TRANSACTIONS

of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Volume 87 • 1999

TRANSACTIONS

of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Volume 87 • 1999

Editor William J. Urbrock

Department of Religious Studies

University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

Oshkosh, Wisconsin 54901

Managing Editor Patricia Allen Duyfhuizen

Department of English

University of Wisconsin Eau Claire

Eau Claire, Wisconsin 54702-4004

Transactions welcomes articles that explore features of the State

of Wisconsin and its people. Articles written by Wisconsin

authors on topics other than Wisconsin sciences, arts and letters

are occasionally published. Manuscripts and queries should be

addressed to the editor.

Submission requirements: Submit three copies of the manu¬

script, double-spaced, to the editor. Abstracts are suggested for

science/technical articles. The style of the text and references

may follow that of scholarly writing in the author’s field. Please

prepare figures with reduction in mind.

© 1999 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

All rights reserved

ISSN 0084-0505

For information on membership in the Academy,

call (608) 263-1692.

Contents

TRANSACTIONS

Volume 87 • 1 999

From the Editor v

Part One: Aldo Leopold Commemorative Articles

A Sense of Place 1

Nina Leopold Bradley

The years the Leopold family had at their Sand County farm, The Shack, were a slow

sensitizing of people to land. “A Sense of Place” is the story of those years.

<cThe Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and the Essay 5

J. Baird Callicott

A comparison of the text of the speech Aldo Leopold gave at the dedication of the

Wisconsin Arboretum and Wildlife Refuge in Madison on June 17,1 934, and the very

different published version thereof reveals that Leopold conceived of ecological

restoration at the Arboretum and other properties primarily as a benchmark of land

health serving the more general goal of ecological rehabilitation everywhere.

Aldo Leopold and Environmental Citizenship 23

Susan Flader

Aldo Leopold was profoundly conscious of the American democratic tradition within

which he was working, and he thought hard throughout his career about the meanings

and implications of environmental citizenship.

Part Two: Other Current Articles

Relationships between Herbaceous Vegetation and Environmental

Factors along a Restored Prairie-Oak Opening Ecotone 37

Craig Annen and Jonathan Lyon

Ecological analysis of restored communities linked with soil analyses provides

additional insights on plant-soil dynamics.

‘Pulp Fiction Edna Ferher’s Come and Get It and Ecofeminism 51

Ellen Argyros

Some elements of Ferber’s novel Come and Get It (a vivid portrait of the logging

industry in the early days of Wisconsin) suggest that Ferber can be identified as a kind

of proto-ecofeminist (ex. her linking lumber baron Barney Glasgow’s “rape” of the

land with his desire to seduce his friend’s granddaughter). Finally, however, Ferber’s

sympathies are not so much with those who share her gender or stance towards the

environment as with those who share her values about the moral benefits of hard work.

Hi

Timing of Spawning and Fry Emergence of Brown Trout

in a Central Wisconsin Stream 63

Ed L. Avery and Kent Niermeyer

The spawning period and timing of fry emergence for wild brown trout was

documented in a central Wisconsin stream to provide insights into potential wading-

related fry mortalities resulting from a proposed early spring catch-and-release trout

fishing season.

Detections of Red-Shouldered Hawks (Buteo lineatus)

Using High Volume Tape-Recorded Broadcasts 73

Terry Balding

A greater volume (130 db) conspecific tape-recorded broadcast may result in more

red-shouldered hawk detections than with the volume attainable from a conventional

portable tape player.

A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen ,

Green Lake County , Wisconsin 79

Thomas L. Eddy

Mitchell Glen supports a climax forest “island” that occupies a narrow post-glacial

gorge along a dolomitic escarpment three miles southeast of Green Lake in east

central Wisconsin. The glen’s shaded cliffs with cold-air drainage and springs at the

base of the gorge render a moist, cool microclimate that sustains certain species more

typical of northern Wisconsin.

Measuring the Degree of Variation in Wisconsin Pyganodon grandis 105

Joan Jass and Jeanette Glenn

Analysis of freshwater bivalve shell traits revealed a high degree of intraspecific

variation and regional differences correlating with the state’s major ecological

regions.

Fisheries Management in the Great Lakes:

The Evolution of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission 1 1 1

Jeffrey J. Ripp

This paper provides an institutional analysis of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission,

describing how the Commission has expanded beyond its original study-and- advise

mandate to become an important institution for coordinating Great lakes fishery

management.

IV

From the Editor

You know you re from Wisconsin if. . .

. . . you define summer as three months of bad sledding.

. . . you have experienced frostbite and sunburn on the same

weekend.

. . . you have more miles on your snowblower than your car.

. . . your Fourth of July picnic was moved indoors due to frost.

. . . you define swimming season as Labor Day weekend.

. . . you design Halloween costumes to fit over snowsuits.

. . . you decided to have a picnic this summer because it fell

on a weekend.

Sound familiar? While this group of one-liners was for¬

warded to me by a friend in Texas, Wisconsinites are used

to sharing similar sentiments with each other about Wiscon¬

sin weather, especially its frequent long hard winters. Let’s

face it: the weather in Wisconsin is a source of endless fasci¬

nation (and, at times, frustration) to residents and visitors

alike.

There are, of course, many positive sides to the Wiscon¬

sin weather story. From my own weather experiences over

just this past year I can bring to mind scintillating star shows

in the unobstructed winter skies above Door County; a frost-

swathed mid-March morning in Oshkosh when every tree

and bush sparkled and tinkled like a swaying crystal chan¬

delier in the dawning sunlight; balmy evenings in late spring

and early summer when the scent of lilacs graced my walks

around our neighborhood; a cool, drizzly day that turned a

hike along the Wisconsin River at the Dells into a sort of

walk through an Impressionist painting; hot, hot days in

mid-July that called out a profusion of wildflowers, especially

the roadside chicory and fields of Queen-Anne’s-lace, purple

knotweed (a.k.a. knapweed or star thistle), and coneflowers;

sunny days at the Cedarburg Bog in Saukville and at the

Whitefish Dunes State Park along Lake Michigan; and a pic¬

ture-postcard summer day at the beginning of August when

white clouds flung carelessly across a deep blue sky seemed

to gently chide the carefully patterned green and gold farm

fields of southwestern Wisconsin between Platteville and

Madison. You know you re from Wisconsin if. . . you've ever

enjoyed days like these.

v

I was reminded of what a special place

Wisconsin is by the fourteen school teach¬

ers from twelve other states (from as nearby

as Illinois and Michigan and as far away as

Hawaii, North Carolina, and Massachusetts)

who spent a month studying with me on the

University of Wisconsin Oshkosh campus

from mid-June to mid-July. While they en¬

joyed engaging in intellectual pursuits dur¬

ing our National Endowment for the Hu¬

manities seminar, they literally reveled in our

trips together around some of the eastern

parts of the state. Their visits to beautiful

Crescent Beach at Algoma; Summer Fest in

Milwaukee; an evening pops concert at But¬

termilk Park in Fond du Lac; State Street,

the Wisconsin State Capitol, and the Uni¬

versity of Wisconsin campus in Madison;

the International Crane Foundation, with its

marvelous restored prairie, in Baraboo; and

various places around Green Lake, the Fox

Cities, and Oshkosh, invariably resulted in

praises for the people, places, flora and

fauna, geology, and — yes! — even the

weather of Wisconsin. You know you ve vis¬

ited Wisconsin if . . . you have memories to

treasure like these.

This issue of Transactions features articles

we have grouped into two sections, each of

which showcases Wisconsin and its natural

and human environments.

The three featured contributions to the

opening section of Transactions pay tribute

to one of Wisconsin’s (and the nation’s) pio¬

neer conservationists, Aldo Leopold. Many

have observed 1999 as a sort of Leopold

Year, marking as it does the fiftieth anniver¬

sary of the publication of Leopold’s classic,

A Sand County Almanac. The Wisconsin

Academy has joined wholeheartedly in the

commemoration. The Academy’s 129th

Annual Conference at Stevens Point in April

featured a day-long plenary session on “Aldo

Leopold and Conservation on Private

Lands.” In October the Academy sponsored

a national conference in Madison dedicated

to “Building on Leopold’s Legacy: Conser¬

vation for a New Century.” Honorary co¬

chairs for this conference were Nina Leopold

Bradley of the Aldo Leopold Foundation

and Gaylord Nelson, former U.S. Senator

and now counselor for the Wilderness Soci¬

ety, which Leopold helped found in 1935.

An entire issue of our sister publication, The

Wisconsin Academy Review, also was devoted

to Leopold and his legacy.

The three articles on Leopold are revised

versions of lectures originally presented as

part of an extended Aldo Leopold Lecture

Series sponsored by the University of Wis¬

consin Arboretum in Madison last year. An¬

drew Hipp deserves special thanks for his

efforts in helping make these lectures avail¬

able to Transactions. We are especially de¬

lighted that Nina Leopold Bradley con¬

sented to let us include her homage to her

father, including her reminiscences of life at

the now famous Leopold family “Shack.”

Also of great interest are the contributions

of J. Baird Callicott and Susan Flader. The

former presents an incisive analysis of the

important speech Leopold delivered at the

dedication of the Wisconsin Arboretum and

Wildlife Refuge and the extensively revised

version he subsequently published in Parks

and Recreation magazine. The latter offers us

valuable insights into the meanings and im¬

plications of environmental citizenship, as

suggested by Leopold’s work and writings.

You know you re from Wisconsin (certainly in

spirit!) if . . . you share some way in the wil¬

derness vision of Aldo Leopold.

In the second section of articles, Ellen

Argyros takes a fresh look from an

ecofeminist perspective at Come and Get It,

a novel by one of Wisconsin’s most

celebrated writers, Edna Ferber. Other

articles in this section concentrate on

vi

Wisconsin’s natural resources. Craig Annen

and Jonathan Lyon present a study of the

Curtis Prairie restoration project at the

University of Wisconsin Arboretum, while

Thomas Eddy documents the vascular flora

of Mitchell Glen in Green Lake County.

Terry Balding takes readers to another part

of Wisconsin with his study of red¬

shouldered hawk detections along the lower

Chippewa River. Waterways of Wisconsin

and its neighbors provide the focus for the

other three studies presented in this section:

Ed Avery’s research on brown trout in

Emmons Creek in central Wisconsin; the

analyses by Joan Jass and Jeanette Glenn of

museum specimens of a freshwater bivalve

mollusk abundant throughout Wisconsin;

and Jeffrey Ripp’s historical review of the

evolution of the Great Lakes Fisheries

Commission.

I hope all readers of this issue of Trans¬

actions will find the contents both challeng¬

ing and enlightening. Dare we forecast a

“warm and sunny” reading experience? Ah,

but as my son will remind me when next he

ventures a mid-winter visit from Atlanta to

Oshkosh:

You know you re from Wisconsin if. . .

. . . the snow on your roof in September weighs

more than you do.

. . . you ve taken your kids trick-or-treating in

a blizzard.

. . . driving is better in the winter because the

potholes get filled with snow.

Bill Urbrock

The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters was

chartered by the State Legislature on March 16, 1870, as a

membership organization serving the people of Wisconsin. Its

mission is to encourage investigation in the sciences, arts and

letters and to disseminate information and share knowledge.

Nina Leopold Bradley

A Sense of Place

Today I speak to you of my own experience, my own deep

attachment to a particular place. This attachment hap¬

pened over time, with my family, on a sand farm along the

Wisconsin River — land that was neither grand nor dramatic,

but mundane, humbled, and degraded. It seems to have hap¬

pened by slow accrual, like the growth of a coral reef. I dwell

in this place and am finally a part of this place.

Recently I came across a splendid little book by Deborah

Tall, who inspired me with the following statement: “How does

land evoke our love? Surely not just driving through scenery or

landscape , treating nature as a prop.”

This makes me think of a quip in The New Yorker not long

ago, recording two secretaries in conversation after their drive-

through vacations. It went something like this:

“But you get so tired with nothing but scenery all the time.”

“Yes, but you get even more tired and bored without any scenery.”

“Well, I guess. But I like it better when there’s mostly landscape

and not so much scenery.”

“Well, I guess. But then most of the scenery was gone when we

were there. There were just mountains and things.”

It seems all too often we hurry through “scenery,” without

any attempt to engage the land. This may be the price we pay

for our mobility and rootlessness.

On our sand farm along the Wisconsin River I was able to

get inside the scenery and the landscape. I became a living part

of a living place. As we worked with family, friends, and neigh¬

bors to restore health to the abused land, we were experienc¬

ing the slow sensitizing of people to land. We learned how to

look, how to dwell, and how to think about land. This was

sick land but rich country for the growth of perception.

No one knew better than my father, Aldo Leopold, the joy

of wild, unspoiled land. His love of wilderness was passionate

and enduring. He had spent immense energy in protecting wil¬

derness and trying to understand its dramatic complexity. He

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realized that wilderness was important in

part so that we might retain the capacity to

compare unspoiled land with lands more in¬

tensively altered by human economic activ¬

ity. My father’s rationale for wilderness pro¬

tection was not just recreational or scenic,

but scientific, biological, political, economic,

and deeply aesthetic. He wrote, “. . . the raw

wilderness gives definition and meaning to

the human enterprise . . . the ability to see

the cultural value of wilderness boils down,

in the last analysis, to a question of intellec¬

tual humility.”

In the 1930s Aldo visited the Rio Gavilan

in northern Mexico. This river still ran clear

between mossy, tree-lined banks. Fires

burned periodically without any apparent

damage, and deer thrived in the midst of

their natural predators, wolves and moun¬

tain lions. “It is here,” Leopold reflected

years later, “I first realized . . . that all my

life I had seen only sick land . . . here was a

biota still in perfect aboriginal health.” In

Song of the Gavilan he wrote:

This song of the waters is audible to every

ear, but there is other music in these hills,

by no means audible to all. To hear even a

few notes of it you must first live here for a

long time, and you must know the speech of

hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when

the campfire is low and the Pleiades have

climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen

for a wolf to howl, and think hard of every¬

thing you have seen and tried to understand.

Then you may hear it — a vast pulsing har¬

mony — its score inscribed on a thousand

hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants

and animals, its rhythms spanning the sec¬

ond and the centuries.

Here, the vital new idea for my father was

the concept of biotic health. In this essay

Aldo grasped the idea of the land commu¬

nity and the need for a deeper understand¬

ing of the functioning of land as an interre¬

lated, indivisible whole. Through his intel¬

lectual struggle to better understand the

system as a whole, there evolved within him

a continuing love and respect for land — a

deepening spirituality. He would now in¬

spire others along the same route.

The ecological integrity of the Gavilan

was put into perspective when my father vis¬

ited the slick, clean forests of Germany in

1933 — spruce trees in straight lines, the for¬

est floor devoid of vegetation. Litter piled up

on the forest floor as a dry, sterile blanket

which smothered all natural undergrowth,

even moss.

Leopold came to realize that what was

lacking in the German forests was wildness —

not wilderness per se — but a lack of bio¬

diversity. He wrote of Germany,

The forest landscape is deprived of a certain

exuberance which arises from a rich variety

of plants fighting with each other for a place

in the sun. It is almost as if the geological

clock had been set back to those dim ages

when there were only pines and ferns. I never

realized before that the melodies of nature are

music only when played against the under¬

tones of evolutionary history. In the German

forest one now hears only a dismal fugue!

My father’s experience in the German

landscape deepened his appreciation of eco¬

logical integrity — his conviction of a rela¬

tionship between ecological diversity and the

stability of the land organism.

And so it was an extraordinary event

when Aldo Leopold purchased his Wiscon¬

sin farm. Here, the frontier story had come

full circle from wilderness to farm land to

waste. Here was the perfect metaphor for

“sick land.”

In A Sand County Almanac he wrote, “My

2

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BRADLEY: A Sense of Place

own farm was selected for its lack of good¬

ness and its lack of highway; indeed my

whole neighborhood lies in a backwash of

the River Progress.”

Gross understatement! The sandy soils,

outwash from the glacier, had produced one

or two crops of corn — perhaps a crop of

buckwheat or rye before the soils were ex¬

hausted. Any timber had been cut. The

corned out fields were coming up in sand

burrs and quack grass. Sand burrs in our

socks were effective reminders.

There was little left to support a farm

family. The previous owner had finally given

up and moved to California, the farm house

having burned to the ground. The only re¬

maining structure was an old chicken coop,

waist deep in chicken and cow manure.

What could be more of a challenge for a

bunch of teenagers than repairing the

chicken coop. Weekend after weekend, the

Leopold family worked to make the chicken

coop more habitable— cleaning out manure,

constructing a fireplace, attaching a bunk

house, a new roof, drilling a small sand-

point well, and many other items contrib¬

uting to comfort.

The “Shack” became a family enterprise

to which each member contributed: cutting

and splitting wood, building bird houses for

martins, screech owls, and bluebirds.

In my father’s quiet way we finally were

led to understand his direction: what did this

land look like before white man took it away

from the Indians. Reconstruction of the na¬

tive landscape became our aim. We now re¬

alize this was one of the earliest attempts at

ecological restoration.

From April to October scarcely a week¬

end went by that someone did not plant or

transplant something — butterfly weed,

tamarack, wahoo and oak, penstemon and

puccoon. Spring vacation became the prin¬

cipal planting season. Each year we planted

some 3,000 native pines on the land. We

planted them with shovels so sharp they sang

and hummed in our wrists as they sliced the

earth. We planted a mosaic of conifers, hard¬

woods, and prairie to restore health and

beauty to the community.

In winter we banded resident birds. We

recorded daily, weekly, seasonal events on

the land — tracks of animals in the snow, ar¬

rival of migratory geese, courtship of wood¬

cock, etc. Here in reality Father’s statement

rang true — “Keeping records enhances the

pleasure of the search, and the chance of

finding order and meaning in these events.”

It was our mother whose enthusiasm sus¬

tained the project. Mother worked as hard

as anyone, planting, weeding, whatever the

enterprise. She was “chief sawyer” as the

gang cut good oak to cook our grub and

warm our Shack.

With Mother’s Spanish background she

taught us Spanish songs, and each evening

the guitar concert filled the old shack until

weariness forced us to our bunks.

In years of drought, our struggling

plantings did not survive. We learned that

“sun, wind and rain” and the thrust of life

would truly determine the outcome of all

our investment in the place.

Here in the sand counties, Aldo Leopold

initiated a different relationship with the land,

at once more personal and more universal.

From his own direct participation in the res¬

toration of the land he was to come to a

deeper appreciation of the ecological, ethi¬

cal, and aesthetic understanding of land. He

gained a new sense of belonging to some¬

thing greater than himself, a continuity with

all life through time. At the same time he

was finding new dimensions to his sense of

place — so, too, did his family members, col¬

leagues in this venture.

What happened involved the senses, the

memory, the history of family. It came from

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working on the land in all weathers, suffer¬

ing from catastrophes, enjoying its mornings

or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the

very investment of labor and feelings.

By his own actions my father instilled in

his children a love and respect for the land

community and its ecological functioning.

I now read with new perspective my

father’s statement: “There are two things

that interest me — the relationship of people

to each other and the relationship of people

to land.”

Family weekends at our sand county farm

turned out to be a place where my father put

these two concepts into practice — the rela¬

tionship of our family members to each

other and their relationship to this piece of

land. These two interests became more a way

of life than simply interests. New values were

developing somewhere within us.

At the Shack, we all became participants

in the drama of the land’s inner workings.

In the very process of restoration — of plant¬

ing, of successes and failures, of animals and

birds responding to changes — we grew in¬

creasingly to appreciate and admire the

interconnectedness of living systems.

As we transformed the land, it trans¬

formed us. This must be how a sense of place

is nurtured. My father once wrote that res¬

toration can be a ritual of self renewal. And

so it was. As we worked together, there came

love and respect for each other and for the

land community.

One of the principal achievements of A

Sand County Almanac is the recasting of our

notion of natural beauty, away from the con¬

ventionally “scenic” to the more subtle sense

that comes with ecological and evolutionary

awareness.

Through my father, my family, and this

experience I have learned to love this land.

This place has taught me how to look and

how to live, and so at last to sing its poetry.

Nina Leopold Bradley lives on the Leopold

Memorial Reserve and is a director of the Aldo

Leopold Foundation. She is a plant ecologist pres¬

ently working on prairie restoration and continu¬

ing the study of phenology started by her father

in the 1930s. Address: Aldo Leopold Founda¬

tion, Inc., El 29 19 Levee Road, Baraboo, WL

53913.

4

TRANSACTIONS

J. Baird Callicott

“The Arboretum and the University”:

The Speech and The Essay

The dedication ceremony of the University of Wisconsin

Arboretum and Wildlife Refuge occurred on June 17,

1934. Aldo Leopold had joined the faculty the previous year

as the nation’s first professor of game management, and had

been involved, as such, in the conception and design of the

Arboretum (Meine 1988). He was among those who spoke on

this occasion.

