Endangered Species

May 15th is Endangered Species Day, a day set aside by Congress in 2005 to recognize the importance of protecting and preserving rare and endangered species worldwide. The peregrine falcon, once close to extirpation in North America because of DDT, has made a remarkable comeback over the last 25 years.

In the early 1990’s, a small group of dedicated falconers and scientists began breeding and raising falcons in captivity as part of a reintroduction program in North America. Their preliminary efforts were successful but limited to cities and areas where nesting boxes had been erected on skyscrapers and power plant smokestacks. Peregrines didn’t begin returning to their historical nesting sites on the Mississippi River in greater numbers until Bob Anderson, founder of the Raptor Resource Project in Decorah, Iowa, raised a brood of chicks in a box attached to a cliff in Effigy Mounds National Monument. In his essay, ‘Bringing the Duck Hawk Home,’ Anderson describes how he and his colleagues, “built a special chamber designed to look like a cliff ledge, in which eighteen young peregrines were raised in 1998 and 1999… [because] it was our belief that this chamber would imprint peregrines to rock face rather than man-made objects.”

In June of 2006, as part of my project to document the prairie restoration of Maiden Rock Bluff, I attended a banding of peregrine chicks organized by Bob Anderson of the Raptor Resource Project. Dan Berger, the falconer who recorded the last pair of peregrines to nest on Maiden Rock Bluff in 1954, joined Anderson’s team of volunteers that day. Three chicks were banded at this historic nesting site for the 5th year in a row. During the banding, a pair of adult falcons circled overhead.

The Long Family

I met Mabel Long shortly after the West Wisconsin Land Trust (WWLT) purchased Maiden Rock Bluff through a partnership with the State of Wisconsin in 2004. Mabel was the daughter of Charles and Christina Long, dairy farmers who purchased the bluff and the surrounding farmland as newlyweds in 1915. Mabel shared a box of old family photographs with me which I scanned and included in my book about the bluff.

When Mabel’s parents bought their 248 acre farm in 1915, there were already over 1,000 farms in Pepin County, most of them small, family owned dairies. Between 1870 and 1910, cultivated land in the county grew more than tenfold, from 5,271 acres to 61,500. By the 1930’s many of the farmed bluff tops overlooking Lake Pepin had been transformed from native oak savanna to a patchwork of deeply eroded hillsides, fields, and cut-over woodlots. Remnants of the original goat prairies–dry grassy areas where the terrain was too steep or rocky to cultivate–were all that remained.

By 2004, the oak savanna and goat prairie on Maiden Rock Bluff was in danger of disappearing altogether due to the unchecked growth and proliferation of red cedar trees. Part of the project of restoration has involved ridding the bluff, especially the south-facing hillside above the limestone cliff, of these red cedars so the native oaks can thrive again.

The Long Family on Maiden Rock Bluff; standing far left, Fred and Milton Long; fourth from left, Mabel Long; seated in profile, Christina Long; standing far right, Harold Long, circa 1940’s.

Daylighting the Oaks

‘Daylighting the oaks' is a term that refers to the removal of unwanted trees or brush that overtake a native oak savanna. Both non-native and native species like the red cedars seen here on Maiden Rock Bluff, directly behind the large bur oak in the photo on the left, can crowd or inhibit the growth of saplings and more mature trees. By clearing these cedars as well as other invasive trees and shrubs, oak trees are given more space to spread out and grow in a more natural, open shape. Daylighting also encourages the growth of oak saplings by opening the understory to sunlight.

The photo on the left was taken in the early spring of 2007, a few years before restoration work on Maiden Rock Bluff began. The photo on the right was taken from the same spot after the West Wisconsin Land Trust cleared many of the red cedars during a winter logging operation. Here, and elsewhere along the exposed, south-facing bluff, ‘daylighting the oaks’ continues to encourage the seeds of native grasses and forbs to take root and flourish in many of the places where they had gone dormant years earlier.

FIRE

Before the prairies in the Upper Mississippi River valley were plowed under by settlers in the late nineteenth century, the Dakota people set fire to the land in late fall or early spring to drive game and clear brush. Fire was once an elemental force on the prairie, central to the Dakota way of life. When these tribal people were pushed out of their villages and forced to leave their ancestral home after the war of 1862, seasonal fires ceased. Once settlers began clearing bluff top prairies for cultivation, the oak savannas of the Driftless region rapidly diminished in size. In some places, they disappeared altogether.

By the mid-20th century, fewer than 500 acres of intact oak savanna remained, less than 0.01% of the original 5.5 million acres. In the 1990’s, a new movement to restore oak savannas, as well as flood plain forests and sand prairies along the Mississippi River, began in earnest. When the Wisconsin DNR took over management of the Maiden Rock Bluff State Natural Area in 2011, they reintroduced fire, incorporating prescribed burns into their long-term restoration plan.