of Muir’s life can be found so many places, but you shouldn’t miss the John Muir Exhibit at the Sierra Club website. Before you go exploring there, however, I hope you’ll linger here a while to learn about Muir in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin Friends of John Muir

There are still today many descendants of the Scotch and Irish immigrants that were the Muirs’ neighbors in the 19th century. Contemporary residents give a lot of attention to their shared John Muir legacy, I was told by Kathleen McGwin, a descendant of one Muir neighbor. There are always new plans afoot to spotlight the locations and landscapes in Marquette County that are part of John Muir’s story.

Two years ago citizens calling themselves the John Muir Legacy Group decided to adopt a more formal structure, and they’ve incorporated as the Wisconsin Friends of John Muir. Tiffany Lodholz, president of the Friends, said they have 60 active members, as well as nearly 200 Facebook fans, and a busy calendar of hikes, parties, and educational talks.

Mark Martin, conservationist and WFJM board member, points out the rare wetland plants of John Muir Memorial Park to a group touring with Naturalist Jounreys last fall. (Photo by Ed Pembleton © 2014 — used with permission)

What drew Tiffany and Kathleen to John Muir in the first place? I asked them via email, and both responded that it was his writings. “I was first inspired by Muir when I read his works in college as an environmental earth science student,” said Tiffany, adding that “moving to the community he grew up in was incredibly serendipitous. . .”

August flowers along the Ice Age Trail in John Muir Memorial Park (photo courtesy of Kathleen McGwin, WFJM)

Kathleen McGwin, active with the Montello Historic Preservation Society, as well as Wisconsin Friends of John Muir, is a writer herself. Together with fellow WFJM board member Daryl Christensen, she has published Muir is Still Here: A Marquette County Journal of Discovery, a book described by the Sierra Club as “part travel guide, part chronicle of the past, part guide to self-discovery.”

The Seeds of an Idea: the National Parks

When he was 22. John Muir left Marquette County and attended the University of Wisconsin for nearly three years before beginning a series of wanderings and epic walks that eventually led him to California and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Though that is where he found his life’s true purpose, Muir scholars routinely credit his growing-up years in Wisconsin for planting the germ of an idea – parks to preserve wild things – in the young boy’s mind.

Ennis Lake (the Muirs called this Fountain Lake when they settled here) at John Muir Memorial Park. (Photo courtesy of Karen Weiss, WFJM)

Muir wrote enthusiastically of his those years in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth:

The sudden plash into pure wildness – baptism in Nature’s warm heart – how utterly happy it made us! Nature streaming into us . . .Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness!:

And in a speech to the Sierra Club in November, 1895, he too, credited Wisconsin for planting the seeds of wildlife preservation:

The preservation of specimen sections of natural flora–bits of pure wilderness–was a fond, favorite notion of mine long before I heard of national parks. When my father came from Scotland, he settled in a fine wild region of Wisconsin, beside a small glacier lake bordered with white pond-lilies…

Marquette County and John Muir’s Legacy

Muir made several well-documented, but unsuccessful attempts during his lifetime to purchase and protect some of the Wisconsin landscape he loved. Over time, though, this wish of Muir’s has materialized, and by 1957, Marquette County had acquired enough of the land that the Muirs had originally settled on to establish the John Muir Memorial Park. In 1972, though still owned by Marquette County, the park was named a state natural area, and in 1988, the Sierra Club purchased additional land which became the park’s restored prairie.

Lily pads in June at John Muir Memorial Park.

(The photo above is from Joshua Mayer’s photostream at Flickr.)

Though located right in the busy southern half of the state, Marquette County today still seems like a place that would please John Muir. It’s true that a 60-minute drive in almost any direction from Montello, the county seat, will end in a busy metropolitan area, but within the county itself you’ll never be far from wildlife and nature preserves; this is a place where you might even encounter some of Wisconsin’s precious few whooping cranes.

Just ask the president of the Wisconsin Friends of John Muir. Tiffany Lodholz has seen them – whooping cranes in the wild: “for the first time last summer with my 3-year-old daughter. They were in a field down the road from my house. It was amazing!”

Field with sandhills, and 2 whooping cranes; Marquette County, 2013. (Photo courtesty of Tiffany Lodholz)

The Winter Homes of Whooping Cranes

If you’re looking for news of Wisconsin’s whooping cranes – where are they now that it’s frigid January, you wonder? – I can point you to two sources of (mostly) good-news items. The first, Operation Migration, is celebrating their own very-good-news story this week: the safe arrival in Florida of the 8 young “ultralight” cranes.