According to William R. Jordan III (personal communica¬

tion), long a member of the Arboretum staff and founding

editor of Restoration and Management Notes, in his speech

Leopold was the first person to clearly articulate the concept

of ecological restoration and provide a rationale for it. Once

more, Leopold earns the metonyms of pioneer and prophet

that so frequently accompany his name. Apparently, he is the

seminal figure in ecological restoration as he is in ecosystem-

management forestry, conservation biology, and environmental

ethics.

Here is the key passage: “Our idea in a nutshell is to recon¬

struct, primarily for the use of the University, a sample of origi¬

nal Wisconsin— a sample of what Dane County looked like

when our ancestors first arrived here during the 1840s.” Be¬

fore this central and summary statement, Leopold character¬

ized what most arboretums were about as “a collection of trees”

of one sort or another, some organized taxonomically, others —

those that were “more advanced” — organized “ecologically” as

“natural associations.” The restoration project at the Univer¬

sity of Wisconsin Arboretum was then unique and (perhaps

now as well as then) represented the most advanced concept

of what an arboretum might be.

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Leopold followed this clear articulation

of ecological restoration with a lyrical de¬

scription of “what our state was like before

we took it away from the Indians” and how

different the Lake-Wingra environs were

then from what his audience beheld in

1934. His description was organized hydro-

logically. He first described the “oak-open¬

ings” on the uplands; next the tamarack for¬

est on the Wingra marsh, “undergrown with

sphagnum moss and orchids”; then the

“wild rice bed” on the lakeshore; and finally

the lake itself, once a haven for waterfowl,

but by 1934 spoiled as a habitat for its erst¬

while avifauna and native fishes by, in all

probability, the introduction of carp. This

could all be ascertained from the “em¬

balmed” pollen grains preserved in the

marsh peat, he noted.

Next Leopold turned to the question

“why dig up these ecological graves?” And

answered that the ecological changes befall¬

ing the area, while the concomitants of the

laudable utilitarian conversion of aboriginal

Wisconsin to fair farms and productive for¬

ests, portended disutilities for the future:

“the erosion of topsoil which followed too

much wheat and too many cattle”; fires

which “burned up the peat beds in our

drained marshes”; exotic insect pests, such

as white-pine blister rust and white-oak

June-beetles “from the four corners of the

earth” — all will at a minimum “reduce our

standard of living” and may even “threaten

the actual physical existence of . . . the

present social structure.” To us Leopold may

seem to have been not only a prophet, but,

more particularly, a Jeremiah, predicting a

plague of locusts and thistles, a prophesy that

has not come true — not yet anyway. The

little island of ecological healing represented

by the Arboretum notwithstanding, the eco¬

logical changes Leopold reviews and laments

have, if anything, accelerated by many or¬

ders of magnitude since 1934. Yet here we

are today enjoying, for the moment at least,

an unprecedented standard of living and a

social structure that remains more or less in¬

tact. But remember, this was 1934. Dust

Bowl. Depression. Bolshevism entrenched in

Russia. Fascism gathering force in Germany.

The future did not look at all either certain

or bright.

Just as he had reduced the concept of eco¬

logical restoration to a “nutshell,” so he re¬

duced the rationale for it to a nutshell at the

end of his remarks. He said: “This, in a nut¬

shell, is the function of the Arboretum: a re¬

constructed sample of old Wisconsin to serve

as a bench mark, a starting point, in the long

and laborious job of building a permanent

and mutually beneficial relationship between

civilized men and a civilized landscape.”

There are two distinct lobes of meat in

this nutshell. Examine the latter first: “a mu¬

tually beneficial relationship between

civilized men and a civilized landscape.”

This is one of several formulations that

Leopold struck to crystallize his novel phi¬

losophy of conservation.

At the turn of the century two philoso¬

phies of conservation had taken shape (Hays

1939, Fox 1981). The more venerable, go¬

ing back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and

Henry David Thoreau, came to be called

“preservation.” Its most forceful and influ¬

ential champion was John Muir. Its standard

or norm and its sanctum sanctorum was wil¬

derness, “in contrast with those areas where

man and his own works dominate the land¬

scape ... an area where the earth and its

community of life are untrammeled by man,

where man is a visitor who does not re¬

main” — to quote the eventual Wilderness

Act of 1964 (Anonymous 1998: 121). The

other philosophy — call it conservation

proper — was summed up, at the turn of the

century, as the “wise use” of “natural re-

6

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CALLICOTT : “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

sources.55 Its most forceful and influential

champion was Gifford Pinchot, the first

Chief of the United States Department of

Agriculture Forest Service, by which Leo¬

pold was first employed. Pinchot’s (1947:

325-26) conservation motto was straightfor¬

wardly utilitarian and anthropocentric: “the

greatest good of the greatest number [of

people, it went without saying] for the long¬

est time.”

Leopold and another maverick ranger,

Arthur Carhart, had first proposed a system

of wilderness preserves under the auspices of

the Service on the national forests (Meine

1988). Thus we tend to think of Leopold

as having begun his career in forestry firmly

in the Pinchot camp. Then, gradually he

became enlightened by his study of ecology

and his experience on the ground in the arid

Southwest, especially in regard to range

management (Leopold 1924). The intercon¬

nection among “natural resources,” Leopold

slowly but steadily came to realize, frustrates

their separate utilitarian exploitation and

management for maximum sustained yield.

Ultimately, therefore, he left the ecologically

unenlightened Pinchot conservationist camp

and came over to the Muir preservationist

camp. His resignation from the Forest Ser¬

vice in 1928 formalized and finalized this

conversion.

But that's not the correct interpretation

of what happened. Leopold’s push for wil¬

derness preservation in the mid- 1920s was

expressed in terms of Pinchovian wise use,

not Muirian Transcendentalism (Leopold

1925). The principal use of wilderness was

recreation, which of course for Leopold

mainly meant big game hunting. And for

some regions of the country — -too rugged to

log, too remote to graze, too arid or too nu¬

trient-poor to plow — wilderness recreation

was their highest use. Leopold did reject spe-

cies-by-species, commodity-oriented re¬

source management, but not in the context

of his wilderness advocacy. In any case, by

the time he had become a university profes¬

sor he had evolved a new paradigm of con¬

servation that lay between the Pinchovian

and Muirian extremes. Leopold’s new idea

of conservation was a human harmony with

nature, as he expressed it with characteristic

grace and simplicity in the Almanac (Leo¬

pold 1949). Not hands-off Muirian nature

preservation. Not efficient Pinchovian re¬

source exploitation. Not a compromise be¬

tween the two: islands of wilderness — the

bigger and more numerous the better — sur¬

rounded by intensively, albeit efficiently,

exploited but ecologically degraded tree

plantations, grain plantations, cattle pasture

and feedlots, suburban and urban sprawl.

Rather a mutually beneficial relation be¬

tween people and land; a symbiosis; a mix¬

ture of beauty and utility in the same place

(Leopold 1939, 199U 1999 a).

Now examine the other lobe of meat in

the nutshell rationale for ecological restora¬

tion, the function of the Arboretum. It will

be a reconstructed sample of old Wisconsin,

to serve as a bench mark, a starting point,

in the long and laborious job of building a

permanent and mutually beneficial relation¬

ship between civilized men and a civilized

landscape. After having come to his novel

philosophy of conservation, incidentally,

Leopold was justifying wilderness preserva¬

tion in exactly the same terms. “A science

of land health,” he wrote, “needs, first of all,

a base datum of normality, a picture of how

healthy land maintains itself as an organism.

. . . The most perfect norm is wilderness”

(Leopold 1941: 3). Less perfect, perhaps, but

just as important is an ecologically restored

landscape. Doubtless there is intrinsic value

in a reconstructed sample of old Wisconsin

as there is in a big Western wilderness pre¬

serve. In Leopold’s rapturous description of

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the presettlement environs of Lake Wingra,

there is a palpable nostalgia and affection.

But that is not the only rationale for the Ar¬

boretum restoration project, nor is it the ra¬

tionale that Leopold explicitly states. Rather,

if we are to forge our own symbiosis with

the land upon which we now live, we need

a bench mark of land health. We found the

land in a state of good health. We have eco¬

logically transformed it and thereby compro¬

mised its health. We cannot and will not

everywhere try to take it back to what it was,

try to restore it to a previous state. “Ameri¬

cans shall look forward not backward,”

Leopold says expressly. Americans are civi¬

lized and their landscape shall be civilized.

But can it not also be healthy? Can there not

also be a mutually beneficial relationship

between civilized men and a civilized land¬

scape? At the conclusion of this article I re¬

turn to Leopold’s concept of land health

and, more particularly, its ecological and

ethical foundations.

Implicit in the possibility of a future sym¬

biosis between civilized European-Americans

and the civilized landscape upon which it is

erected is the conviction that the previous

tenants of the Upper Midwest had estab¬

lished their own mutually beneficial relation¬

ship with the place that would later be called

Wisconsin. If they could do it, maybe we

could do it. In The Story of My Boyhood and

Youth , John Muir (1913: 32) exclaims “Oh

that glorious Wisconsin wilderness!” To the

contrary, Leopold knew that Wisconsin was

not in a wilderness condition in 1 849 when

Muir first beheld it, for Leopold acknowl¬

edges that “we took it away from the Indi¬

ans.” Moreover, though not mentioned in

Leopold’s talk, present at the dedication,

dressed in full ceremonial regalia, and giv¬

ing a speech of his own, was a Winnebago

Chief, Yellow Thunder, a living reminder

that old Wisconsin was not a place where,

until the 1 840s, man was a visitor who did

not remain (Meine 1988).

Four months later, Leopold’s address at

the dedication ceremony of the University

of Wisconsin Arboretum and Wildlife Ref¬

uge was published in the October issue of

Parks and Recreation. Or was it? Leopold had

so thoroughly revised the text of his speech

that only a few phrases remained from the

original to indicate that the published essay

had evolved from it — and in so short a pe¬

riod of time, given manuscript preparation,

typesetting, proofreading, and the other

time-consuming steps from the pencil, with

which Leopold composed, to the printing

press. One memorable fragment stands

out: In the speech Leopold wrote: “This task

[preserving an environment fit to support

citizens] is of a complexity far beyond what

I can here take time to explain. I will ask

you to accept my word that it is a long and

difficult job. To perform it, a University

must have, for the daily use of its faculty and

students, a living exhibit of what Wiscon¬

sin was, what it is, and what it expects to

become.” In the essay we read, “If civiliza¬

tion consists of cooperation with plants, ani¬

mals, soil, and men, then a university which

attempts to define that cooperation must

have, for the use of its faculty and students,

places that show what the land was, what it

is, and what it ought to be.” Hard on the

heels of this remark is a disparaging men¬

tion of what an arboretum normally is, “a

‘collection’ of imported trees,” which also

echoes the speech. Finally, in the next and

last paragraph of the essay, the whole of

which is shorter than the speech, Leopold

condensed his invidious comparison of the

present ecological condition with that pre¬

vailing in the past, emphasizing the corro¬

sive combination of wetland draining and

burning. But his eye to the past remains, in

the essay as in the speech, in service of his

8

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CALLICOTT: “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

eye on the future. “At what stage in the ret¬

rogression from forest to meadow is the

marsh of greatest use to the animal commu¬

nity? How is that desirable stage to be at¬

tained and maintained? What is the role of

drainage? These questions are of national

importance. They determine the future hab¬

itability of the earth, materially and spiritu¬

ally. . . . The scientist does not know the an¬

swer — he has been too busy inventing

machines. The time has come for science to

busy itself with the earth itself. The first step

is to reconstruct a sample of what we had

to start with. That, in a nutshell, is the Ar¬

boretum.”

So here is a mystery: Why didn’t Leopold

just mail the text of his speech to Parks and

Recreation for publication? Why did he so

thoroughly rework it? Adding to the mys¬

tery is the fact that the essay purports to be

the text of a speech. In it he writes “This

Arboretum ...” as if he were actually stand¬

ing in it as he spoke. A line or two afterward

he writes “I am here to say . . .” a locution

more appropriate to a speech than to an es¬

say. Most unambiguously misleading he

writes “Take the grass marsh here under our

view . . . .” Let me hasten to say that I do

not accuse Leopold of dishonesty. Rather, it

is a most revealing example of his artistry.

By way of comparison, I am convinced that

“Thinking Like a Mountain,” Sand County's

second most famous and oft-quoted essay,

is fictional. Neither Susan Flader (1974) nor

Curt Meine (1988), Leopold’s biographers,

could find a record of such a signal event as

it purportedly recalls in Leopold’s correspon¬

dence or journals. “Thinking Like a Moun¬

tain” was written in response to a criticism

by Albert Hochbaum, who was reading and

critiquing drafts of the book that was to be¬

come the Almanac (Ribbens 1987). Hoch¬

baum had complained that Leopold came

off as elitist and superior and reminded him

that he had once been as ecologically blind

as those he criticized (Ribbens 1987). In

support of that observation Hochbaum

pointed out that Leopold had had a hand

in the extirpation of wolves from the South¬

western game fields (Ribbens 1987). Leo¬

pold might enable his readers more to iden¬

tify with the author, Hochbaum suggested,

if the author found his lessons in his own

mistakes (Ribbens 1987). Leopold re¬

sponded with “Thinking Like a Mountain,”

an environmental transmogrification, as it

seems to me, of the story of Saint Paul’s con¬

version on the road to Damascus. The old

she-wolf, silently asks, in effect, why

persecutest thou me?, with that bewitching

green fire in her dying eyes. That in all prob¬

ability the event did not actually happen

does not in the least diminish the truth of

the essay. It fits like the keystone in one of

the twentieth century’s greatest works of lit¬

erature and one of the greatest works of lit¬

erary natural history of all time.

So part of the solution to our present mys¬

tery is the author’s need to transform his text

from an oral to a written work of art. The

speech is far less aggressive. At one point in

the speech Leopold almost apologetically is¬

sues a disclaimer. “Now this is not a tirade

against careless farming, lumbering, or trans¬

portation,” he says to his audience that might

well include farmers, lumbermen, teamsters,

and engineers. But in the essay he openly ad¬

mits to being “indignant about something.”

The artist also seems to have felt a need to

scale up from the municipal, regional, and

state level to the continental and even global

level for a national publication; hence the

Wisconsin landscape is less the central sub¬

ject, than an example used to illustrate the

more general plight of land and the current

human maladaptation to the earth.

The most startling change Leopold made

in transforming the Arboretum speech into

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

the Arboretum essay is not in voice or in

adaptation to audience, but in substance.

He added a philosophical, one might even

say, eco-metaphysical theme that is com¬

pletely absent in the speech — and he put it

at the very beginning. Leopold wished his

national readership to imagine that this is

how he opened his address to the company

assembled at the dedication of the Univer¬

sity of Wisconsin Arboretum and Wild Life

Refuge:

For twenty centuries and longer, all civi¬

lized thought has rested upon one basic

premise: that it is the destiny of man to ex¬

ploit and enslave the earth.

The biblical injunction to “go forth and

multiply” is but one of many dogmas which im¬

ply this attitude of philosophical imperialism.

During the past few decades, however, a

new science called ecology has been unobtru¬

sively spreading a film of doubt over this

heretofore unchallenged “world view.” Ecol¬

ogy tells us that no animal — not even man —

can be regarded as independent of his envi¬

ronment. Plants, animals, men, and soil are

a community of interdependent parts, an or¬

ganism. No organism can survive the deca¬

dence of a member. Mr. Babbitt is no more

a separate entity than is his left arm, or a

single cell of his biceps. Neither are those ag¬

gregations of men and earth which we call

Madison, or Wisconsin, or America. It may

flatter our ego to be called the sons of man,

but it would be nearer the truth to call our¬

selves the brothers of our fields and forests.

The incredible engines wherewith we now

hasten our world-conquest have, of course,

not heard of these ecological quibblings; nei¬

ther perhaps have the incredible engineers.

These engines are double-edged swords. They

can be used for ecological cooperation. They

are being used for ecological destruction on

a scale almost geological in magnitude. . . .

Pretty strong stuff. And bold. The only

mention of ecology in the Arboretum speech

is adjectival, first used to characterize the way

the more “advanced institutions arrange their

tree collection,” viz., as “ecological group¬

ings,” and then to characterize the Arbore¬

tum project as digging up “ecological graves.”

In the Arboretum essay ecology is character¬

ized as more than just a new science. It is a

new world view pregnant with ethical import.

But what ecology? Evidently the ecology

of Frederic Clements, the dean of that

emerging new science in the early twentieth

century, who boldly represented plant for¬

mations as superorganisms. The Clement-

sian paradigm in ecology cast doubt not just

on the Judeo-Christian view of nature as cre¬

ated for man’s use, it also cast doubt on the

prevailing mechanistic world view of classi¬

cal physics, which informed engineering.

The Judeo-Christian dogma that it is man’s

God-given right to have dominion over and

subdue the earth and “the mechanistic con¬

ception of the earth” in Newtonian physics

combined to create the “iron-heel” mental¬

ity that Leopold twice goes on to condemn

in the Arboretum essay. A decade earlier (in

an essay that he never got around to pub¬

lishing in his lifetime, but that was finally

published more than fifty years after it was

written), Leopold (1979) had more fully

contrasted the organismic ecological world

view with the biblical and mechanical world

views, allied in their “anthropomorphism”

as he called it.

Now back to the theme with which I be¬

gan: Leopold’s articulation of the nature of

and a rationale for ecological restoration in

his Arboretum speech. Supplementing the

speech with the essay it is evident that the

prophet and pioneer of ecological restoration

was informed by the Clementsian paradigm

in ecology, with one major and crucial dif¬

ference, as I shall explain directly.

10

TRANSACTIONS

CALLICOTT: “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

According to Clements (1905, 1916),

each region of the world, which he called a

“biome,” had a characteristic plant “forma¬

tion55 that he called the “climax” because it

was determined by the climate-— which he

supposed to be stable and unchanging.

Climate consists of two principal gradients,

moisture and temperature. In North Ameri¬

ca, for example, the moisture gradient runs,

low to high, from the Sierra rain shadow

eastward to the Atlantic; in the dry South¬

west, a formation dominated by saguaro

cactus is the climax; a little farther east the

climax is short-grass steppe; still farther east,

it’s long-grass prairie; from the Mississippi

valley on eastward, it’s forests. Similarly the

temperature gradient determines forest

types from southern oak-hickory hard¬

woods to northern spruce-fir softwoods.

Elevation complicates this picture, and it

does demonstrably in the Southwest where

Leopold first worked. Going upslope is like

going north, and, in the U.S., like going

east: the micro-climate is cooler and wetter

at higher elevations.

In any case, from time to time the cli¬

max formation in a biome experiences cata¬

strophic external disturbances— volcanic

eruption, wild fire, flood, wind storm.

There follows a series of plant formations

until the climax formation is reestablished.

Clements called this process “succession.”

Moreover, he viewed this process as a

kind of organismic development, an ontog¬

eny. It was the climax “sere” (successional

stage) that he believed to be a highly inte¬

grated superorganism. Ecology is the study

of its anatomy, physiology, and metabolism.

Clements5 study area was the Nebraska

prairie just at the time it was being settled

by European-American agriculturists. To

him they represented an alien and external

disturbance that not only destroyed the cli¬

max formation but that also disrupted and

forestalled the process of succession back to

climax.

It is just here, I think, that Leopold parts

company with Clements. Human beings

too, in Leopold’s view, are members of

ecological superorganisms. Sinclair Lewis’s

Babbitt, no less than Yellow Thunder, is

but one cell of the superorganism in which

he lives, moves, and has his being. Human

beings and human ecological impacts are

not metaphysically set apart from nature, as

our biblical Western philosophical tradi¬

tions often interpret them to be. Nor is

Homo sapiens a physically alien species,

invading Earth from another planet. Hence

the ecological effects of human activities are

not by definition sullying. Just like the

activities of other species, human activities

can be ecologically benign as well as

malignant, functional as well as dysfunc¬

tional, harmonious as well as disruptive.

Our “engines . . . can be used for ecological

cooperation,” Leopold writes, even though

at present “they are being used for ecolo¬

gical destruction on a scale that is almost

geological in magnitude.”

Ecological restoration, as we have come

to know it, I submit, rests, implicitly, on

the orthodox Clementsian paradigm in

ecology, not the Leopoldian alternative (Jor¬

dan et al. 1987). The putatively “objective”

norm for conventional ecological restora¬

tion is the humanly undisturbed climax for¬

mation for a given biome. Supposedly, that

was the condition it was in just prior to hu¬

man “settlement” by the “white man,” i.e.,

by Homo sapiens of European descent and

cultural habits. Granted, the Indians were

here already, but they were too few and

their cultures were too primitive to have

much ecological effect. Or so restorationist

orthodoxy would have us think. In addition

to destroying the climax and disrupting the

process of succession, the white man

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Volume 87 (1999)

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

brought with him a range of “exotic” spe¬

cies; that is, species that had evolved, natu¬

rally or artificially, elsewhere. Some of

these — for example, wheat, cattle and

sheep — were his domesticated cultivars.

