Looking for Signs of Spring? Check the Calendar!

This being April in Wisconsin, the signs of spring we’re all yearning for, are often unpredictable, at best, but one place you can always find some is on the calendar! There are a number of dates for interesting events – Earth Day and others – that happen only in April, and these are guaranteed harbingers of spring and the warmer, longer days ahead. Following is a summary of such dates I’ve been collecting.

April 12: The annual Midwest Crane Count

If you’re free from 5:30 to 7:30 a.m. on Saturday, the 12th, you can join one of the largest citizen-based wildlife surveys in the world, to monitor the abundance and distribution of cranes in the upper midwest. This spring phenomenon was initiated by the International Crane Foundation in 1976 to locate and study the sandhill cranes in one Wisconsin county only. It has grown over the years, and now includes reporting on both sandhills and whooping cranes in over 100 counties spread across six upper midwest states.

Visit the International Crane Foundation, near Baraboo. (photo courtesy, ICF)

April 15: The opening day at the International Crane Foundation’s 2014 Visistor Season

At ICF, which will be open everyday from 9 to 5 p.m. beginning Tuesday, April 15th until October 31st, you can wander hiking trails, and get acquainted with individual birds from all 15 species of the world’s cranes. ICF is located just off U.S. Hwy. 12, between Baraboo and Wisconsin Dells. The following new guided tours will be offered this year: Flyways, Culture and Cranes, Whooping Cranes, and Conservation Leadership.

 

April 19:  John Muir’s Birthday celebration in Marquette County

You’re invited to celebrate the birthday of one of the greatest naturalists of all times – John Muir – in Marquette County (where Muir once lived) with The Wisconsin Friends of John Muir.  The celebration is co-sponsored by the WFJM, the Ice Age Trail, and Marquette County Health Communities.

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

The party plans include an Earth Day clean up and guided hike of John Muir Park, on Hwy. O, between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. and, starting at 1:30  p.m., a family-friendly concert, featuring The Prairie Sands Band,  followed by birthday cake at Vaughhn Hall, 55 W. Montello St., in Montello. 

April 22: Earth Day conference at the Nelson Institute

Actress/activisit Rosario Dawson, British science fiction author China Mieville, leading ecologists Erle Ellis and Kevin Noone, and Paul Robbins, Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies (at UW-Madison) will be among the features speakers at the 8th annual Nelson Earth Day Conference. “Earth: To Be Determined” is the theme of the day-long program which will explore challenges and opprotunities presented by rapid-scale changes in the global environment. All events are at Monona Terrace Conference and Convention Center, 1 John Nolen Drive, in Madison.

A campsite at Newport State Park, where a Work Play Earth Day event is scheculed April 19. (Photo taken by Nate Beaty, July 23, 2013; accessed at Flickr, April 4, 2014.)

April 19, 26, and May 3: Work Play Earth Day in the Wisconsin State Park System

You can get your hands dirty planting, installing benches, pulling out invasives, staining picnic tables or raking up leaves and pine needles at one of the 20 state parks or forests particiapting in these “Work Play Earth Day” events planned by the Friends of Wisconsin State Parks.

(Here is a link to Flickr, for the photo above, taken by Nate Beaty.) 

Earth Day Where YOU Are

And finally, wherever YOU happen to be there’s sure to be something planned for Earth Day 2014. Where I am, for example, the Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary has programming planned all weekend, April 25th, 26th and 27th. In addition to an Electronics Recycling Drive (the 25th and 26th) and a Spring Bird Hike early Saturday morning, the Sanctuary will use the occasion to educate the public about its animal resources, including its porcupines, otters, and wolf pack.

Wherever you are in the world, there is probably something similar happening  in April – a chance to do something nice for our Mother Earth, and to get outside and enjoy the gifts of the natural world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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)