Bird & Nature Blog
A clutch of the latest stories from Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance
Righteous… not a word one encounters as much today as several decades ago when it popped up to express sincere, heartfelt approbation. If you said or did something that elicited that response from your friends, you felt you were on the right track.
Some wonderful folks are acting righteously these days and better yet we can join them. Upper Sugar River Watershed Association, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and Madison Audubon are among them.
Photo by Gail Smith
In June 2020, Madison Audubon purchased a 36 acre parcel across the road from our Otsego Marsh property. The new parcel didn’t come pre-loaded with increidble diversity and beautiful vistas. It was mostly soybean fields, a woodlot chocked full of big oaks and invasive underbrush, and a small wetland with great potential. One needed a creative imagination to envision what it could be — and fortunately our visionary staff, board members, volunteers, and donors had a vision!
The resident managers and land steward at Goose Pond Sanctuary coordinate the restoration work at Otsego Marsh, and began getting the new parcel into shape by removing a bunch of the brushy, invasive buckthorn in the woodlot’s understory that was choking out the good native species. And beginning on January 6, 2021, we began installing wetland scrapes!
Photo by Brenna Marsicek / Madison Audubon
The 2020-2021 Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp (aka the Duck Stamp) is now available. Please buy one or a bunch soon. I just bought several even though my duck hunting days are probably past. The reason:
Revenue from the Duck Stamp supports the National Wildlife Refuges and the Waterfowl Production Areas. The Wildlife Refuges are big and mostly well known as are the habitat and wildlife they offer.
Goose Pond is a prairie pothole, one of the most threatened types of wetlands in the world and a mecca for wildlife. They’re biodiversity hotspots.
They’re also in danger of destruction in Wisconsin. These shallow ponds with fluctuating water levels fall under the "non-federal" or “isolated" wetlands category. Current proposed legislation seeks to eliminate any permitting or oversight by agencies like the WDNR and would allow developers to destroy and build over these wildlife havens.
Photo by Arlene Koziol