Others — such as carp and Johnson grass —

were neither domesticated, that is, artifi¬

cially selected, nor cultivated, but were, nev¬

ertheless, deliberately introduced. Still

others — such as the Norway rat — were in¬

advertently introduced. Hence, in addition

to “pre-settlement” ecological conditions,

native species also became a norm for eco¬

logical restoration and exotic species a tar¬

get for eradication.

Contemporary biogeography, ecology,

and anthropology have rendered these

straightforward norms for ecological resto¬

ration problematic (Pickett and Ostfeld

1995):

• The climate has not been stable during

the Holocene; hence forests, grasslands,

and deserts have slowly wandered around

(Davis 1986).

• Local disturbance has been frequent, and

not exceptional, and once a patch within

a biome has been disturbed, succession

does not follow a lock-step order through

a series of intermediate formations back

to the original climax (Pickett and White

1985).

• Further, the reductive “individualistic”

paradigm in ecology, first advocated by

Henry Gleason (1926), has eclipsed

Clementsian holism; plant formations

are not now regarded as highly integrated

superorganisms, or even as typological

biotic communities that come and go as

units, but as stochastic aggregates of spe¬

cies populations that are adapted to simi¬

lar climatic and edaphic gradients (Sim-

berloff 1980).

• Because species are constantly dispersing

to new areas and disappearing from their

former haunts, mixing and matching, hit

or miss, catch as catch can, the sharp dis¬

tinction between native and exotic spe¬

cies is blurred (Peretti 1998).

• And, lastly, the impact of Homo sapiens

has been significant and ubiquitous

throughout the Holocene. Geographers

and anthropologists now estimate the

indigenous population of the Western

Hemisphere on the eve of European

discovery to be ten to twenty times as

great as the geographers and anthropo¬

logists contemporary with Clements

estimated it to be (Denevan 1992). In

1492 the biomes of North and South

America were as much an artifact as

those in Europe at the same time — just

a different kind of artifact. The oak

openings which Leopold eulogizes were

created and maintained by Indian-set

fires, as John Curtis (1959) — he of the

Arboretum’s Curtis Prairie — notes in his

wonderful book, The Vegetation of

Wisconsin. In 1492 the only sizable land

mass in a “pristine” condition was

Antarctica. Then, one of the largest cities

in the world, Kahokia, lay only some 600

kilometers and change east of the area in

which Clements did his research at the

turn of the last century, and only some

500 kilometers south of Lake Wingra

(Doolittle 1992). Between the European

“discovery” of America and “settlement”

Old World diseases reduced the Indian

population by ninety or ninty-five per

cent — a demographic debacle of unpre¬

cedented proportions (Denevan 1992).

So it was easy for twentieth-century

ecologists to ignore the impact of the

indigenes of the Western Hemisphere, as

Clements did. But to their credit Leo¬

pold and Curtis did not, at least not in

Wisconsin.

12

TRANSACTIONS

CALLiCOTT: “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

As a target for restoration, the condition

of a given patch when the white man first

laid eyes on it is therefore but a snapshot in

the ever-changing, ubiquitously human-im¬

pacted biogeography of an area. Ecological

restoration may learn to live with that, in

which case it might be compared to archi¬

tectural and automotive restoration. Some

people have a quaint fondness for structures

built in an architectural style at some arbi¬

trarily selected particular time in the past —

the Victorian era, for example — and are will¬

ing to spend considerable time and energy

restoring them. Other people have a quaint

fondness for particular old cars — 1957

Chevrolets, for example — and are willing to

spend considerable time and energy restor¬

ing them. Likewise, we environmentalists

have a quaint fondness for “pre-settlement”

oak savannas and long-grass prairies and are

willing to spend considerable time and ef¬

fort restoring them. I think that Aldo

Leopold would confess to being something

of an ecological antiquarian himself — with¬

out apology. Just as some people buy an old

Victorian house and restore it to its former

condition as a hobby, Leopold bought an

old worn-out farm and attempted to restore

the land to its condition prior to its being

farmed. (The analogy is not perfect, but it’s

close enough.)

Such a concession, however, would rob

ecological restoration of its moral high

ground. We environmentalists believe that

the time and energy of ecological restora-

tionists should be subsidized by the general

public — in the case of the Arboretum res¬

toration project, through the agency of the

University — because it is both the right and

the necessary thing to do. Ecological resto¬

ration is more than a matter of personal

taste, we feel, it is also a matter of imper¬

sonal environmental ethics. But why?

Leopold may not be as scientifically up-to-

date as we are now, nearly sixty-five years

later. Even prophets do not always see un¬

erringly into the future, especially into the

twists and turns of a science so fickle as ecol¬

ogy. But he is unfailingly wise.

Remember, his rationale for ecological res¬

toration is not stated in terms of the supe¬

rior value of the previous ecological condi¬

tion over the present one because the former

is “pristine” or “virgin” and the latter is an¬

thropogenic, as Thoreau and Muir before

him had done. As noted, contrary to

Clements as well as to Muir, he viewed hu¬

man beings — Lewis’s Babbitt as well as Yel¬

low Thunder — as a part of nature. His own

antiquarian affections aside, the objective

value of the past ecological condition is as a

point of reference, a bench mark, for a once

and future condition of what Leopold

(1991*, 1991 by 1999 a, 1999b) elsewhere

called “land health.” Ecological restoration,

sensu stricto , the restoration of a past ecologi¬

cal condition, is a point of reference for a

more general program that we might call eco¬

logical rehabilitation (Callicott et al. 1999).

What was good and right about the Wiscon¬

sin that the Indians lived in, took their liv¬

ing from, and actively managed? It was nei¬

ther pristine nor virgin; the Indians were

members of the same species, Homo sapiens ,

as their European-American successors; they

lived on the land; and not without signifi¬

cant ecological impact. The difference was

that under the aegis of the Indians, old Wis¬

consin was ecologically functional. Prior to

European settlement, the Wisconsin biota re¬

cruited, retained, and recycled nutrients from

the parent materials. It stabilized the top soil

that it had built up. It percolated and modu¬

lated the flow of surface waters. It was com¬

posed of a diverse assemblage of plants,

which provided habitat for a diverse commu¬

nity of animals, related in tangled food webs,

woven of lengthy food chains, topped off by

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

long-lived, large-bodied carnivores (Leopold

1991*, 1991 b, 1999*, 1999b). What Leo¬

pold envisioned, indeed what he conceived

the task of conservation to be, is the creation

of a similar ecological condition in the fu¬

ture, but one that would necessarily involve

different species of plants and animals than

that which the Indians had adapted to their

economy — just as it would involve a differ¬

ent stock of Homo sapiens. He characterized

it as a civilized landscape for civilized men.

The bench mark, the reference point would

be the ecological status quo ante as it was

when we took it away from the Indians. And

the Arboretum was to restore that condition

for that purpose. In a nutshell, the principal

objective reason for undertaking ecological

restoration at the Arboretum and elsewhere,

from Leopold’s point of view, was its service

of the more general, more important, and

more difficult goal of ecological rehabilita¬

tion everywhere.

1 4

TRANSACTIONS

CALLICOTT: “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

Appendix A: The Speech 1

What Is the University of Wisconsin Arboretum,

Wild Life Refuge, and Forest Experiment Preserve?

What Is an Arboretum! An arboretum

is ordinarily a place where the seri¬

ous-minded citizen can learn, by looking at

them, the difference between a white and a

black spruce, or see in person a Russian

olive, a tamarisk, or an Arizona cypress. That

is, it is a collection of trees.

Sometimes an arboretum also serves as an

outdoor library of horticultural varieties, i.e.,

a place where one can compare all the

apples, all the lilacs, all the roses.

Some advanced institutions arrange their

tree-collection as natural associations, rather

than as taxonomic groups. They present, for

example, a sample of the Douglas fir forest

of the Northwest, showing the hemlocks,

larches, and balsams which grow in associa¬

tion with Douglas fir, and also the ferns,

salmonberries, yews, and shrubs which grow

under it, and if possible the mosses and

herbs which grow under the shrubs. Such

exhibits are called “ecological groupings”

and represent “advanced thought” in arbo¬

retum management.

The Wisconsin Arboretum. We want to

have all these things, but they by no means

represent the main idea which we are trying

to express here. It is something new and dif¬

ferent. Perhaps we should not call the place

an arboretum at all. Whether our idea is a

worthy one, I will have to leave you to judge.

Our idea, in a nutshell, is to reconstruct,

primarily for the use of the University, a

sample of original Wisconsin— a sample of

what Dane County looked like when our

ancestors arrived here during the 1 840s.

Obviously, it will take 50 years to do this

thing. Obviously, too, it will be done for re¬

search rather than for amusement, and for

use by the University, rather than for use by

the town.

What I want to try and picture today is

why it is important to the future welfare of

our state to know what it was like before we

took it away from the Indians.

Rebuilding the Wisconsin Landscape.

First let me convince you that if you were

set down, blindfolded, in Nakoma in 1840,

you would not only fail to recognize the

place, but you might fail to realize you were

in Wisconsin at all.

This hill on which we stand was then an

“oak-opening.” Our grandparents describe,

sometimes with rapture, the beauty of these

open orchard-like stands of oaks, inter¬

spersed with copses of shrubs, and the pro¬

fusion of prairie grasses, and flowers which

grew between. But just what shrubs, grasses,

and flowers were they? We don’t know.

Why did they remain open, instead of grow¬

ing up to solid woods? Probably fire, but

we’re not sure. What oaks? Largely burr-oak,

but we are not sure. We do know this, that

the bluegrass which now covers half of our

1 Given by Aldo Leopold at the dedication of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum on

June 17, 1934. Printed by permission of the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

Volume 87 (1999)

15

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

county was not present- — it came with the

white man — while the native grasses which

then grew here are now rare or even possi¬

bly extinct. The pheasants and possibly even

the quail which now inhabit Nakoma were

absent; instead the oak-openings were popu¬

lated with sharptailed grouse, then appropri¬

ately called “burr-oak grouse,” and now

found only a hundred miles to the north.

The wild turkey apparently did not occur.

The copses contained the ordinary partridge

or ruffed grouse. There were elk and deer-

elk horns have been pulled out of our local

marshes, and of deer we have ample records.

The Wingra Marsh, which we boast of as

largely “unspoiled,” we would not have rec¬

ognized in 1840. Those waving meadows of

grass, rushes, and dogwood were then largely

a tamarack forest, undergrown with sphag¬

num moss and orchids. We know this be¬

cause tamarack logs were encountered in

draining the golf course. The tamarack for¬

est has been gradually converted into grass¬

land by repeated burning, cutting, grazing,

and mowing — a process still plainly visible

in any of the tamarack relicts of the eastern

half of the county.

The deep layers of peat which comprise

this marsh are merely the closely packed re¬

mains of sphagnum plants which could not

decay because of the acid water in which

they were “pickled” through innumerable

generations. Professor Fassett of the Botany

Department takes his students there to ex¬

hume samples of this peat from various

depths, and in these samples he finds em¬

balmed the very pollen grains which fell or

were blown into the marsh from the plants

then growing in and around it. So perfectly

are these pollens preserved that their shape

and structure tell the kinds of plants which

grew, while the relative abundance of the

various kinds tells which plants were then

most common. The bog is, in short, a vast

historical library telling the story of the ar¬

boretum back to the Glacial Epoch, 10,000

years ago. Its volumes are still largely

untranslated, but it is easy to see why they

constitute a valuable educational and scien¬

tific asset.

Lake Wingra itself wears so different an

aspect that the early settler would not know

it now. Much of the shore was then a wild

rice bed. The water level fluctuated more,

but averaged higher. It was full of waterfowl,

whereas now the ducks show almost an aver¬

sion to it. Presumably the introduction of

carp contributed heavily to these changes,

but we do not know.

Why Study Original Wisconsin?

Granted, then, that we have radically

changed the aspect of land, what of it? It’s

still good to look at — -why worry? Why try

to discover the exact processes by which the

Wisconsin of 1840 became the Wisconsin

of 1930? Americans shall look forward, not

backward, so why dig up these ecological

graves?

Because we are just beginning to realize

that along with the intentional and neces¬

sary changes in the soil and its flora and

fauna, we have also induced unintentional

and unnecessary changes which threaten to

undermine the future capacity of the soil to

support our civilization.

In some places these changes will merely

reduce our standard of living— physical, in

the sense of a healthy agriculture; spiritual,

in the sense of needless spoliation of natu¬

ral beauty. In other places, these changes

threaten the actual physical existence of

even the present social structure. In some

cases, the damage is temporary, in others

permanent.

For example, the erosion of topsoil

which followed too much wheat and too

many cattle is carrying the best parts of

southwestern Wisconsin to the Gulf of

16

TRANSACTIONS

CALLICOTT : “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

Mexico. It will take time, geological time,

to repair this loss.

The fires which followed lumbering have

probably cut by half, for at least a generation

or two, the capacity of northern Wisconsin

to support a self-sustaining population. Ev¬

erybody knows this, but few know that the

same fires have burned up many of the peat

beds in our drained marshes, and thus

threaten to turn land once too wet into a fu¬

ture sand-dune. Three marshes in Dane

County have been burning all summer.

When some old rattletrap of a building

catches fire we all rush to the rescue, but

when the compound interest of 10,000 years

of plants catches fire, our officials sit by with

folded hands while the average citizen’s depth

of understanding is reflected by the observa¬

tion that he dislikes the smell of peat smoke.

The new insects which modern transpor¬

tation continuously imports from the four

corners of the earth are a standing threat to

future agriculture. Our white pine — the

very backbone of our original economic

structure — now threatens to go down be¬

fore the blister rust, an imported disease. In

the offing stands the threat of June-beetles

(white grubs) making it imperative to cut

down all the white oaks in our pastures.

Granted we could shade our cows under tin

roofs — who would want to live in a Wis¬

consin of oakless pastures?

Now this is not a tirade against careless

farming, lumbering, or transportation. It is

rather an admission that the tools where¬

with we are building our civilization are so

powerful, and their use has such complex

and unexpected consequences, that we are

tearing down about as fast as we are build¬

ing up. It is an admission that science does

not yet know enough, or is not yet suffi¬

ciently listened to, to anticipate and prevent

this process of wreckage which attends our

supposedly advancing footsteps.

Research. The business of a University

has heretofore been conceived to be the

preparation of citizens to cope with their en¬

vironment. The University must now take

on the additional function of preserving an

environment fit to support citizens. This

task is of a complexity far beyond what I can

here take time to explain. I will ask you to

accept my word for the fact that it is a long

and difficult job. To perform it, a Univer¬

sity must have, for the daily use of its fac¬

ulty and students, a living exhibit of what

Wisconsin was, what it is, and what it ex¬

pects to become. Examples of what it is lie

on every hand. What it expects to become

may be exemplified on public forests, ref¬

uges, farms, and parks. What it was is to be

exemplified on the Arboretum, and I hope

on numerous areas created for the purpose.

This, in a nutshell, is the function of the

Arboretum: a reconstructed sample of old

Wisconsin, to serve as a bench mark, a start¬

ing point, in the long and laborious job of

building a permanent and mutually benefi¬

cial relationship between civilized men and

a civilized landscape.

1 7

Volume 87 (1999)

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Appendix B: The Essay2

The Arboretum and the University (1934)

For twenty centuries and longer, all civi¬

lized thought has rested upon one basic

premise: that it is the destiny of man to ex¬

ploit and enslave the earth.

The biblical injunction to “go forth and

multiply” is merely one of many dogmas

which imply this attitude of philosophical

imperialism.

During the past few decades, however, a

new science called ecology has been unob¬

trusively spreading a film of doubt over this

heretofore unchallenged “world view.”

Ecology tells us that no animal — not even

man — can be regarded as independent of his

environment. Plants, animals, men, and soil

are a community of interdependent parts, an

organism. No organism can survive the

decadence of a member. Mr. Babbitt is no

more a separate entity than is his left arm,

or a single cell of his biceps. Neither are

those aggregations of men and earth which

we call Madison, or Wisconsin, or America.

It may flatter our ego to be called the sons

of man, but it would be nearer the truth to

call ourselves the brothers of our fields and

forests.

The incredible engines wherewith we

now hasten our world-conquest have, of

course, not heard of these ecological

quibblings; neither, perhaps, have the

incredible engineers. These engines are

double-edged swords. They can be used for

ecological cooperation. They are being used

for ecological destruction on a scale almost

geological in magnitude. In Wisconsin, for

example, the northern half of the state has

been rendered partially uninhabitable for the

next two generations by man-made fire,

while the southwestern quarter has been

deteriorated for the next century by man¬

made erosion. In central Wisconsin a single

fire in 1930 burned the soil off the better

part of two counties.

It can be stated as a sober fact that the

iron-heel attitude has already reduced by half

the ability of Wisconsin to support a

cooperative community of men, animals,

and plants during the next century. More¬

over, it has saddled us with a repair bill, the

magnitude of which we are just beginning

to appreciate.

If some foreign invader attempted such

loot, the whole nation would resist to the

last man and the last dollar. But as long as

we loot ourselves, we charge the indignity

to “rugged individualism,” and try to forget

it. But we cannot quite. There is a feeble

minority called conservationists, who are

indignant about something. They are just

beginning to realize that their task involved

the reorganization of society, rather than the

passage of some fish and game laws.

2From Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott, The River of the Mother of God and Other

Esays by Aldo Leopold. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Copyright 1991. Re¬

printed by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press and the Aldo Leopold Founda¬

tion. The essay first appeared in Parks and Recreation, Vol. 18, No. 2, October 1934.

18

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CALLICOTT: “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

What has all this to do with the Arbore¬

tum? Simply this: If civilization consists of

cooperation with plants, animals, soil, and

men, then a university which attempts to

define that cooperation must have, for the

use of its faculty and students, places

which show what the land was, what it is,

and what it ought to be. This Arboretum

may be regarded as a place where, in the

course of time, we will build up an exhibit

of what was, as well as an exhibit of what

ought to be. It is with this dim vision of

its future destiny that we have dedicated

the greater part of the Arboretum to a

reconstruction of original Wisconsin,

rather than to a “collection” of imported

trees.

The iron-heel mentality is, of course,

indifferent to what Wisconsin was. This is

exactly the reason why the University cannot

be. I am here to say that the invention of a

harmonious relationship between men and

land is a more exacting task than the

invention of machines, and that its accom¬

plishment is impossible without a visual

knowledge of the land’s history. Take the

grass marsh here under our view: From the

recession of the glacier until the days of the

fur trade, it was a tamarack bog — stems and

stumps are still imbedded there. In its

successive layers of peat are embalmed both

the pollens which record the vegetation of

the bog and the surrounding countryside,

and also the bones of its animals. During

some drouth, man-caused fires burned off

the tamarack, which gave place first to grass

and brush, and then, under continual

burning and grazing, to straight grass. This

is the history and status of a thousand other

marshes. What will happen if the decom¬

posed surface peat is all burned off? At what

stage of the retrogression from forest to

meadow is the marsh of greatest use to the

animal community? How is that desirable

stage to be attained and maintained? What

is the role of drainage? These questions are

of national importance. They determine the

future habitability of the earth, materially

and spiritually. They are just as important

as whether to join the League of Nations —

it is only our iron-heel inheritance which

makes the comparison ludicrous. The

scientist does not know the answer — he has

been too busy inventing machines. The time

has come for science to busy itself with the

earth itself. The first step is to reconstruct a

sample of what we had to start with. That,

in a nutshell, is the Arboretum.

Volume 87 (1999)

1 9

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Literature Cited

Anonymous. 1998. The Wilderness Act of

1964. Pp. 120-30 in J.B. Callicott and M.P.

Nelson, eds. The great new wilderness debate.

University of Georgia Press, Athens.

Callicott, J.B., L.B. Crowder, and K. Mumford.

1999. Current normative concepts in con¬

servation. Conservation Biology 13:22—33.

Clements, F.E. 1905. Research methods in ecol¬

ogy. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

Clements, F.E. 1916. Plant succession: an

analysis of the development of vegetation.

Publication No. 242. Carnegie Institution,

Washington, D.C.

Curtis, J.T. 1939. The vegetation of Wisconsin.

University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.

Davis, M.B. 1986. Climatic instability, time

lags, and community disequilibrium. Pp.

269-84 in J. Daimond and T.J. Case, eds.

Community Ecology. Harper and Row, New

York.

Denevan, W.M. 1992. The pristine myth: the

landscape of the Americas in 1492. Annals

of the Association of American Geographers 82:

369-85.