The cranes that have been trained to fly with ultralight aircraft since hatching, and have been learning the migration route with those ultralights since leaving Wisconsin on October 2nd, touched down Sunday at St. Mark’s Wildlife Refuge. Their pilot led them in close to their winter pensite in the salt marshes of St. Mark’s, then rapidly accelerated into higher altitudes, too fast for the cranes to follow. That was the last flight they would ever take with their ultralight “surrogate parent”.

2009 photo of cranes following an ultralight; by Tim Ross; at Wikimedia Commons.

The cranes must have been surprised as the aircraft took off, but, according to OM eyewitnesses, they quickly responded to the signals coming from costumed handlers with whooping crane brood callers a short distance below them. As they landed, the next and final phase of their training to learn a migration route and ultimately become free, wild creatures was beginning. More about this story below, but first, a digression into the second source of whooping crane data – periodic population updates for Wisconsin’s cranes, officially called the Eastern Migratory Population (EMP).

International Crane Foundation photo of the whooping crane winter pen site in Florida; taken January 2007.

Whooping Crane Population Reports

The Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership monitors the EMP and issues updates, making them available on the front page of their website. The most recent update covers the time period November 15 to December 15, 2013, and it shows a pretty good “snapshot” of where our cranes have gone; or at least where they were in mid-December. I’ll summarize the major points, but you can access this WCEP report directly for particular details, such as “long-term-missing” and other categories that affect the totals. There is quite a bit to study and learn from in each report.

Here are the highlights of the December 15th report: There were approximately 18 EMP cranes reported in Kentucky and Tennessee; 2 were counted in Georgia, 6 in Florida, and 24 in Alabama. But the majority, 42 of them, remained close to home in our neighboring states of Illinois and Indiana.

That was well before the polar vortex sent overnight temperatures plunging below zero all over the midwest. Have the 42 that were counted in our neighboring states in December now moved on? Are more Wisconsin cranes staying in Alabama, rather than Florida, for most of their migration? These are questions a future EMP update may help answer. I’ll be sure to mention it here when WCEP issues the next one.

Data from Operation Migration

Just as WCEP provides much data on the whooping cranes that we in Wisconsin call “ours,” so too, does Operation Migration. They are exclusively concerned with one particular aspect of establishing this new flock of whooping cranes, that being the training of some of the new chicks hatched each year to follow the ultralights. So by necessity, their focus is a narrow one. But it is so deep in details – from the aircraft, to the pilots, to the cranes-in-training.

Photo courtesy International Crane Foundation

And you can’t forget the ground crew that travels along the migration route to set up the travel pens and carry equipment and when necessary retrieve a crane that has gone astray; nor the people along the route that open their homes and fields to host the crew and the cranes. Then add the constant worry and tedium waiting for the right weather to allow all this to happen. Whew! That’s quite a list, and I know it just scratches the surface. All this, and then some, is described everyday in the Field Journal at OM’s website. You don’t want to miss it.

The cranes that arrived in Florida this week, have now begun a transition that Joe Duff, lead pilot for OM, has called “their gentle release into the wild.” Every step of this process will be chronicled at the Field Journal. In fact, it’s best described in a post Joe wrote when the Class of 2012 arrived at St. Mark’s a year ago. Read his “Just As It Should Be” to see what happens next.

Canada’s Highest Honor Presented to Dr. George Archibald

World citizen George Archibald, the co-founder of the International Crane Foundation, has been presented a new and distinguished high honor. At a ceremony in December in Ottawa, Ontario, Dr. Archibald was presented with the Order of Canada, on behalf of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

George Archibald, after a speaking engagement at The Ridges Sanctuary in Door County in July 2012.

A press release from ICF called this award “the cornerstone of the Canadian Honours System” and noted that it was awarded to the ICF co-founder in recognition of “his visionary leadership in international conservation efforts over the past 40 years.” Dr. Archibald, who has become a global citizen through his work on behalf of endangered cranes, is a Canadian native, and also a long-time resident of Wisconsin.

In recent years he has been presented many prestigious honors including the first Dan W. Lufkin Prize from The Audubon Society last year. In 2006, Dr. Archibald was chosen as the inaugural winner of the then-brand-new Indianapolis Prize, created by the Indianapolis Zoo to recognize extraordinary efforts in animal conservation.

For more than a century, Wisconsin has been a state that can boast of strong ties to some of the giants in the field of conservation, and Dr. Archibald adds more weight to that legacy. Inspired by his new honor, during January, The Badger and the Whooping Crane plans a series of posts about our conservation icons, including John Muir and Aldo Leopold. More will be written about George Archibald, too. These posts will all be headlined “Wisconsin’s Conservation Legends.” I hope you will look for them!