Doolittle, W.E. 1992. Agriculture in North

America on the eve of contact: a reassess¬

ment. Annals of the Association of American

Geographers 82: 386-401.

Flader, S.L. 1974. Thinking like a mountain:

Aldo Leopold and the evolution of an ecologi¬

cal attitude toward deer , wolves, and forests.

University of Missouri Press, Columbia.

Fox, S. 1981. John Muir and his legacy: the

american conservation movement. Little,

Brown and Company, Boston.

Gleason, H.A. 1926. The individualistic con¬

cept of the plant association. Bulletin of the

Torrey Botanical Club 53:1-20.

Jordan, W.R., III, M.E. Gilpin, J.D. Aber, eds.

1987. Restoration ecology: a synthetic approach

to ecological research. Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge, MA.

Leopold, A. 1924. Grass, brush, timber, and fire

in southern Arizona. Journal of Forestry

22(6):1— 10.

Leopold, A. 1925. Wilderness as a form of land

use. Journal of Land and Public Utility Eco¬

nomics 1:398-404.

Leopold, A. 1939. The farmer as a conserva¬

tionist. American Forests 45:294—99, 316,

323.

Leopold, A. 1941. Wilderness as a land labora¬

tory. Living Wilderness 6(July):3.

Leopold A. 1949. A sand county almanac, and

sketches here and there. Oxford University

Press, New York.

Leopold, A. 1979. Some fundamentals of con¬

servation in the southwest. Environmental

Ethics 1:131-41.

Leopold, A. 1991*z. Conservation: in whole or

in part? Pp. 310-19 in S.L. Flader and J.B.

Callicott, eds. The River of the Mother of God

and Other Essays. University of Wisconsin

Press, Madison.

Leopold, A. 1991 A Land pathology. Pp. 212-

17 in S.L. Flader and J.B. Callicott, eds. The

river of the Mother of God and other essays.

University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.

Leopold, A. 1999*2. The land health concept

and conservation. Pp. 218-26 in J.B.

Callicott and E.T. Freyfogle, eds. For the

health of the land: previously unpublished es¬

says and other writings. Island Press, Wash¬

ington, D.C.

Leopold, A. 1999 A Biotic land use. Pp. 1 98 —

206 in J.B. Callicott and E.T. Freyfogle, eds.

For the health of the land: previously unpub¬

lished essays and other writings. Island Press,

Washington, D.C.

Meine, C. 1988. Aldo Leopold: his life and work.

University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.

Muir, J. 1913. The story of my boyhood and

youth. Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

Peretti, J. 1998. Nativism and nature: rethink¬

ing biological invasion. Environmental Val-

ues 7:181-92.

20

TRANSACTIONS

CALLICOTT: “The Arboretum and the University”: The Speech and The Essay

Pickett, S.T.A., and R.S. Ostfeld. 1995. The

shifting paradigm in ecology. Pp. 261-78 in

R.L. Knight and S.F. Bates, eds. A new cen¬

tury for natural resource management. Island

Press, Washington, D.C.

Pickett, S.T.A., and P.S. White. 1985. The ecol¬

ogy of natural disturbance and patch dynam¬

ics. Academic Press, New York.

Pinchot, G. 1947. Breaking new ground.

Harcourt, Brace, New York.

Ribbens, D. 1987. The making of A Sand

County Almanac. Pp. 91-109 in J.B. Calli-

cott, ed. Companion to A Sand County Al¬

manac. University of Wisconsin Press, Madi¬

son.

Simberloff, D. 1980. A succession of paradigms

in ecology: essentialism to materialism and

probabilism. Synthese 43: 3—39.

J. Baird Callicott is professor of philosophy and

religion studies at the University of North Texas.

He is editor or author of many works by or about

Aldo Leopold including The River of the Mother

of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold (with

Susan L. Flader), For the Health of the

Land: Previously Unpublished Essays and Other

Writings by Aldo Leopold (with Eric T.

Freyfogle), Companion to A Sand County

Almanac: Interpretive and Critical Essays, In

Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environ¬

mental Philosophy, and Beyond the Land

Ethic: More Essays in Environmental Philoso¬

phy. Address: Department of Philosophy , Univer¬

sity of North Texas, P.O. Box 310920, Denton,

TX 76203-0920. Email: callicott@unt.edu

Volume 87 (1999)

21

Susan Flader

Aldo Leopold

and Environmental Citizenship

In the outpouring of books and articles in recent years on

the meaning of citizenship, many of them lamenting the

weakening of civic bonds in America, there has been scant at¬

tention to the role of citizenship with respect to the environ¬

ment.1 Even among environmentalists, who realize that citi¬

zen action has been a hallmark of the “new environmental

movement” from the time of the first Earth Day (1970), there

is little appreciation of the extent to which our citizenry has

played a vital role in the shaping of American environmental

policy ever since the origins of the nation.2

As we seek the historical roots of our quest for environmen¬

tal quality and the means for sustaining it, it is worth ponder¬

ing the roles and responsibilities of citizens and the relation¬

ship between the citizenry and the state — in short, how

American democracy works. In this exploration, we may seek

insights from Aldo Leopold, who was profoundly conscious

of the American democratic tradition within which he was

working and who thought hard throughout his career about

the meanings and implications of environmental citizenship.

We have had in the United States a tradition of a limited

or weak state. It may not seem that way today when people

complain of a bloated federal bureaucracy, but relative to the

strong central states in the democracies of Western Europe and

certainly to authoritarian regimes, our government is decid¬

edly limited and our citizens have always had a healthy skepti¬

cism about most everything that government tries to do. In

this weak state we have traditionally had rather low legal ex¬

pectations of our citizens. Citizens are expected to obey the

law and pay taxes; even voting is optional. Yet we have had in

America a concomitantly vibrant tradition of voluntary citi¬

zen action.

The foremost interpreter of the era of the American

Revolution, Gordon Wood, has termed the phenomenon of

TRANSACTIONS Volume 87 (1999)

23

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

revolutionary citizen action “the people out

of doors.”3 He was likely not thinking

environmentally, but rather portraying

“people out of doors” as citizens acting

voluntarily outside of the formal channels

of government to shape the kind of com¬

munity they wanted. When we look back

at the controversies of the era, however, we

see citizens acting often on environmental

issues. Local groups organized, with some

success, to prevent new dams from blocking

the passage of salmon upstream, for exam¬

ple, seeking to protect their community’s

customary right to fish against interference

by new industrial mills.4

When we think of the origins of the na¬

tion, we tend to think of citizens struggling

for liberty, for the right of the individual to

pursue his own self-interest. This is a con¬

cept of American history that became ce¬

mented in our imaginations especially dur¬

ing the Cold War, when we were fighting

the menace of international Communism

and trying to picture America as everything

that the Soviet Union was not. Yet, histori¬

ans returning to the original documents of

the revolutionary era several decades ago be¬

gan to see in them some ideas that were at

first startling, because they were so at odds

with the usual interpretation. What they

found were people who thought of them¬

selves as citizens of a republic in which the

greatest virtue was civic consciousness, a

willingness to subordinate one’s own self-in¬

terest to the good of the community. “Civic

virtue,” they called it, or “civic republican¬

ism,” referring to the participatory civic val¬

ues of a republic like that of ancient Ath¬

ens.5 We tend to celebrate America as a

country grounded in individual rights, like

the freedoms of speech and of the press and

of assembly enshrined in the first article of

the Bill of Rights. But a case can be made

that these rights pertain to communities as

well as to individuals; they protect the op¬

portunity for ordinary citizens to organize

and communicate with each other outside

of the formal channels of government to

shape the environment of their communi¬

ties or the policies of their governments.6

The complex of republican values so per¬

vasive in revolutionary America was largely

overwhelmed, scholars are agreed, by demo¬

cratic egalitarianism, liberal individualism,

and capitalist development in the early nine¬

teenth century, ushering in the liberal demo¬

cratic state we celebrate today. But the tra¬

dition of civic organizing has persisted in

American history. It has not been mandated

by law; it has been voluntary. The tendency

of Americans to form voluntary groups —

’’associations,” Alexis de Tocqueville called

them7 — could be used to sustain traditional

community values; it could also be used to

protect economic self-interest. This tradition

of citizen action, especially in its “civic re¬

publican” strain, is the tradition out of

which much of our American conservation

movement grew. But it may also be the tra¬

dition from which several strands of what

we may think of today as anti-environmen¬

talism emerged — groups devoted to “wise

use,” property rights, and county su¬

premacy.8 Citizens organize for a variety of

purposes.

It must be noted that not everyone re¬

gards voluntary citizen action as key to the

shaping of society or environmental policy.

Many would argue that ours is a representa¬

tive democracy and that the shaping and ad¬

ministration of policy is the responsibility

of elected representatives and executive

agencies. Indeed, much of the administra¬

tive capacity of the modern American state

was developed in the Progressive Era at the

turn of the twentieth century, in large part

in response to environmental concerns. The

U.S. Forest Service, in which Aldo Leopold

24

TRANSACTIONS

FLADER: Aldo Leopold and Environmental Citizenship

began his career, has been regarded by schol¬

ars as the quintessential example of a pro¬

gressive agency.9 Gifford Pinchot, the first

chief of the Forest Service, sought to place

technically trained experts — professional

foresters like Leopold — in government and

let them establish specific policies and man¬

age the resources. This was a model of gov¬

ernance that elevated the values of order, ef¬

ficiency, and control — values that may be

quite incompatible with democratic partici¬

pation. Pinchot once said, “The first duty

of the human race is to control the earth it

lives upon,” and I think Leopold himself

once may have believed that.10 From the

perspective of a later day, however, we may

note that the progressive model, in elevat¬

ing the virtues of professionalism and tech¬

nical expertise, tended to crowd out the citi¬

zenry and also their elected representatives,

the politicians.

Inasmuch as Aldo Leopold began his ca¬

reer as a professional in the employ of the

modern administrative state and is today re¬

garded as something of a prophet of the new

environmental consciousness, which elevates

the responsibilities of citizenship, we may

look to him for insights into the meanings

of environmental citizenship— into the role

of citizens in the modern state, the tension

between the rights of individuals and the

claims of the community, and the tension

also between professional resource manag¬

ers and citizen activists. We look first at

what Leopold had to say about citizenship

in A Sand County Almanac , the slender vol¬

ume of nature sketches and philosophical

essays that represents the distillation of his

mature thought, and then explore the evo¬

lution of his thinking during the course of

his career.

As we page through A Sand County Al¬

manac, we meet our first citizen in the very

first essay, “January Thaw”:

The mouse is a sober citizen who knows that

grass grows in order that mice may store it

as underground haystacks, and that snow falls

in order that mice may build subways from

stack to stack: supply, demand, and transport

all neatly organized.11

The mouse is what kind of citizen? — an

ordinary citizen who goes about his own

business and pursues his own interests. We

have many such in our communities.

Skipping perhaps a few citizens, we come

to “Pines Above the Snow”: “Each species

of pine,” Leopold tells us, “has its own con¬

stitution, which prescribes a term of office

for needles appropriate to its way of life.”

He continues with his analogy between hu¬

man constitutions and the regimen of vari¬

ous pine trees, the white pine retaining its

needles for a year and a half, red and

jackpines for two and a half years. “Incom¬

ing needles take office in June, and outgo¬

ing needles write farewell addresses in Oc¬

tober.”12 These pines are going about their

own business, but they are also meeting the

legal requirements of citizenship, acting ac¬

cording to their constitutions, even taking

office in a perfunctory way.

Next we meet the thick-billed parrots of

Chihuahua, who “wheel and spiral, loudly

debating with each other the question . . .

whether this new day which creeps slowly

over the canyons is bluer and golder than

its predecessors, or less so.”13 They are de¬

bating the criteria of the good life, which

in Aristotelian thought is an activity of citi¬

zenship more fundamental even than that

of developing legal constitutions. The vote

being a draw, Leopold observes, they head

to the high mesas for breakfast.

In “Clandeboye,” the great prairie marsh

of Manitoba, we find the grebe, a species of

ancient evolutionary lineage impelled,

Leopold believes, by “pride of continuity.”

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

His is the call that dominates and unifies the

marshland chorus: “Perhaps, by some imme¬

morial authority, he wields the baton for the

whole biota.”14 Here is the grebe as ethical

citizen, as a leader directing the chorus of

the marsh for the longterm betterment of

the whole community.

Not until the more philosophical essays

in the last section of the book do we meet

human citizens. In “Conservation Esthetic”

Leopold discusses the various components of

the recreational process, beginning with the

most basic motivation of trophy seeking,

common to hunters with both shotgun and

field glass as well as to most conservation¬

ists and even professionals. He goes on to

discuss other more highly evolved compo¬

nents of the recreational process, such as a

feeling of isolation in nature or the percep¬

tion of natural processes, and then reaches

what to him is the ultimate component, a

sense of husbandry. This component, he tells

us, “is unknown to the outdoorsman who

works for conservation with his vote rather

than with his hands. It is realized only when

some art of management is applied to land

by some person of perception.”15 So, to

Leopold, husbandry is the highest form of

citizenship: actually working with one’s

hands, participating actively to build or

maintain the land community.

Leopold expresses his concept of environ¬

mental citizenship most memorably in “The

Land Ethic”:

In short, a land ethic changes the role of

Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-

community to plain member and citizen of

it. It implies respect for his fellow-members,

and also respect for the community as such.16

Here Leopold offers us a concept of citi¬

zenship in a community larger even than

humankind; we are plain member and citi¬

zen of a community that embraces the land

and all the plants and animals that are a part

of it. The usual formula for conservation,

“Obey the law, vote right, join some orga¬

nizations, and practice what conservation is

profitable on your own land; the govern¬

ment will do the rest,” he tells us is too easy.

“It defines no right and wrong, assigns no

obligation.”17 Leopold’s formula implies per¬

sonal responsibility to participate actively as

an ordinary citizen in maintaining or restor¬

ing the health of the biotic community.

This review of A Sand County Almanac

suggests that Leopold’s mature concept of

environmental citizenship, with its empha¬

sis on obligation to the community, is simi¬

lar in some respects to the concept of civic

virtue in the republican ideology of the

American Revolution, though he conceives

the community much more broadly. But

one would not necessarily expect to find

these ideas early in his career, when he was

working for the U. S. Forest Service, mod¬

eled on a different conception of the rela¬

tionship between citizens and the state.

Aldo Leopold throughout his career was

a consummate professional, extremely effi¬

ciency-oriented during his years in the For¬

est Service and fascinated by the intricacies

of administrative procedures and standards.18

And yet we get a sense from one of his ear¬

liest publications that he was not wholly sat¬

isfied with the Forest Service model of gov¬

ernmental administration. Shortly after he

had become supervisor of the Carson Na¬

tional Forest in New Mexico at age 25, he

was stricken with an illness that nearly led

to his death and required more than a year

of recuperation. During this time he ad¬

dressed a letter “to the forest officers of the

Carson” reflecting on their responsibilities.

The problem that concerned him was how

to measure success in forest administration.

Was success simply a matter of efficiently

26

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FLADER: Aldo Leopold and Environmental Citizenship

following prescribed policies and procedures,

or was there something else? “My measure,”

Leopold wrote, “is the effect on the forest. ”

Even at the start of his career he was con¬

cerned about the ends of administration,

what was happening to the land, not only

the procedures, or meansP

It was a preoccupation he would continue

to pursue into the early 1920s, when he was

chief of operations in charge of roads, trails,

fire control, personnel, and finance on

twenty million acres of national forests in the

Southwest. In order to improve the effi¬

ciency of administration while focussing at¬

tention on “the effect on the forest,” he de¬

veloped an intricate system of tally sheets for

a new system of forest inspection that would

enable foresters to diagnose local problems

and monitor the effectiveness of manage¬

ment solutions. Leopold regarded this elabo¬

rate system of inspection as one of his points

of greatest pride during his career in the

Southwest. And indeed, his lifelong fascina¬

tion with tracking the dynamics of change

and the efficacy of management for the to¬

tal biotic system, begun during his inspec¬

tion forays in the Southwest, would lead him

in our own day to be acknowledged as the

exemplar of the new philosophy of ecosys¬

tem management recently adopted by the

Forest Service and other land management

agencies.20

Clearly, Leopold was enlarging the re¬

sponsibilities of professional foresters by ex¬

tending the boundaries of the community of

concern to include the entire biota — soils,

waters, plants, and animals — as well as trees

and the economic interests of the people

who used them. But there was scant room

for ordinary citizens in Leopold’s model of

forest administration. Though he recognized

the difficulty of determining the objectives of

management — a problem that bedevils eco¬

system management today — he concluded

that these decisions should be made by “only

the highest authority.”21 Yet the essay in

which he dealt most directly with what he

called “standards of conservation” tails off in

mid-sentence and remained unpublished,

suggesting that Leopold may have realized

he was caught in an unresolved problem of

authority: who decides the objectives and on

what basis? A kind of ‘super-inspector’

would crop up in his writing from time to

time over the years, but I am not sure he was

ever really comfortable with this type of au¬

thority.22

Despite Leopold’s commitment to profes¬

sional expertise in forest administration, he

saw roles for citizens in related endeavors.

Indeed, when his illness prevented him from

resuming his post as a forest supervisor, he

began developing a new line of activity —

game management — in the Forest Service,

and in conjunction with this he traveled all

across Arizona and New Mexico organizing

game protective associations — citizen con¬

servation organizations — in local communi¬

ties and statewide. These associations of

sportsmen, ranchers, and townspeople

would work for non-political game wardens,

predator control, and refuges. They were

grassroots citizen-action groups in a long¬

standing American tradition.

Leopold addressed the subject of citizen¬

ship in a number of lectures early in his ca¬

reer, including one on “Home Gardens and

Citizenship” to students at the University

of New Mexico in 1917, just after the

American entry into World War I. A home

garden, he said, was one mark of a useful

citizen. Nobility is won by soiling your

hands with useful labor, by building some¬

thing. Leopold was always one for building

something. If your job doesn’t allow

enough play for creativity, he told the stu¬

dents, you can be creative by working the

ground, whereupon he went into a solilo-

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

quy about how to raise spectacular toma¬

toes in your Albuquerque backyard. In a

world threatened with food shortage, what

right have we to hold idle some of the best

agricultural lands in our back yards? he

asked. Better to turn them into gardens and

learn to be good citizens.23

A year later he spoke to the women’s club

on “The Civic Life of Albuquerque.” Hav¬

ing left the Forest Service to become secre¬

tary of the Albuquerque Chamber of Com¬

merce, Leopold was now asking “What has

the 20th-century American city contributed

to human progress?” His answer was public

spirit. He defined it as “year-round patrio¬

tism in action; . . . intelligent unselfishness

in practice.” He tried to trace the idea his¬

torically, contrasting Confucius, whom he

saw as more interested in personal virtues

and family ties than in obligations to oth¬

ers, with Socrates, who knew that citizens

had a moral obligation to support and im¬

prove their government. But then he lost the

thread, explaining that “it would require a

better scholar than I am to even attempt to

trace the idea of public spirit through the era

of individualism and the political revolutions

of the 18th and 19th centuries.”24

From this we realize that the concept of

civic virtue, the republican ideology of the

American Revolution, had been lost to con¬

sciousness by 1918. Leopold was assuming

a revolutionary America dedicated to indi¬

vidualism; he had lost the thread of public

spirit, though he sensed it must have been

there somewhere. And in fact historians

would not rediscover it until the late 1960s,

twenty years after his death. But he went on

to define the “modern idea” — modern as of

1918 — of public spirit: “It means that a

democratic community and its citizens have

certain reciprocal rights and obligations.”

Not only rights, but obligations as well.

“The man who cheerfully and habitually

tries to meet this responsibility,” he says, “we

call public-spirited.”

Leopold went on to offer a critical assess¬

ment of the public spirit of Albuquerque,

confiding his dream that his own Chamber

of Commerce might serve as the “common

center” to organize the “democratic welter”

of professional societies, women’s groups,

religious, political, labor, and other volun¬

tary associations of citizens toward accom¬

plishment of common goals for the better¬

ment of Albuquerque. But he also admitted

to some frustration — businessmen unwilling

to welcome representation in the chamber by

labor and craft organizations, for example.

After little more than a year, Leopold left

the Chamber of Commerce to rejoin the

Forest Service. A few years later, still feeling

the effects of his experience in the chamber,

he delivered a scathing “Criticism of the

Booster Spirit” to an Albuquerque civic so¬

ciety in which he excoriated “the philosophy

of boost.” Boost was premised on growth by

unearned increment, rather than investment

in basic resources, especially the soil, he

charged. In his quest for fundamental im¬

provement in the resource base, he began

looking to enforced responsibility of land-

owners. In “Pioneers and Gullies,” for ex¬

ample, he described numerous valleys of the

Southwest torn out by erosion, and he pre¬

dicted, for the first time in print, that one

day proper land use would be a responsibil¬

ity of citizens: “The day will come when the

ownership of land will carry with it the ob¬

ligation to so use and protect it with respect

to erosion that it is not a menace to other

landowners and the public.”25

Leopold left the Southwest in 1924 to

accept a job in Madison, Wisconsin, as di¬

rector of the Forest Products Laboratory.

Though the laboratory’s focus on industrial

products after the tree was cut proved ulti¬

mately frustrating for one so committed to

28

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FLADER: Aldo Leopold and Environmental Citizenship

the growing forest and he would leave after

only four years, he did manage to extract

from the experience a lesson for citizens. In

an article, “The Home Builder Conserves,”

he admonished people, before they casti¬

gated the “wasteful lumberman,” to think

about how their own arbitrary demands as

consumers and home builders cause waste.

The thinking citizen has power not only in

his vote but in his daily thoughts and ac¬

tions, and especially in his habits as a buyer

and user of wood. “Good citizenship is the

only effective patriotism,” he concluded,

“and patriotism requires less and less of mak¬

ing the eagle scream, but more and more of

making him think.” This theme of the re¬

sponsibility of the citizen as intelligent con¬

sumer is one Leopold would return to from

time to time, most notably during World

War II in “Land Use and Democracy.”26

Shortly after his move to Wisconsin,

Leopold became involved with the state

chapter of the Izaak Walton League of

America, which was the most vibrant citi¬

zen conservation organization in the 1920s.

He worked with the league to promote a

non-partisan conservation commission and

a forestry policy for Wisconsin. Still hewing

to his professional orientation as a forester,

however, he warned members to eschew the

tendency to actually write policy: “It is a

pretty safe rule to remember that while

groups of men can insist on and criticize

plans, only individuals can create them.”27

Leopold himself was a professional writer of

policies, as he demonstrated both in the For¬

est Service and after he left in 1 928 to con¬

duct game surveys and recommend conser¬

vation policies in the midwestern states,

when he drafted an “American Game

Policy” adopted by the American Game

Conference in 1930, and when he helped

write a “Twenty-Five Year Conservation

Plan” for his home state of Iowa in 1931.

Leopold was tremendously impressed by

the citizen commitment to conservation in

Iowa and genuinely proud of the plan for

integration of all aspects of conservation —

parks, forests, wildlife, fish, water quality,

soil conservation — that the team of nation¬

ally recognized experts wrote. Iowa was

clearly a leader among the states in conser¬

vation thought and practice in these years.

But buried in Leopold’s correspondence are

intimations of foreboding. He warned his

colleagues in Iowa that they needed to make

a special effort to educate the public about

what was in the plan, lest people buy into it

without personally engaging with it. He was

concerned especially about the protection-

minded women so active in the parks move¬

ment who might become upset if they were

suddenly to discover that the plan aimed to

produce game to shoot. “There is grave dan¬

ger,” he said, “that the conservationists will

blow it up before they even understand what

it is.”28

In 1933, shortly after he accepted a newly

created chair of game management at the

University of Wisconsin, Leopold proposed

to the dean of agriculture the development

of a conservation plan for Wisconsin farms

similar to the Iowa plan. The purpose, as in

Iowa, would be to get all the government

agencies working together to encourage

farmers and other landowners to care for

their lands in a more conservative way — or,

as he put it, to “integrate economic with es¬

thetic land use.” But the means would dif¬

fer. In Iowa the plan was produced by im¬

ported experts who did not participate in its

execution, an arrangement that clearly left

Leopold uneasy, whereas in Wisconsin he

proposed to “evolve” a plan “rather than to

write one out-of-hand.”29

Leopold’s emphasis on evolving a plan

from the grassroots was prophetic — not only

of the emerging emphasis on public involve-

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ment in resource planning in our own day

but of the situation in Iowa at the time. By

1935 the Iowa conservation plan disinte¬

grated, at least in Leopold’s view. After Iowa

merged all relevant agencies into a single de¬

partment, as recommended in the twenty-

five-year plan, the new Iowa Conservation

Commission bypassed the man whom to

Leopold was the obvious director, and most

of Leopold’s friends in fish and game re¬

signed or were fired. The issue apparently

had to do with the Iowa commission’s in¬

sistence on an immediate showing of quick

results by government through public works

rather than, as Leopold and his colleagues

preferred, a long-term emphasis on building

a new conservation consciousness in the citi¬

zenry, especially among landowners.30

In the wake of the Iowa debacle, Leopold

commented to a friend that the only state

conservation effort to survive was in Michi¬

gan, “strangely enough, by a process of in¬

ternal disharmony. I am tempted to draw

the conclusion that complete unanimity

within a state [such as in Iowa] is a symp¬

tom of approaching dissolution.”31 In other

correspondence and articles in the 1930s he

addressed the problem of factions within the

conservation community, especially the

shotgunners versus the field glass hunters,

arguing for tolerance, a capacity for self criti¬

cism, and an institutional structure within

which factions could argue out their con¬

flicts. “It is a question of applying the demo¬

cratic process to conservation,” he con¬

cluded.32

Leopold’s thoughts on democracy and

conservation were further stimulated by

travel in Germany in 1935, where he ob¬

served an elaborate system of law, public ad¬

ministration, ethics, and customs that was

“incredibly complete and internally harmo¬

nious.” Though he could observe no real dis¬

tinction between the government, acting hi¬

erarchically from the top down, and popu¬

lar acceptance from below, he recognized

that the German system, with its strong cen¬

tral governmental authority, was “manifestly

a surrender of individualism to the commu¬

nity.”33 While he could admire it in Ger¬

many (before he understood the connection

with the Nazi movement), he knew that it

wouldn’t work in America.

Leopold addressed the tension between

the claims of the community and the rights

of the individual in America in a number of

essays in the 1930s in which he dealt with

the role of government. How can we get

conservation? he often asked. And his an¬

swer: we can legislate it, we can buy it, or

we can build it. Government’s initial efforts

at conservation had been through laws pro¬

hibiting hunting, fishing, or cutting, a first

step but inadequate. The second step, aug¬

mented by the open money bags of the New

Deal, was to buy land for conservation, but

that could be carried only “as far as the tax¬

string on our leg will reach.” The solution

had to be found on private land.34

By the time he wrote “Land Pathology”

under the menacing clouds of the dust bowl

in 1935, he saw only two possible forces that

could effect change in private land use. One

was the development of institutional mecha¬

nisms for protecting the public interest in

private land — a quest he had been on for

over a decade, especially after his new chair

of game management was lodged in the Uni¬

versity of Wisconsin’s famed Department of

Agricultural Economics with its institutional

bent. The other was his new preoccupation

with “the revival of land esthetics in rural

culture.” Out of these forces he hoped might

eventually emerge what he was even then

beginning to term a “land ethic.”35 After his

friend Jay “Ding” Darling cautioned him

that his search for institutional controls

could lead to socialization of property,36

30

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FLADER: Aldo Leopold and Environmental Citizenship

Leopold seemed increasingly to emphasize

development of a personal sense of obliga¬

tion to the land community, a sense of hus¬

bandry.

During these years of the depression

Leopold experimented with a form of citi¬

zen organization he hoped would encourage

a sense of husbandry. With farmers, sports¬

men, and his own wildlife students he es¬

tablished a series of cooperative ventures in¬

tended to apply conservation to land and

improve habitat for game. One of them, the

Coon Valley Erosion Project near LaCrosse,

Wisconsin, involved cooperation of local

landowners with government agencies in a

pathbreaking demonstration of erosion con¬

trol and integrated land use on a watershed

scale. But others functioned entirely outside

the formal channels of government, includ¬

ing the Riley Cooperative and the Faville

Grove Area within an easy drive of Madi¬

son. Leopold described these experiments in

community conservation as vertical rather

than horizontal planning, focusing a battery

of minds simultaneously on one spot. “It

may take a long time to cover the country

spot by spot,” he admitted, “but that is pref¬

erable to a smear.”37

As war clouds darkened the horizon and

called into question his earlier admiration for

Germany’s tightly regimented system of re¬

source administration, Leopold lectured to

his wildlife ecology students about “Ecology

and Politics,” presenting the case for an evo¬

lutionary mandate for individualism. Indi¬

vidual deviations from societal norms in land

management, like individual evolutionary

variations, he suggested, might enable cer¬

tain individuals to survive catastrophe even

when most members of a species were elimi¬

nated.38 This was an individualism not of

economic self-interest but of creative experi¬

mentation, in the sense of solutions gener¬

ated from the bottom up by individual citi¬

zens or communities rather than mandated

by government on all alike. It was in this

spirit that Leopold looked to the evolution

of a land ethic.

American entry into World War II fur¬

ther defined the issue: “We must prove that

democracy can use its land decently,”

Leopold argued in a seminal essay, “Land

Use and Democracy.” Here he called for

conservation from the bottom up instead of

from the top down. It had to begin with

“that combination of solicitude, foresight,

and skill which we call husbandry,” practiced

by landowners on their own land. But non¬

landowning citizens had responsibilities in

their roles as consumers as well. They could

refuse to buy “exploitation milk” from cows

pastured on steep slopes and insist on “hon¬

est boards” from properly managed forests.

There was an indispensable role for govern¬

ment as “tester of fact vs. fiction” or guard¬

ian of standards, Leopold acknowledged, but

farmers could scrutinize their own practices

through courageous use of their self-govern¬

ing Soil Conservation Districts, and there

were opportunities also for self-scrutiny by

industrial or citizen groups.39 More than half

a century later, the Forest Stewardship

Council’s independent third-party certifica¬

tion of forest products and other examples

of the movement for green production and

consumption standards would attest to the

validity of Leopold’s visionary argument.

Aldo Leopold’s ideas about the roles of

government and citizens in the shaping of

environmental policy were tested in the last

decade of his life as never before by his in¬

volvement in the traumatic deer debates of

the 1940s in Wisconsin. After being nearly

hunted to extirpation in the early decades of

the century, the state’s deer herd had in¬

creased to such an extent that by the early

1940s it needed to be reduced for the good

of both deer and forest, and Leopold sought

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

to work with the Conservation Department

to build a case for an “any-deer” season, for

killing does as well as bucks. But the call for

reduction stirred disbelief and resentment

among both hunters and the general pub¬

lic, to whom conservation of deer was a good

thing. In response, the Conservation Com¬

mission organized a Citizens’ Deer Commit¬

tee, appointing Aldo Leopold as chairman.40

Leopold’s committee had a cross-section

of citizens, mostly from northern Wiscon¬

sin, most of them distrustful of the policy

he was urging on the department. For the

first meeting he prepared maps and charts

to provide an historical review of deer irrup¬

tions nationwide. But he was upstaged by

another member of the committee, Joyce

Larkin, editor of the Vilas County News Re¬

view. She didn’t think there were too many

deer, and she arrived at the meeting armed

with a printed booklet of history and local

opinion about the deer situation in Vilas

County. We don’t know how Leopold re¬

acted to Larkin that day, but we do know

that he decided to take the committee and

several newspaper reporters on a three-day

tour of deer yards, to let them discuss what

they were actually seeing on the ground.

Joyce Larkin, among others, was impressed.

She went back to Vilas, got the county board

to accept Leopold’s challenge to bring clash¬

ing interests together to look at the problems

locally, and came to a subsequent meeting

of the committee with a new report in fa¬

vor of an any-deer season.41

However successful Leopold proved at

changing attitudes among the members of

his Citizens’ Deer Committee by letting

them argue out their views with respect to

conditions in particular locales, the deer

problem proved too widespread and public

attitudes too entrenched for him to make

much headway in the state as a whole. A new

newspaper, Save Wisconsin s Deer, ridiculed

and castigated him in virtually every issue

and offered fuel to those who opposed his

reasoning. Yet he never gave up on his ef¬

fort to educate the citizenry, individually and

collectively. It is likely that the unremitting

stress of dealing with the deer issue in the

public arena during the 1940s helped send

Leopold to an early grave. But he had been

appointed to a six-year term on the Wiscon¬

sin Conservation Commission, and he be¬

lieved it was his responsibility as a citizen to

4?

serve.

During those years he took solace in the

exercise of another type of citizenship that

he had advocated since the days of his back¬

yard garden in Albuquerque: he practiced

husbandry as plain member and citizen of

the land community at the sand farm his

family called “the shack.” He expressed this

form of citizenship — citizenship as creative

individualism — perhaps most poignantly in

his essay, “Axe-in-Hand,” which includes a

definition of a conservationist that could as

easily be read as his definition of a citizen:

I have read many definitions of what is a con¬

servationist [citizen], and written not a few

myself, but I suspect that the best one is writ¬

ten not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a

matter of what a man thinks about while

chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A

conservationist [citizen] is one who is hum¬

bly aware that with each stroke he is writing

his signature on the face of his land. Signa¬

tures of course differ, whether written with

axe or pen, and this is as it should be.43

Endnotes

'See A Nation of Spectators: How Civic Disengage¬

ment Weakens America and What We Can Do

About It (Final Report of the National Com¬

mission on Civic Renewal, 1998); and Rob¬

ert D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s

32

TRANSACTIONS

FLADER: Aldo Leopold and Environmental Citizenship

Declining Social Capital J Journal of Democ¬

racy 6:1 (January 1995), 65-78. Much of the

recent attention to citizenship in the United

States has been stimulated by scholarly writ¬

ing concerning the forging of civil society in

new democracies around the world, especially

since the fall of the Iron Curtain. See, for ex¬

ample, Andrew Arato, “Interpreting 1989,”

Social Research 60:3 (Fall 1993), 609-46;

Michael Bernhard, “Civil Society after the

First Transition: Dilemmas of Post-Commu¬

nist Democratization in Poland and Beyond,”

Communist and Post-Communist Studies 29

(1996): 309-30; Shu-Yun Ma, “The Chinese

Discourse on Civil Society,” The China Quar¬

terly 137 (1994); James Bohman, “Complex¬

ity, Pluralism, and the Constitutional State:

On Habermas’s Faktizitat und Geltungf Law

& Society Review, 28:4 (1994), 897-930; and

Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere:

A Contribution to the Critique of Actually

Existing Democracy,” in Justice Interruptus:

Critical Reflections on the “ Postsocialist” Con¬

dition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 69-98.

2Susan L. Flader, “Citizenry and the State in the

Shaping of Environmental Policy,” Environ¬

mental Review 3: 1 (January 1998), 8-24.

3Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the Ameri¬

can Republic, 1776—1787 (New York: W.W.

Norton and Co., 1972), 319-28.

4See, for example, Gary Kulik, “Dams, Fish, and

Farmers: Defence of Public Rights in Eigh¬

teenth-Century Rhode Island,” in The Coun¬

tryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation ,

ed. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press,

1985), 25-50.

5See Robert E. Shalhope, “Republicanism and

Early American Historiography,” William

and Mary Quarterly 39 ( 1 982):334 — 56; Joyce

Appleby, ed., “Special Issue: Republicanism

in the History and Historiography of the

United States,” American Quarterly 37

(1985); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of

the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1992).

6See Jack N. Rakove, “Parchment Barriers and

the Politics of Rights,” in A Culture of Rights:

The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics, and

Law — 1791 and 1991 , ed. Michael J. Lacey

and Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cam¬

bridge University Press, 1992), 103; and Wil¬

liam A. Galston, “Practical Philosophy and

the Bill of Rights: Perspectives on Some Con¬

temporary Issues,” ibid., 234.

7Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America ,

ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage,

1945), I:ch. 12, II:ch. 5.

8See Philip D. Brick and R. McGreggor Cawley,

eds., A Wolf in the Garden: The Land Rights

Movement and the New Environmental Debate

(Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield,

1996).

9See Stephen Skowronek, Building a New Ameri¬

can State: The Expansion of National Admin¬

istrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1982); and

Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel

of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation

Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1950).

10Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation

(Garden City, NY, 1910), IV:6. Compare

Leopold: “It is no prediction, but merely an

assertion that the idea of controlled environ¬

ment contains colors and brushes wherewith

society may some day paint a new and possi¬

bly a better picture of itself;” in “The Con¬

servation Ethic,” Journal of Forestry 31:6 (Oc¬

tober 1933), 634-43.

nAldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and

Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1949), 4.

12Ibid., 87.

13Ibid., 138.

14Ibid., 161.

15Ibid., 166-67, 175.

16Ibid., 204.

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

17Ibid., 207-8.

18For details of Leopold’s biography see Curt

Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

1988), and Susan L. Flader, Thinking Like a

Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of

an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves,

and Forests (1974; Madison: University of

Wisconsin Press, 1994).

19“To the Forest Officers of the Carson,” The

Carson Pine Cone (July 1913), reprinted in

The River of the Mother of God and Other Es¬

says by Aldo Leopold, ed. Susan L. Flader and

J. Baird Callicott (Madison: University of

Wisconsin Press, 1991), 41-46 [hereafter

cited as River] .

20See Susan Flader, “Aldo Leopold and the Evo¬

lution of Ecosystem Management,” in Sus¬

tainable Ecological Systems: Implementing an

Ecological Approach to Land Management, ed.

W. Wallace Covington and Leonard F.

DeBano (USDA Forest Service General

Technical Report RM-247, 1994), 13-19.

21 “Standards of Conservation” (handwritten ms.,

c. 1922), General Files — Aldo Leopold, Se¬

ries 9/23/10-6, Box 16, University of Wis¬

consin Division of Archives [hereafter cited

as LP 6B6 (Leopold Papers, Series 6, Box

16)], reprinted in River, 82-85.

22See, for example, “Conservation Economics,”

Journal of Forestry 32:5 (May 1934), 537-44,

reprinted in River, 20 1 . For discussion of the

problem of authority as related to the rela¬

tionship between professionals and citizens

see Terry L. Cooper, “Citizenship and Pro¬

fessionalism in Public Administration,” Public

Administration Review 44 (March 1984),

143-149; and J. Douglas Wellman and

Terence J. Tipple, “Public Forestry and Di¬

rect Democracy,” The Environmental Profes¬

sional 12 (1990), 77-86.

23“Home Gardens and Citizenship,” 23 April

1917, 7pp. tps., LP 8B8.

24“The Civic Life of Albuquerque,” 27 Septem¬

ber 1918, 9pp tps., LP 8B8.

25“A Criticism of the Booster Spirit,” 6 Novem¬

ber 1923, 10pp tps speech to Ten Dons, LP

6B16, reprinted in River, 98-105; “Pioneers

and Gullies,” Sunset Magazine 52:5 (May

1924), 15-16 and 91-95, reprinted in River,

106—13. Leopold’s language on the obligation

of landowners was similar to that in a speech

he had written in December 1922 for the

New Mexico Association for Science, “Ero¬

sion as a Menace to the Social and Economic

Future of the Southwest.” The speech was

published many years later in Journal of For¬

estry 44:9 (Sept 1946), 627-33.

26“The Homebuilder Conserves,” American For¬

ests and Forest Life 34:413 (May 1928), 276-

78 and 297, reprinted in River , 143-47;

“Land-Use and Democracy,” Audubon Maga¬

zine 44:5 (Sept-Oct 1942), 259-65, reprinted

in River, 295-300.

27“Izaac Walton League and Its Relation to For¬

estry in Wisconsin,” [n.d., c. 1925], 10pp tps,

LP 6B16.

28Leopold to Claude V. Campbell, 15 October

1932, LP 3B5, and associated correspon¬

dence. See also Jacob L. Crane, Jr., and

George Wheeler Olcott, Report on the Lowa

Twenty-five Year Conservation Plan (Des

Moines: Meredith, 1933).

29“A Conservation Plan for Wisconsin Farms,”

23 October 1933, 6pp tps., LP 6B16.

30See Leopold to William Schuenke, 10 July

1935; I.T. Bode to Leopold, n.d. [c. July

1935]; and Leopold to I.T. Bode, 19 July

1935, all in LP 3B5. See also Rebecca

Conard, Places of Quiet Beauty: Parks, Pre¬

serves, and Environmentalism (Iowa City: Uni¬

versity of Iowa Press, 1997), 120-36.

31Leopold to P.S. Lovejoy, 18 July 1935, P.S.

Lovejoy Papers, Michigan Historical Com¬

mission Archives, Lansing, RG63-12 B12F6.

32“A House Divided,” Wisconsin Sportsman (Oc¬

tober 1940), 5. See also “Game and Wild Life

Conservation,” The Condor 34:2 (Mar-Apr

34

TRANSACTIONS

FLADER: Aldo Leopold and Environmental Citizenship

1932), 103-06, reprinted in River , 164-68.

For recent examples of local democratic par¬

ticipation in decisionmaking see Daniel

Kemnis, Community and the Politics of Place

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,

1991); and Mark Sagoff, “The View from

Quincy Library: Civic Engagement in Envi¬

ronmental Problem-Solving” (Working Paper

#16, The National Commission on Civic

Renewal).

33“Notes on Game Administration in Germany,”

American Wildlife 25:6 (Nov-Dec 1936), 85,

92-93.

34See, for example, “The Conservation Ethic,”

Journal of Forestry 31:6 (Oct 1933), 634-43

[River, 181—92]; “Conservation Economics,”

Journal of Forestry 32:5 (May 1934), 537-44

[River, 193-202]; “Conservation in the

World of Tomorrow,” lecture notes 29

March 1937, 5pp tps, LP 6B14; and “The

Farmer as a Conservationist,” American For¬

ests 45:6 (June 1939), 294-99, 316, 323

[River, 255-65].

35“Land Pathology,” 15 April 1935, 8pp tps, LP

6B16, reprinted in River, 212-17.

36J.N. Darling to Leopold, 20 November 1935,

LP 6B16.

37“Farmer-Sportsman Set-ups in the North Cen¬

tral Region,” Proceedings North American

Wildlife Conference, February 3-7, 1936 (Sen¬

ate Committee Print, 74th Cong., 2d sess.,

1936), 279-85. See also “Coon Valley: An

Adventure in Cooperative Conservation,”

American Forests 41:5 (May 1935), 205-208

[River, 218-23]; “Flelping Ourselves” (with

Reuben Paulson), Field and Stream 39:4 (Au¬

gust 1934), 32-33, 56 [River, 203-08]; and

“Flistory of the Riley Game Cooperative,

1 93 1-1939,” Journal of Wildlife Management

4:3 (July 1940), 291-302. For recent ex¬

amples of the burgeoning movement in com¬

munity conservation, see the special issue of

the Journal of Forestry 96:3 (March 1998) on

community forestry.

38“Ecology and Politics,” WLE 118 Introductory

Lecture, n.d. [c. 1941], 7pp tps, lp 6B16

[River, 281-89].

39“Land-Use and Democracy,” Audubon Maga¬

zine 44:5 (Sept-Oct 1942), 259-65 [River,

295-300].

40See Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain, 1 68—

260.

41Ibid., 183-93.

42Ibid., 194.

43 A Sand County Almanac, 68.

Susan Flader is professor of American western

and environmental history at the University of

Missouri- Colu m bia and has written or edited six

books and numerous articles, including Think¬

ing Like a Mountain (a biographical study of

Aldo Leopold) and The River of the Mother of

God ( essays by Aldo Leopold, edited with Baird

Callicott). She has served as president of the

American Society for Environmnental History

and the Missouri Parks Association and as a di¬

rector of the National Audubon Society, the

American Forestry Association, and the Forest

History Society. Address: Department of His¬

tory, University of Mis so u ri -Colum bia, 101

Read Hall, Columbia, MO 65211. Email:

fladers @m isso u ri. edu

Volume 87 (1999)

35

Craig Annen and Jonathan Lyon

Relationships between Herbaceous

Vegetation and Environmental

Factors along a Restored Prairie-Oak

Opening Ecotone

Abstract We studied a potential ecotone between a wet-mesic prairie and

an oak opening in a restored landscape in southern Wisconsin.

We described the relationships between herbaceous vegetation and

soil variables along the prairie-oak opening transition using twenty-

five 1-rn2 plots located on five 75 -m transects. We identified a

total of 46 herbaceous species and analyzed eight environmental

variables: seven soil variables and photo synthetic ally active radia¬

tion (PAR). We observed distinct soil gradients along the ecotone:

soil organic matter , total N, pH, P, Mg, and Ca levels all exhib¬

ited significant reductions when moving along the ecotone from

prairie to oak opening. PAR was weakly correlated with vegeta¬

tion patterns. Using cluster analysis and ordination techniques,

we identified few distinct herbaceous community types along the

transition, except for a unique assemblage dominated by reed ca¬

nary grass (Phalaris arundinacea L.). Our canonical correspondence

analysis ( CCA) results indicated strong correlations between her¬

baceous vegetation and soil N, pH, Ca, and Mg gradients. Her¬

baceous species richness and Shannon-Wiener diversity increased

moving from the prairie into the oak opening. Overall, our re¬

sults indicated that (1) distinct soil gradients exist at the site, (2)

soil gradients are correlated with herbaceous vegetation patterns

in the restored area, and (3) while P. arundinacea has a strong

influence on the composition of vegetation at the site, non- Phalaris-

dominated plots exhibited continuous rather than discrete ecotonal

properties. The potential importance of soil variables and soil gra¬

dients should be considered when studying the characteristics of

ecotones in restored habitats.

TRANSACTIONS Volume 87 (1999)

37

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

E cotones are transition zones between

two or more distinct community types.

The role of ecotones (and ecoclines) in de¬

scribing and explaining spatial and tempo¬

ral vegetation patterns has received renewed

attention in recent years (Naiman and

Decamps 1990, Holland et al. 1991,

Hansen and di Castri 1992, Gosz 1993,

Risser 1993), although interest in the struc¬

ture and ecological impact of ecotones is by

no means new (Clements 1905, Leopold

1933, Weaver and Albertson 1956). Recent

ecotone research has been focused on

biodiversity (Pulliam 1988, Hansen and

Urban 1992, Leach and Givnish 1996), nu¬

trient and material flows between commu¬

nities (Johnston 1993, McClaran and

McPherson 1995), ecotones in landscapes

(Boren et al. 1997, Dyer and Baird 1997,

Sagers and Lyon 1997), and regulation and

response to large-scale climatic change

(Nielson 1993, Rusek 1993). Despite the

renewed interest in ecotones, characteriza¬

tion of vegetation in and across ecotones re¬

mains problematic (Auerbach and Shmida

1993, Jarvis 1995, Stohlgren et al. 1997).

Rates of spatial change in vegetation are

scale-dependent, and ecotones can be char¬

acterized over a wide range of spatial scales

(di Castri 1993, Gosz 1991, Crumley 1993).

Assigning boundary classifications can be

difficult at larger scales because of the ten¬

dency of small-scale differences to average

out at larger levels of observation (Allen and

Hoekstra 1992). Ecotone studies at the

population level encompass the spatial dis¬

tribution of individuals in a small habitat

and facilitates analysis at smaller scales

(Fahrig and Merriam 1985, Gosz 1993). In

both large and small scale ecotonal land¬

scapes, specific environmental variables can

strongly influence the distribution and abun¬

dance of vegetation and be correlated with

the spatial distribution of ecotones (Gosz

and Sharpe 1989, Risser 1990, van der

Maarel 1990, Neilson 1993). Grassland and

prairie vegetation, in particular, have been

shown to be sensitive to changes in soil nu¬

trient status and balance (W edin and Tilman

1996), and soil gradients have been shown

to have a strong influence on the composi¬

tion of prairie and savanna vegetation

(Curtis 1959, Anderson 1968, Jastrow 1987,

Zak et al. 1990, Leach 1994).

We studied a suspected ecotone between

a restored prairie community and a remnant

oak opening. The study was conducted in

the Curtis Prairie, a prairie restoration

project at the University of Wisconsin-

Madison Arboretum. The restoration effort

at the Curtis Prairie has been studied from

a variety of perspectives, including land use

history (Blewett and Cottam 1984), fire

(Anderson 1972, Peet et al. 1975), vegeta¬

tion dynamics (Cottam and Wilson 1966,

Blewett 1981), and organic matter incorpo¬

ration into soils (Nielsen and Hole 1963).

However, no studies have assessed potential

linkages between underlying soil gradients

and composition of vegetation along the re¬

stored prairie-oak opening ecotone. Our

overall objective was to determine how her¬

baceous vegetation was distributed in the

ecotonal region and if vegetation patterns

were correlated with soil variables and/or

photosynthetically active radiation (PAR).

Specifically, we wanted to determine:

(1) if and how the environmental vari¬

ables changed across the prairie-oak open¬

ing boundary;

(2) if the boundary between the two veg¬

etation zones was discrete or continuous;

(3) if any of the environmental variables

were correlated with vegetation compo¬

sition;

(4) if a plant diversity gradient existed be¬

tween the adjacent vegetation zones.

38

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ANNEN and LYON: Prairie-Oak Opening Ecotone

Study Site

The 0.45-ha study site was located in the

northwestern portion of the Curtis Prairie,

a prairie restoration project within the Uni¬

versity of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.

Presettlement vegetation in the area con¬

sisted of an oak opening intermixed with

patches of tallgrass prairie (Curtis 1959,

Sachse 1965, Cottam and Wilson 1966,

Blewitt and Cottam 1984). The area was

settled and converted into farmland in the

1850s. By the 1920s, the agricultural fields

were abandoned, and the area was used as a

horse pasture. In 1932 the Arboretum ac¬

quired the land, and in 1935 the prairie res¬

toration project at Curtis Prairie was initi¬

ated. By 1948 the first prescribed burning

was conducted (Curtis and Partch 1948).

Current management of the Curtis Prairie

includes a two-year cycle of prescribed burn¬

ing; two-thirds of the prairie are burned one

year, and the remaining third is burned the

next (Anderson 1972). Occasional brushing

and mowing also have been used as manage¬

ment tools. A detailed history of the site is

provided by Blewitt and Cottam (1984).

Methods

Herbaceous Vegetation Sampling

Five 75-m transects were established at

intervals of 1 5 m running parallel across the

prairie-oak opening border. The transects

started at a small drainage channel running

southwest to northeast across the site (a

topographical low point). Position 1 was in

the prairie while position 5 was in the oak

opening. All transects were set up at an

azimuth of 310°. Sampling plots were

located at 15 m intervals along the transect.

Herbaceous vegetation was sampled using 1 -

m2 quadrat constructed from PVC pipe.

Vegetation samples were taken at each 15 m

interval along each of the five transects for

a total of 25 plots. The quadrat shape and

size are appropriate for this type of vege¬

tation (Brummer et al. 1994).

Herbaceous vegetation within each plot

was clipped at the base of the plant (plant-

soil interface) and separated according to

species. Nomenclature follows Gleason and

Cronquist (1991). The species samples were

then dried by placing them in a drying oven

at 65°C for 48 hours or until a constant

weight was obtained. Dry weight biomass

was determined for each species (g m'2) (Ap¬

pendix A). Photosynthetically active radia¬

tion (PAR) was measured on each plot us¬

ing a Li-Cor LI-192SA Quantum Sensor

(Lincoln, NE). Paired light measurements

were taken in full sunlight adjacent to the

study area, above the herbaceous canopy (ap¬

proximately 1.3 m) as a measure of light

interception by oak opening burr oaks

( Quercus macrocarpa Michx.), and at

approximately 8 cm above the ground sur¬

face beneath the herbaceous canopy.

Soils

A composite soil sample was taken from each

plot to a depth of approximately 1 0 cm from

three arbitrary locations within each plot.

Leaf litter was removed from the sample area

prior to soil collection. Soil samples were

stored in plastic bags and kept refrigerated

until analysis. Soils were analyzed at the

University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Soil

Testing, Plant Analysis and Feed and For¬

age Analysis Laboratory in Madison, WI.

Soils were analyzed for pH, organic matter,

total N, available P, and exchangeable K, Ca,

and Mg.

Soil pH was measured using a glass elec¬

trode pH meter in a 1:1 w/v aqueous solu¬

tion following the methods of Corey and

Tanner (1961). Calcium was measured as

lime (CaOH2) using a glass electrode Ca

Volume 87 (1999)

39

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

meter in a 1:1 w/v aqueous solution. Avail¬

able phosphorous was measured after the

methods of Bray and Kurtz (1945). Avail¬

able potassium was measured according to

the methods outlined in Wilde et al. (1979).

Percent organic matter (OM) was deter¬

mined following the methods of Schulte

(1980). Total nitrogen was measured using

the semi-micro Kjeldahl procedure (Brem-

ner and Mulvaney 1982)

Vegetation Analysis

Classification of herbaceous vegetation was

conducted using Cluster Analysis performed

by program PC-ORD (McCune and Mef-

ford 1995). To evaluate the variation in her¬

baceous vegetation and environmental vari¬

ables along the transects, analysis of variance

tests were performed using the general lin¬

ear model (GLM) procedure in Minitab 8.2

(Minitab 1991). Mean separations across

transect position groups were conducted us¬

ing Fisher’s test at P < 0.05. Species density

was defined at the total number of species

found in a sample plot and was used as an

estimate for species richness (Magurran

1988). Species diversity was determined us¬

ing the Shannon-Wiener diversity index, H’

.= -£ pi In pi, where pi is the proportion of

importance value of the ith species. These

values were based on dry-weight biomass.

To evaluate relationships between vegeta¬

tion and environmental variables, we per¬

formed multivariate analyses, namely

detrended correspondence analysis (DCA)

and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA)

ordinations on herbaceous species-environ¬

mental variable matrices. We conducted the

ordinations using the programs PC-ORD

(McCune and Mefford 1995) and

CANOCO 3.10 (ter Braak 1990). Herba¬

ceous species biomass was used in the plant

matrix as an indicator of plant abundance.

Plant dry weight biomass was used in all the

ordination and classification methods de¬

scribed. The DCA procedure used segment

detrending, nonlinear rescaling of axes, and

rare species downweighting (Hill and Gauch

1980). The CCA procedure involved linear

combination of variables for site scores, no

transformation of species abundance matri¬

ces, and the use of a Monte Carlo permuta¬

tion to test the significance of the first axis

eigenvalue (ter Braak 1990). In all CCA or¬

dinations performed, the Monte Carlo test

indicated that the eigenvalues for the first axis

were significant (P < 0.05). Given the influ¬

ence of noisy environmental data on CCA

(McCune 1997), CCA was used and inter¬

preted in the limited context of describing

plant community variation with respect to

the limited set of measured environmental

variables in the study. Soil and environmen¬

tal variables were transformed, when neces¬

sary, to meet the assumptions of normality.

Significance is reported at the alpha = 0.05

level, unless otherwise noted in the text.

Results

A total of 46 herbaceous species were found

on the study plots (Appendix A). Standing

crop, dry weight biomass on the plots ranged

from 69 to 21 17 g m'2 (mean = 533 g m'2).

A distinct biomass gradient was also ob¬

served along the prairie-oak opening transi¬

tion; mean plot biomass was 642 g mf2, 1046

g m'2, 437 g m'2, 307 g m'2, and 231 g m'2,

at transect positions 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, re¬

spectively. Herbaceous species density on

plots ranged from 2 to 1 1 species (mean =

5.9). Note that the species density totals do

not include a limited number of spring

ephemeral species. A summary of the over¬

all fidelity of the herbaceous species encoun¬

tered in the study indicated that the major¬

ity of the species sampled were uncommon;

cumulative totals of species fidelity show that

40

TRANSACTIONS

ANNEN and LYON: Prairie-Oak Opening Ecotone

64.6% of the species were found on three

or fewer plots, 29.1% were found on from

four to eight plots, and the remaining 6.3%

were found on nine or more plots.

Soil Chemical Gradients

Table 1 provides a comparison of the means,

standard deviations, and ranges of the

environmental variables in the study. The

relatively wide ranges of environmental

variables depicted in Table 1 indicate the

existence of soil heterogeneity at the site.

Table 2 summarizes the correlations between

environmental variables in the study. Moving

from prairie towards the oak opening, seven

of the eight environmental variables under

examination were found to be negatively and

significantly correlated with distance along

the transects: pH (r = -0.81), organic matter

(r - -0.73), N (r = -0.73), P (r I -0.63), Ca

(r = -0.82), Mg (r = -0.88), and PAR above

the herbaceous canopy (r = -0.33) (Figure 1).

Table 2 shows that K was not significantly

correlated with distance or any of the

environmental variables measured. Further¬

more, PAR above the herbaceous canopy was

weakly correlated with all other environ¬

mental variables, and PAR beneath the

herbaceous canopy exhibited even weaker

correlations (Table 2). Table 2 also shows

that many of the soil nutrient variables were

strongly correlated.

Table 1. Means, standard deviations, and ranges (minimum and maximum) of environ¬

mental variables along a prairie-oak opening ecotone in the Curtis Prairie.

Variable a Mean Standard Range

Deviation

Variables shown are in the following units: organic matter (OM) %; Total N %; available P (P) mg/I;

exhangeable K (K) cmol+kg-1; exhangeable Ca (Ca) cmol+kg'1; exhangeable Mg (Mg) cmol+kg'1;

photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) nmol s^m*2.

Table 2. Pearson correlation coefficients between variables measured in the study.

Variables shown are in the following units: distance (D) m; organic matter (OM) %; Total N %; available P (P)

mg/I; exhangeable K (K) cmol+kg*1; exhangeable Ca (Ca) cmol+kg*1; exhangeable Mg (Mg) cmol+kg*1;

photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) jimol s^m*2.

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Figure 1. Graphs show relationships between transect position and soil nutrient

levels. Transect position 1 corresponds to prairie and 5 corresponds to oak opening

in the Curtis Prairie. Bars represent one standard deviation.

Figure 1 is a composite graph of transect

position plotted versus measured soil levels of

total N, available P, exchangeable Ca, and

percent OM. Significant reductions in soil N

{P < o.OOl), Ca {P < 0.001), P (P = 0.030),

and OM (P = 0.002) were noted moving

from prairie (position 1) to oak opening (po¬

sition 5). The Mg results (not shown) were

highly similar to the Ca results. These results

indicate strong underlying soil gradients on

the study site moving across the prairie res¬

toration-oak opening transition zone.

Vegetation along the Transition

Cluster analysis identified six weak clusters

in the dataset. However, only a single dis¬

tinct herbaceous assemblage was found in

the study area. Reed canary grass ( Phalaris

arundinacea L.) dominated the plant assem¬

blages found in transect positions 1 and 2

along the ecotone. The DCA ordination re¬

sults (not shown) also indicated this pattern.

Figure 2 shows that positions 1 and 2 had

significantly lower DCA mean scores than

positions 3 to 3 (P < 0.001). No significant

differences in mean DCA scores were found

between positions 3, 4, and 3. However, the

standard deviation was highest for position

3. This latter result indicates the vegetation

at position 3 (between the prairie restoration

and oak opening) shows a high rate of spe¬

cies change at that location. The five remain-

42

TRANSACTIONS

ANNEN and LYON: Prairie-Oak Opening Ecotone

Figure 2. A plot of DCA axis 1 scores (±1 SD) versus plot position along the five

study transects.

ing non-Phalaris-dominated clusters were

located in plots spread out along the three

remaining transect positions. No clear pat¬

terns of prairie versus oak opening vegeta¬

tion were found.

Vegetation-Environmental Relationships

Ordinations were used to detect relation¬

ships between vegetation and measured

environmental variables. Both DCA and

CCA were run, but because the two ordina¬

tions produced similar results, only the CCA

results are presented in detail. Figure 3 is a

summary CCA ordination showing plot or¬

dination on a biplot for the 23 vegetation

plots with eight environmental variables.

The first three axes of the CCA ordination

explained 33.2% of the variation in the spe¬

cies matrix. The three vectors shown in Fig¬

ure 3 correspond to the environmental vari¬

ables showing strong correlations with the

first CCA axis, namely Ca (r = -0.88), N (r

= -0.72), and pH (r = -0.71). Mg also ex¬

hibited a strong correlation (r = -0.78) as did

OM (r = -0.58); however, a vector for Mg

wasn’t included in Figure 3 because Mg re¬

sults were similar to those of Ca. The results

in Figure 3 parallel the results presented in

Table 2. The CCA correlations also closely

paralleled the correlations between environ¬

mental variables and the DCA ordination

axes. While CCA may be sensitive to noise

in environmental data (McCune 1997), the

results provide corroboration of the soil gra¬

dient analysis and the DCA results.

The distribution of plots in Figure 3 also

shows a separation of the plots dominated

by Phalaris , with all Phalaris- dominated

plots located exclusively on the left side of

the ordination. No clear segregation of plots

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Figure 3. A CCA ordination biplot of 25 plots and 9 environmental variables. The

environmental variables with the strongest correlation with the vegetation matrix are

shown in the biplot.

was observed on the right half of the CCA

biplot, indicating more of a continuous dis¬

tribution than discrete gradation of herba¬

ceous assemblages in the non -Phalaris—

dominated plots.

Diversity Gradients

In addition to soil chemical gradients, a

herbaceous plant diversity gradient also was

found along the prairie-oak opening tran¬

sition. Plant diversity was calculated for each

transect position using both species richness

(S) and the Shannon-Weiner Diversity Index

(IT). The results in Table 3 show that both

species richness and Shannon-Weiner

diversity were positively correlated with

distance along the transition zone; as prairie

graded into oak opening, species richness and

diversity increased. Diversity estimates were

strongly correlated with Ca (r = -0.90), N (r

= -0.84), OM (r = -0.72), and pH (r =

-0.67). Interestingly, no significant relation¬

ships were found between any of the PAR

measurements and species diversity measures.

There was a strong negative correlation

between Phalaris and species richness (r =

-0.73) and diversity (r = -0.78) along the

ecotone transition. While the cause-effect

relationship between Phalaris and plant

diversity is beyond the scope of this study,

the results suggest that Phalaris dominance

reduces diversity.

Discussion

The term ecotone was first used by Clements

(1903) to describe the “tension zone” be¬

tween plant communities where the major

44

TRANSACTIONS

ANNEN and LYON: Prairie-Oak Opening Ecotone

Table 3. Correlations between Shannon-

Weiner diversity (H’)t species density (S),

and distance and environmental variables.

Values represent Pearson’s correlation

coefficients (r).

Variables shown are in the following units: dis¬

tance (D) m; organic matter (OM) %; Total N %;

available P (P) mg/I; exhangeable K (K) cmol+kg*1;

exhangeable Ca (Ca) cmol+kg'1; exhangeable Mg

(Mg) cmol+kg-1; photosynthetically active radia¬

tion (PAR) nmol s^nr2.

dominant species in adjacent communities

overlapped in their distribution. In recent

years, the term ecotone has been used inter¬

changeably with the terms “transition zone”

and ‘landscape boundary’ (van der Maarel

1990; Shugart 1990; Holland et al. 1991;

Hansen and di Castri 1992). The presence

of ecotones and their manifestation are in¬

fluenced by a host of factors, including

edaphic conditions, geomorphology, distur¬

bance, and climate (Risser 1990, van der

Maarel 1990, Gosz 1993).

The results of our study indicate distinct

ecotonal characteristics in both vegetation

and soil variables in the Curtis Prairie. The

herbaceous layer exhibited sharp ecotonal

boundaries only at the transition between

Phalaris- dominated communities and prai¬

rie-oak opening vegetation. Cluster analysis

and CCA ordinations showed little distinct

separation between plots on non -Phalaris-

dominated plots; herbaceous vegetation as¬

semblages were more continuous than dis¬

crete across the prairie-oak opening

transition. Our results also indicate that

there were both soil chemical and diversity

gradients along the prairie-oak opening eco¬

tone in the study area. Organic matter, pH,

P, Ca, Mg, and total N decreased along the

gradient from prairie to oak opening; plant

diversity increased from prairie to oak open¬

ing. Given the importance of total N and

available P to plant nutrition, the role and

influence of OM in prairie soil development,

and the impacts of Ca and Mg on plant dis¬

tribution in calcareous and dolomitic soils,

our results highlight the importance of soil

gradients along the prairie oak opening tran¬

sition in this study. However, the presence

of Phalaris at the site may have had a strong

influence on altering p re- Phalaris— invasion

vegetation and soil patterns.

Integrating vegetation analyses with en¬

vironmental and physiographic variables can

provide a more robust basis for classification

and characterization than vegetation analy¬

ses alone (Rowe 1984, Hix 1988, Palmer

1993). The soil gradient analysis and CCA

results indicate that herbaceous species were

influenced by soil gradients across the

ecotonal landscape. The correlations be¬

tween the soil variables and herbaceous spe¬

cies diversity indicate that plant diversity

may also be influenced by soil chemical gra¬

dients. In the oak opening portion of the

ecotone, lower nutrient availability may pro¬

mote greater diversity compared to that of

the prairie.

Ecotones may provide pathways for the

invasion of exotic plants that can disrupt

community dynamics (Risser 1990, Planty-

Tabacchi et al. 1996). An important factor

influencing the observed diversity patterns

in our results was that Phalaris had a nega¬

tive impact on herbaceous species diversity

on the study site. Phalaris was a dominant

species on the wetter soils on the prairie side

of the ecotone but was not found in the oak

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

opening or the prairie-oak opening inter¬

face. Phalaris is an exotic species that grows

in dense clumps, outcompetes local flora,

and is highly resistant to flooding (Apfel-

baum and Sams 1987, Chonchou and

Fustec 1988). Seasonal flooding has oc¬

curred and continues to occur near and

around an overflow ditch within the study

area. Phalaris arundinacea was most domi¬

nant near the overflow ditch, and it follows

that the ditch is quite possibly the vector

by which seeds of P. arundinacea first en¬

tered the area.

Current management techniques (i.e.,

fire and selective brushing) may have influ¬

enced the ecotone under study. In addition,

light (PAR) may have a long-term impact

on the vegetation composition at the site

depending on phenology, available wave¬

lengths of light, and variation in herbaceous

canopy composition. While the influence of

these variables requires more investigation,

the results of the present study clearly dem¬

onstrate the potential influence of soil fac¬

tors on the composition and distribution of

herbaceous vegetation. We suggest that soil

variables and gradients should be considered

when studying characteristics of ecotones in

restored habitats.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Dr. Mark Leach

and the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Arboretum for access to the Curtis Prairie

site. Kevin Hollender and Melissa Slabich

provided a great deal of field assistance in

collecting data and in the preliminary analy¬

sis of that data. We would also like to thank

Dr. Robert Bohanan and an anonymous re¬

viewer for reviewing preliminary drafts of the

manuscript. This manuscript is submitted

through Edgewood College’s Environmen¬

tal Studies Program.

46

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ANNEN and LYON: Prairie-Oak Opening Ecotone

Volume 87 (1999)

47

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

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Jonathan Lyon is assistant director of Commu¬

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50

TRANSACTIONS

Ellen Argyros

“Pulp Fiction”: Edna Ferber s

Come and Get It and Ecofeminism

dna Ferber’s novel Come and Get It is pulp fiction not so

1 1/much because of its dealings with sensational subjects or

its being printed on low-quality paper as because it is about

the making of pulp, the logging industry in Wisconsin in the

early half of the twentieth century, the empire-making of

Barney Glasgow. Granted, the book does contain some melo¬

dramatic elements: the lust of a sugar daddy for a sweet young

thing, the sudden deus ex machina when that sugar daddy dies

in a boating accident, the social-climbing tendencies of that

opportunistic young woman once the wealthy Barney Glasgow

dies and she can marry his son, heir to his fortune. Still, Come

and Get It is of interest not because of its melodrama but be¬

cause what it reveals about the status of women and the status

of the environment in Wisconsin around the turn of the cen¬

tury right up until before World War II. It is also is an im¬

pressive testimony to the “Wisconsin character,” as Ferber de¬

fines it. In her novel, Ferber rewards those who are

unpretentious, work hard, save their money yet do not become

seduced by the trappings of material success into becoming

what they are not. She is also extremely aware of the way in

which Midwesterners define themselves — sometimes defen¬

sively — against standards set in the east.

Given the recent interest in such local environmental issues

as what to do about the high concentration of PCBs in the

Fox River and in such national gender-political issues as the

sexual predation of our own president upon young women like

Monica Lewinsky, it would appear to be a timely moment in

which to examine the kinds of connections Ferber makes in

her novel between the treatment of the environment and the

treatment of women.

After giving an overview of Ferber’s life, I will provide a brief

plot synopsis for those unfamiliar with this relatively obscure

novel, address what kind of a feminist she is, and then go on

TRANSACTIONS Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

to argue that it is tempting to read Ferber

as a kind of proto-ecofeminist in some parts

of Come and Get It, even though her primary

sympathies are not so much with those who

share her gender or ideological stance to¬

wards the environment as with those who

share her values about the salubrious and

ethical benefits of hard work.

Edna Ferber’s Life

Edna Ferber is described by her biographer,

Julie Goldsmith Gilbert (Ferber’s great-

niece), as a “massive little woman” who may

have been physically tiny — she was only

5 ’2” — but was extremely strong-willed. The

Ferber in Gilbert’s biography could be

fiercely protective of those she loved, while

unsparingly savage towards those for whom

she felt contempt; there’s a kind of mascu¬

line swagger in Edna Ferber, according to

Gilbert’s presentation. Ferber had a great

deal of respect for the common worker, en¬

joyed being in the position of the sharply

observant onlooker, gave lavish meals, was

given to fits of outrage, had difficulty trust¬

ing others, and always wanted to be the one

who rejected first. Gilbert writes that

Ferber’s

life was antiseptic — absolutely no excesses

were allowed. She was a Middle Western

maiden lady who took care of her mother, her

family, and her typewriter. She recycled her¬

self with every book, and each seemed a tes¬

tament more to her own health and vigor

than to inspiration. With themes like Seattle,

Oklahoma, Alaska, New England, the West,

Texas — she had no time or penchant for per¬

sonal probing. There was too much to do.

Her ego was as mammoth as her scope, and

no man, vice, crisis, or illness was going to

deter her. An obsessive in the most produc¬

tive sense, a spinster in the most resolved

sense, a plain woman who kept herself in silk

purses, and an angry daughter who deter¬

minedly made her mother’s life roses. . .one

would assume that her bill of mental health

was immaculate. A presumption. Her com¬

plete devotion to her mother Julia bordered

on the incestuous. Her hatred of her sister

Fannie was at times close to being pathologi¬

cal. Her need and ability to ‘play God’ was

despotism at its worst. There were chinks in

her armor. Many. (Gilbert, 13)

Edna Ferber was born on August 13,

1883, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of Jewish

parents. According to Gilbert, Edna’s

mother had wanted a boy, whom she would

have named Edward. Instead, she had a sec¬

ond girl, and she named her Edna. Edna’s

father, Jacob, was a Hungarian; her mother,

Julia, was born in Milwaukee. Her father

was the owner of a general merchandise

store, first in Iowa, then in Appleton (on

College Avenue). Her older sister, Fanny,

and Edna had frictive relations for much of

their lives, perhaps because Fanny was the

more beautiful of the two, but there may

have been other reasons as well.

At 17, Ferber graduated from the Ryan

High School in Appleton. For her graduat¬

ing essay she wrote an account of the life of

the women workers in a local mill. The lo¬

cal editor of the Appleton Daily Crescent saw

it, recognized that it was good reporting, and

gave her a job in 1903 as a local reporter at

$3.00 a week — a huge salary for a young

woman in a small town. She then was gradu¬

ated from the Appleton paper to Milwau¬

kee, where she was also a reporter. While she

was earning a living as a reporter, she wrote

Dawn O’Hara, her first novel. It sold well.

While it was in the press and selling during

1911 and 1912, Ferber began publishing the

story of Emma McChesney, a travelling

saleswoman. The character appealed to the

52

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ARGYROS: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It and Ecofeminism

public, and Ferber’s success began to grow.

In 1913, the stories were collected under the

title Roast Beef Medium, and that book also

sold well. This was followed by Buttered Side

Down, another collection of short stories,

and more novels, Fanny Herself (1917),

Cheerful by Request (1918), The Girls ( 1 922) ,

Show Boat (1926), Giant (1952), Ice Palace

(1958), and others. She was a prolific writer,

with a total of twelve novels — including So

Big, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in

1924 — twelve short story collections, two

autobiographies, nine plays. Twenty five of

her properties sold to the films, although

“only” ten of her works were actually made

into motion pictures. She never married, and

she died in 1968 at the age of 83.

Come and Get It : Plot Synopsis

Come and Get It was published in 1935, just

before World War II struck in Europe and

Asia and at a time of labor strikes in the

United States. Porgy and Bess was opening

in New York at this time; the following year

Gone with the Wind was a best-seller, and

Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times was re¬

leased.

In Come and Get It, Edna Ferber chroni¬

cles the rags to riches tale of the handsome

Barney Glasgow, who marries the boss’s

homely daughter in order to consolidate his

wealth and become one of the leading lum¬

ber barons in the state; after Barney’s death

about two thirds through the novel, she goes

on to describe his son’s inheritance and aug¬

mentation of the Glasgow fortune.

Barney Glasgow is orphaned at the age of

14 and taken under the wing of Swan

Bostrum. The young Barney proves a quick

study in how to fell a tree and how to make

himself indispensable to his boss. He discov¬

ers the various illicit but technically legal

ways of acquiring land with lumber on it.

Through clever bits of legal fraud, Barney

wins his way into his boss’ heart and busi¬

ness. He secures his career when he oppor¬

tunistically marries the boss’s “thin-lipped,

hook-nosed, bony” daughter, Emma Louise,

who is several years older than the dashing

Barney. Barney is not attracted to his wife,

nor does he like his calculating son Bernard,

although he is fond of his daughter Evelyn.

Evelyn, following in her father’s footsteps,

is in the process of marrying a person she

does not love simply because he is the son

of another lumber baron, and because she

feels that this is what she is expected to do.

The marriage is even more of a travesty be¬

cause she really loves and is loved by a hand¬

some Italian worker, whose love she sacri¬

fices in order to maintain her social standing.

Prior to his marriage to Emma Louise,

Barney and Swan both had been attracted

to a pretty young prostitute, Lotta Morgan.

Barney loves her, but Swan does the right

thing and marries her. Lotta remains mar¬

ried to Swan for ten years and then, after giv¬

ing birth to a little girl Karie, dies.

Then the plot skips ahead 35 years, and

we meet Karie’s daughter, Lotta Lindbeck

(Lotta II). At age 18, Lotta II is now a “rav¬

ishing beauty.” Barney never actually forces

himself sexually upon her, but he is infatu¬

ated with her, showers her with gifts, and re¬

gards her as his possession. He wishes to

marry her and feels that with all the millions

he has, it’s a shame that he remains married

to a homely woman whom he does not love.

He is therefore incensed to discover Lotta and

his son Bernie kissing at a party and to learn

of Bernie’s intention to marry her. The two

men fight and nearly kill one another. Barney

threatens to disown his son, whom his wife

hides. Then, when everyone in the family but

the son Bernie decide to go out on a boat,

the boat explodes. Bernie becomes heir to the

Glasgow fortune and marries Lotta.

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

The rest of the novel follows the career

of Lotta Glasgow, who is shunned by the

wealthy women of Butte des Morts; in frus¬

tration she becomes an expatriate, travelling

in Europe and repudiating the life she once

lived in Butte des Morts. But her grandfa¬

ther Swan, the moral authority in the novel,

returns to Iron Ridge to resume his humble

life among the pine trees. Lotta’s mother

Karie, although she stays with her daughter

and helps her care for her grandchildren, re¬

mains as down to earth, unpretentious, and

seemingly uncorrupted by wealth as she ever

was. Lotta, of course, becomes a complete

social-climber and snob, flaunting her

newfound wealth. Against her will, her Eu¬

ropean-born children become intrigued by

their American origins. When their father

loses millions during the Great Depression

and has a nervous collapse, his wife reluc¬

tantly returns home with their grown chil¬

dren — who are excited about the paper mills

but who also want to travel across America

and learn about their native land.

The novel ends with Lotta and Karie and

the grandchildren helping to celebrate

Swan’s 85th birthday up in his tiny cabin

up north. The old man can still heft an axe,

and he cuts down a 100 year old pine tree

while his daughter Karie yells “Come and get

it!” to the gaping crowd.

Public Reception of the Novel and

Brief Critical Evaluation

The public’s initial response to Come and

Get It was anger. Specifically, Ferber’s treat¬

ment of Polish-American workers was per¬

ceived as pejorative, discriminatory. Gilbert

defends Ferber: “Ferber, always true to au¬

thentic ethnicity, had used the term ‘dumb

Polack girls’ in the context of the story. No

doubt, in her research of the territory, she

had heard it mentioned. To Polish-Ameri-

cans, it was unmentionable” (Gilbert 329).

Gilbert even received a letter of protest from

a congressman. Others complained that

Ferber had conducted her research for the

novel in a way that violated the etiquette of

the time. Gilbert writes:

When she went to Wisconsin to do research

for Come and Get It , she enlisted the help of

an executive of a large paper mill in Neenah

.... The executive gave her all she needed

to know. What he didn’t know was that he

unwittingly gave her himself to use as the

main character in her book .... What stung

him was not so much her portrayal of him,

but the fact that she never, after their long

sessions together, even wrote him a thank-you

note. And, as is often the case in tight-knit

societies, everyone knew about her rude con¬

duct. The whole town tsked. (330)

In my opinion, Come and Get It is not

Ferber’s best work. The characters seem a bit

two-dimensional: the dashing robber baron,

the dowager wife, the blond bombshell. The

plot plods along somewhat tediously until

Barney’s lust for the young Lotta develops;

then it suddenly erupts into melodrama,

only to have Barney’s family (with the ex¬

ception of his heir, Bernard) die in a rather

improbable plot contrivance.

Ferber herself recognized that this was not

a perfect novel. In her autobiography A Pe¬

culiar Treasure, she writes about how “in the

writing of the novel Come and Get It, [sic]

I was guilty of. . . [a] . . . stupid blunder. I

killed Barney Glasgow in the middle of that

book because he was dominating the story.

The book gave a gasp right there, and the

murder was doubled.” (223) 1 Ferber further

confesses that “Plot is something that doesn’t

interest me. Character I find absorbing. My

novels usually are character-strong and plot-

weak. I’d be sorry to have it the other way

54

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ARGYROS: Edna Ferber’s Come end Get It and Ecofeminism

round” (224). There is, of course, a rather

transparent and somewhat defensive false

dilemma implicit her assumption that a

writer will inevitably make mistakes in one

area, either in developing characters or in de¬

veloping plotlines.

Ecofemism Defined

Its failings notwithstanding, when I first read

this novel and in subsequent readings of it,

I was struck by the sorts of connections

Ferber invites us to make between Barney’s

ravaging of the land — with no intentions of

replenishing the lumber supply once it has

been depleted — and his desire to ravage his

best friend’s granddaughter, again, with little

thought about what the consequences of this

action would be on his friendship with

Swan, on his relationship with his children,

or on his relationships with the people of his

community. Vaguely remembering that

ecofeminists also draw connections between

the treatment of the land and the treatment

of women, I did some research into eco¬

feminism and then re-read the novel

through the lens provided by that ideologi¬

cal perspective.

Ecofeminism, I found, is a relatively re¬

cently coined term used to link the domi¬

nation of both land and women without re¬

gard for the feelings or desires of the women

or for the future productiveness of the land.

Literary ecofeminists explore the manifold

ways in which the exploitative treatment of

women reflects a similarly exploitative and

opportunistic treatment of the environment.

Marie Mies and Vandana Shiva in Eco¬

feminism describe the origins of eco¬

feminism, “which grew out of various social

movements of the late 1970s and early

1980s . . . The meltdown at Three Mile Is¬

land prompted large numbers of women in

the USA to come together in the first

ecofeminist conference — ‘Women and Life

on Earth: A Conference on Eco-Feminism

[sic ] in the Eighties’ — in March 1980, at

Amherst. At this conference the connections

between feminism, militarization, healing

and ecology were explored” (Mies and Shiva

13-14).

Gretchen Legler discusses what an

ecofeminist literary criticism might look like:

“Ecofeminist literary criticism is a hybrid

criticism . . . that gives literary and cultural

critics a special lens through which they can

investigate the ways nature is represented in

literature and the ways representations of

nature are linked with representations of

gender, race, class, and sexuality” (quoted in

Warren 227). According to Legler, “many

canonical authors still place nature ‘out

there’ as an ‘other.’ Many canonical authors

refine and entrench the notion of nature as

a sacred place where only solitary, single, and

chaste men go to cleanse their spirits and be

one with God” (quoted in Warren 229).

Legler suggests that “critiquing canonical

works through an ecofeminist lens might

include investigating the ways in which gen¬

der, race, and class are represented in and

inform the writings of these ‘fathers’ of

American nature writing”; she goes on to

suggest that ecofeminists might well study

the texts of such contemporary women writ¬

ers as Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Linda

Hasselstrom, Sue Hubbell, Alice Walker,

Leslie Silko, Diane Ackerman, and others in

order to study how their “postmodern pas¬

toral” is a vision “informed by ecological and

feminist theories, and . . . that images hu¬

man/nature relationships as ‘conversations’

between knowing subjects” (quoted in War¬

ren 229).

Putting it bluntly, Legler suggests that

ecofeminists today might take one of two

tacks: bashing the likes of Melville and

Hawthorne as perpetuators of a colonialist

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approach to nature or marveling at the sub¬

versive strategies of Silko and Dillard. Her

assumption seems to be that the nineteenth-

century male writers will inevitably “get it

wrong” in their representation of nature as

a feminine category to be transcended, while

the late twentieth-century female writers will

“get it right.” My approach is to ignore these

polarized positions and stake out a third pos¬

sibility in examining the work of a woman

writer for whom gender alone is not, as we

have seen, an easy means of identification

with others — for whom a hard work ethic

was a more important means of identifica¬

tion — in order to see where she fits into the

vast gulf between Melville and Dillard, in

order to investigate how her novel might be

read as a precursor to ecofeminist paradigms.

An Ecofeminist Reading

of Come and Get It

Let us return to Ferber’s novel. That Barney

Glasgow has a nakedly exploitative relation¬

ship to the land and to women is evident in

the very title of the novel Come and Get It,

the title of which may be read as a double

entendre, conflating the desires for (lumber¬

jack) food, (cheap) land, and (extramarital)

sex. In fact, at one point, Katie warns the

lovely Lotta to be suspicious about the ex¬

tent of Mr. Glasgow’s attentions to her. Her

exact words to Lotta — “A girl looks the way

you do men just think they can come along

and help themselves” (177) — underscore

this connection between appetite for food

and appetite for sex. Barney’s lust to wring

profit from the land and his lust to consum¬

mate his relationship with the lovely grand¬

daughter of his best friend are clearly

equated: he feels he is entitled to both, and

his sense of self-restraint towards Lotta is

slowly weakening at the point when he is

suddenly killed off in the narrative.

Moreover, although his son recognizes

the importance of replanting new trees for

future generations to harvest, Barney — in

his infinite stubbornness and shortsighted¬

ness — refuses to do so. Then again, he also

lacks the vision to see that his son’s plans

of inventing paper cups and paper towels

for bathrooms are viable economic ventures.

So Ferber suggests that Barney’s tense and

competitive relationship with his son pre¬

vents him from perceiving where his future

economic success lies. Barney’s son Bernie,

though not well-developed as a character,

represents a kind of progress over his father

in the sense that he is more rational, more

far-sighted, more genuinely devoted to his

wife, and also — interestingly — slightly more

androgynous. Bernie never needs to desire

a mistress because he is married to the most

desirable woman he knows, nor is he a

Lydgate character freighted with a gorgeous

but insipid wife who cannot understand his

ambitions. It is as if Ferber grudgingly re¬

wards him for being more restrained and

far-seeing than his father, even though she

is not as compelled by him as a character.

In addition to these larger plot contours

which indicate Ferber’s making a connection

between Barney’s unbridled desire to harvest

as many trees as possible and to possess

Lotta, there are at least four identifiable pas¬

sages from the text which become illumi¬

nated by an ecofeminist reading. In these

passages, Ferber covers a gamut of attitudes

towards women and the environment.

Women like the horse-faced Emma Louise

are identified as stifling agents of civilization;

their association is with smothering domes¬

tic interiors which drive Barney to seek the

freedom of the almost masculine northern

woods. At the same time, insofar as beauti¬

ful young women like Lotta are represented

as vulnerable, consumable commodities,

they are identified with those elements of

56

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ARGYROS: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It and Ecofeminism

nature which are, to Barney’s way of think¬

ing, “tailor-made” for raping: that is, the for¬

ests of pine trees which furnish Barney with

lumber. Women also furnish Barney with

cheap labor for his rag-paper mills, and they

satisfy male appetites — while suppressing

their own — in two ways: by feeding the lum¬

berjacks, as Barney’s mother does, and by

offering men like Barney fantasies of sexual

availability and a renewal of youthful vigor,

as Lotta does.

Consider the first passage, which occurs

relatively early in the novel:

If the thick, rich routine of the well-ordered

household and the feminine possessiveness of

Emma Louise and Evelyn threatened to

smother [Barney] completely, he escaped to

the northern woods whence he had come,

and in that pine-laden atmosphere found

healing. (12)

Here, manipulative women like Emma

Louise are identified as stifling agents of civi¬

lization, threatening to smother Barney, vir¬

tually forcing him into the healing arms of

his mistress, the great outdoors. This theme

of Barney’s need to escape is developed in

the novel: whenever Barney feels oppressed

by Emma Louise within the domestic sphere

of his home in Butte des Morts, he retreats

up north to Iron Ridge, a small camp de¬

void of the comforts of home but also mer¬

cifully devoid of the entrapments and social

restrictions imposed by the likes of Emma

Louise. Barney feels he can be himself, be

authentic, eat simple lumberjack fare, and

be bawdy while he is in Iron Ridge. Barney’s

retreats to Iron Ridge prefigure and fore¬

shadow his illicit desire to make Lotte

Lindberg his mistress.

In the second passage, Barney surveys the

“Polish and Bohemian” women working in

the rag-paper mill:

Barney had always hated the rag-paper mill

over at Grand Chute . . . The rag mill made

the finest grade of writing paper obtainable —

much superior in texture and quality to the

wood-pulp paper manufactured in this Butte

des Morts mill. Barney almost never visited

it, and only from necessity. He hated the rags

piled mountain high; he loathed the rag sort¬

ing room with its cloud of dust and lint

whirling up from the sorting bins over which

the girls bent. They wore pieces of gauze tied

across their faces, futilely, to shield mouths

and noses. They coughed, and their complex¬

ion was a curious clay gray. Polish and Bo¬

hemian, most of them, they lived the other

side of the tracks or over on the Flats. . .

Though the odors of the wood-pulp mill were

none too ambrosial Barney did not find them

offensive. Of the rag mill he said, “It stinks.”

He seemed to find something peculiarly ob¬

noxious in the smell of the acids that reduced

old rags to the least common denominator of

white pulp. Even the magic of the process by

which a pair of tattered overalls might be

transformed into a fragrant love-missive, or

an old shirt or pair of ragged muslin drawers

might, Cinderella-like, emerge as a delicately

tinted invitation to a ball, did not interest

Barney. He liked the process of the wood-

pulp mill. Great flat cars out in the yards,

loaded with fourteen-foot hemlock spruce,

balsam and jack pine, pungent, redolent of

the north. (35)

Although the rag paper mill “made the

finest grade of writing paper obtainable,”

Barney rarely visits it. Although the wood

pulp mill sends forth fumes every bit as

malodorous as those of the rag-paper mill,

it is only the latter’s fumes that Barney finds

offensive. Why the discrepancy between

Barney’s reaction to the rag-paper mill and

the wood pulp mill? Ferber suggests that on

some level Barney realizes that his female

Volume 87 (1999)

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workers are suffering from their exposures

to the chemicals, and he can hardly stand

to witness their daily sacrifices of their

health for economic survival. Ferber also

suggests that perhaps there is something dis¬

tressingly “feminine” about the rags — a

scrounged, found, endlessly folded, and

molten set of materials that originate in do¬

mestic interiors and that are less “mascu¬

line” than the solid, imposing slabs of “four-

teen-foot hemlock spruce” found at the

wood pulp mills. Lest we miss Ferber’s

proto-ecofeminist critique, her narrator

even imagines how one might more posi¬

tively view the processing of the rags as a

kind of transformative, fairy-tale process by

which “an old shirt or pair of ragged mus¬

lin drawers might, Cinderella-like, emerge

as a delicately tinted invitation to a ball.”

That allusion to Cinderella underscores the

pathetic economic realities of the women

who work in Barney’s rag-paper mills and

the extent to which they perhaps fantasize

about the only possible means of escaping

their drudgery. Barney is not so much

oblivious to their plight as he is sub-con-

sciously shamed by it, hence, his avoidance

of the rag-paper mills.

Consider how Ferber rather heavy-

handedly underscores the theme of Barney’s

patriarchal power in this third passage:

[Barney] was a great grand duke riding to¬

ward his duchy — forests, streams, villages.

Fish, deer, birds. He liked to survey largely

his holdings — his mills, his lands, his crops,

his timber, his employees, their families,

keeping a firm possessive hand on all. A Goth

turned patriarch, but not yet ready to enjoy

the benefits of his ravishments. He never

looked on his vast possession as an empire,

though it was that. To him it was just so

many tons of this, acres of that, pounds or

square miles or cords of the other. A tree was

potential pulp to him, a river something on

which to float boats or drive logs. A hill was

a rise of ground which might conceal ore, a

free waterfall was unharnessed machine

power. (66)

Again, this passage most forcefully exem¬

plifies the extent to which we are invited to

see Barney as the dominating and dehuman¬

izing patriarch who equates his workers with

the stuff of nature — regarding them all in a

proprietary light as his possessions, as his

subjects, as fodder for his profit, regardless

of the short-sightedness of his schemes. The

allusion to the Goths, Teutonic peoples who

invaded and settled in parts of the Roman

Empire in the third to fifth centuries, estab¬

lishes Barney’s transition from invader to

settler to patriarch. “Ravishments” nicely

concretizes the connection Ferber wishes us

to draw between Barney’s actual rape of the

land and his unrealized desire to rape/seduce

young Lotta Lindbeck.

Finally, in the fourth passage, we are

treated to an image of woman as provider

of the food that she not only cannot enjoy

but that sickens her:

[Barney’s mother Nellie] did man’s work

. . . The great gross mounds of food which

daily she provided for the voracious men

sickened her. She ate nothing, finally, but

a crust of bread and cup after cup of scald¬

ing black tea. (84)

Woman is handmaiden to lumber mill

productivity though she is alienated from

her work; woman is untempted by the

highly desired fruits of her labor. That

Barney’s mother dies of consumption is one

of the more interesting ironies in the early

parts of this novel; it suggests that what kills

her is some self-destructive element as if she

has been starved for so long that her body

58

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ARGYROS: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It and Ecofeminism

begins to consume itself. Barney never con¬

sciously makes the connection between the

premature death of his own mother and the

short lifespans of the girls working in his rag-

paper mill over at Grand Chute — although

perhaps he makes it unconsciously, and this

is part of his aversion to the rag-paper mill —

but we as readers are encouraged to see that

he is unconsciously perpetuating a cycle in

which poor women are ground up and spit

out as they provide cheap labor and profits

for the likes of Barney Glasgow.

As in the fiction of her Victorian liter¬

ary predecessors (and I am thinking more

of Charlotte Bronte than of George Eliot

now), women are identified with the pro¬

vision of food for male appetites, but

Ferber, unlike her Victorian predecessors,

makes a critical distinction between the

older female “martyrs” and the younger,

more androgynous, more “selfish” females.

While the older women in the novel (like

Barney’s mother and then like Barney’s

wife) provide ample feasts for the menfolk,

they themselves abstain from eating much

at all. Barney’s wife Emma Louise, though

“by nature a stingy woman,” “set a lavish

table at Barney’s insistence” while “sipping

coffee and nibbling dry toast” (15). And,

as I just noted, Barney’s mother, a cook in

a lumberjack camp, slowly dies of consump¬

tion. But if one is tempted to conclude that

Ferber believes that female desire must al¬

ways be kept in check while male desire

runs rampant, one must qualify this gener¬

alization by noting that Ferber depicts

younger women like Evelyn and Lotta de¬

vouring, without restraint, both food and

fortunes. Both Evelyn and Lotta have

healthy appetites for food and sex — Evelyn

committing adultery with her Italian

worker on the eve of her wedding, and

Lotta doing whatever is necessary to con¬

solidate her social position.

Ferber’s Feminism

Just what kind of a feminist is Ferber? Ferber

is like George Eliot in being hard to assimi¬

late comfortably under the category of femi¬

nist. Both Eliot and Ferber led lives work¬

ing in a male-dominated profession, but if

one examines their novels, one finds that

they do not necessarily provide for their

heroines the same sort of pathbreaking bold¬

ness that they themselves enjoyed. If Eliot’s

female protagonists are systematically denied

the opportunities to fulfill themselves in

some sort of meaningful work (their very

paucity of options eliciting our sympathies),

Ferber’s female protagonists in Come and

Get It take upon themselves the full-time

’’work” of trying to manipulate wealthy and

powerful men. Unlike Eliot, who attempts

to penetrate the opacity of even the self-cen¬

tered Hetty Sorrels and Rosamond de

Vincys in her narrative worlds, Ferber invari¬

ably caricatures and condemns such female

characters who attempt to eschew hard work

by playing upon their feminine wiles; her

sympathies are always with the under-appre¬

ciated working class women (the nannies,

the waitresses) who serve such entitled

women. Class privilege, then, becomes the

dividing line across which Ferber’s sympa¬

thies cannot pass — unless, that is, the female

who inherits such privilege still takes solace

in the stabilizing effects of hard work.

Yet as I mentioned earlier, Ferber herself

was an unusually outspoken woman and

perhaps slightly ahead of her time, insofar

as she was able to succeed in a man’s world.

In one of her autobiographies, she writes: “If

men ever discover how tough women actu¬

ally are they’ll be scared to death. And if

women ever decide to throw away that

mask, wig and ruffled kimono and be them¬

selves, this will be another [female-domi¬

nated] monarchy — and perhaps it’s about

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

time” (quoted in Gilbert 82). In Come and

Get It, she is somewhat interested in depict¬

ing power struggles between the sexes, and

she is sympathetic to smart women who are

deprived of the opportunity to make the best

use of their talents in the work force. For

example, at one point her narrator expresses

sympathy for Barney’s daughter Evelyn, who

is smart enough to run a paper mill but is

forced by social convention into marrying a

man she does not love: “Born out of her day

she could, ten years later, have run one of

her father’s mills; driven an ambulance in

France; started a career of her own choos¬

ing. And now Evelyn was to be married”

(21). Ferber also represents sympathetically

the hard-working, plain Karie Lindbeck be¬

cause Karie never loses her down-to-earth

self, even among the crowned heads of Eu¬

rope, and because Karie remains with her

social-climbing daughter despite the fact that

she “work[s] harder than any servant you

got, only I don’t get paid for it” (431).

Still, it is perhaps a bit wishful for us to

call Ferber a feminist or even a proto-femi¬

nist. While a woman writer like George Eliot

might be willing to soften her judgment to¬

wards those beautiful female characters who

end up doing great harm to themselves and

others, Ferber has little patience for those

beauties like Lotta who trade on their looks

in order to advance themselves up the so¬

cial ladder. Given the premium she puts on

the value of hard work, it is entirely under¬

standable that she resent those who need do

no work other than apply make-up and then

go out and seduce lumber barons. However,

one cannot help but wonder — politically in¬

correctly, of course — if her being the plain

sister of a beautiful woman might not have

played a role in Ferber’s scathing contempt

for the opportunistic blond bombshell Lotta.

Then again, Ferber never makes any effort

to represent sympathetically the bourgeois,

horse-faced wife of Barney Glasgow either.

Indeed, the narrator seems just as judgmen¬

tal of Emma Louise as Barney is: “It was in¬

credible that any woman — even a plain

woman of 36 who has been married years

before for her money, and knows it — could

be so utterly lacking in coquetry as to ap¬

pear before a man in such grim habiliments”

(10). Disappointingly, there are no moments

in the narrative when Ferber’s narrator at¬

tempts to enter into the consciousness of

Emma Louise, never attempts to imagine

what it might feel like to be a homely

woman married for one’s money. Perhaps

the topic was a little too close to home for

Ferber, who was — again, like George

Eliot — widely regarded as a plain, hard-fea¬

tured woman.

Conclusions

Would it be fair to call Ferber an early

ecofeminist? At times, she seems like one,

especially when she writes such lines as “A

tree was potential pulp to [Barney], a river

something on which to float boats or drive

logs. A hill was a rise of ground which might

conceal ore, a free waterfall was unharnessed

machine power” (66). Although he prides

himself on exercising great self-restraint

when he does not actually rape Lotta, Barney

is equally exploitative of both women and

nature: in Karie’s words, he thinks he can

“come along and help [himself]” to a por¬

tion of forest and Lotta. As I have also noted,

the title “Come and Get It” reflects not just

the call to meal time2 but Barney’s greed in

acquiring land cheap from the government

in order to rape it of its trees. And the “it”

in “Come and Get It” takes on clearly sexual

undertones when Barney contemplates the

seduction of Lotta.

In her developing of the character Barney

Glasgow as a power-hungry, dominating,

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ARGYROS: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It and Ecofeminism

greedy, ruthless, opportunistic, and wasteful

patriarch, Ferber certainly seems to be ad¬

vancing a proto-ecofeminist critique. Barney

is a patriarch tailor-made for an ecofeminist

critique, although, to be fair, he also pro¬

vides the novel with its most vital energies:

Ferber realized that as an artist she sacrificed

the aesthetic design of her novel when she

killed him prematurely.

However, and this is why I feel I must

qualify my stance by acknowledging that one

is only “tempted” to pronounce her a proto-

ecofeminist, Ferber never really sustains a

pro-woman or pro-environment stance for

very long. Perhaps for all her bravado and

swagger in her diaries and autobiography,

she sensed in this novel that she was engag¬

ing in a kind of cultural critique that was,

like Evelyn Glasgow, about fifty years ahead

of its time. I suspect she had some reserva¬

tions about making the truly scathing and

sustained challenge to patriarchal authority

that she could have made if she were, say,

Margaret Atwood.

Finally, the novel is not about progres¬

sive ideology so much as it is about the sus¬

taining quality of certain values, an ideo¬

logical stance of a more traditional sort.

Women and men who work hard and never

lose their appreciation for the moral value

of hard work fare best in this novel. Beau¬

tiful women who expect their looks to work

for them are ostracized and unhappy; suc¬

cessful men who have stopped working with

their hands die prematurely. The message

is clear: those who continue to work hard,

to endure privation, to avoid being seduced

by the trappings of material success into be¬

coming what they are not are those who

thrive and live to be 85- If there are seeds

of a proto-ecofeminist sensibility in the

work of Edna Ferber, they remain intact

and identifiable but in a largely dormant

state.

Endnotes

'Interestingly, in the movie version of the novel,

that mistake would not be repeated; director

Howard Hawkes insured that Barney would

remain alive at the end of the film, unpun¬

ished for his sins of lust and greed.

2At the end of Hawkes’ film based on the novel,

Barney sadly witnesses the elopement of Lotta

and his son, all the while banging tearfully

on a triangle and shouting “Come and get it!”

to the guests at his party. It is as if the old

man is forced to reconcile himself to his

newfound role as passive provider for the ap¬

petites of others when his own appetites (for

sex, for domination over Lotta) cannot be sat¬

isfied. The dinner triangle that he bangs also

visually reinforces the idea of a triangulated

state of affairs between (failed) father, (suc¬

cessful) son, and the love object (Lotta)

whom they both desire.

Works Cited

Dickinson, Rogers. Edna Ferber: A Biographical

Sketch with a Bibliography. New York:

Doubleday, Page & Co., 1925.

Ferber, Edna. A Kind of Magic. New York:

Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1963.

Ferber, Edna. A Peculiar Treasure. New York:

Doubleday, Dora &c Company, Inc., 1939.

Ferber, Edna. Come and Get It. Madison, Wis¬

consin: Prairie Oak Press, 1991.

Mies, Maria and Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism.

New Jersey: Zed Books, 1993.

Warren, Karen J., ed. Ecofeminism: Women , Cul¬

ture, Nature. Indiana: Indiana University

Press, 1997.

Ellen Argyros is an assistant professor of English

literature at the University of Wisconsin-Fox Val¬

ley. Her book, The Limits of Sympathy in George

Eliot’s Novels, is forthcoming in 1999 from Peter

Lang Press. She is also interested in representations

of maternal subjectivity in the works of George

Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Virginia Woolf, Toni

Morrison, and Louise Erdrich. Address: UW-Eox

Valley, P. O. Box 8002, Menasha WI 54952.

Volume 87 (1999)

61

Ed L. Avery and Kent Niermeyer

Timing of Spawning

and Fry Emergence of Brown Trout

in a Central Wisconsin Stream

Abstract The spawning period and timing of peak fry emergence of brown

trout (Salmo trutta) were studied during 1995—96 in a 1.2-km

reach of a central Wisconsin trout stream. This information was

collected to help the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

determine if a potential for egg and pre-emergent fry mortality

from angler wading would exist if a special regulation early trout

fishing season (1 March to the first Saturday in May) was estab¬

lished in 1997.

Weekly reconnaissance of the study area was made to count and

identify new trout redds. Free-swimming fry counts were made

on a weekly basis in three 20-m subsections. The spawning pe¬

riod spanned 3.2 months (12 October 1995 through 19 January

1996) with peak activity (77% of all redds constructed) occur¬

ring between 28 October and 8 December. The median date of

spawning was 20 November. Emergence of brown trout fry be¬

gan the week of 15— 22 March 1996, peaked around 25 April,

and extended into early May. Residence of eggs and pre-emergent

fry in streambed gravels approximated five months equivalent to

636 Centigrade thermal units. A potential for trout egg and pre-

emergent fry mortalities due to angler wading would exist if an

early trout fishing season were implemented. Comparisons of the

1997 year-class strength of trout with long-term average year-class

strength in several Wisconsin trout streams did not, however, show

any effect of an early trout fishing season implemented in 1997.

In 1995, controversy among members of Wisconsin Trout

Unlimited chapters, other nonaffiliated trout anglers, and

the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) was

initiated by a DNR proposal for a special regulation early trout

TRANSACTIONS Volume 87 (1999)

63

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

fishing season that would open on 1 March

1997 and extend to the first Saturday in

May when the regular trout fishing season

started. The proposed “early season” would

apply statewide to inland streams and would

be limited to catch-and-release only with ar¬

tificial lures and barbless hooks. The DNR’s

proposal was made to fulfill a commitment

to the angling public to replace a previous

(1975-94) early trout fishing season in eight

to ten southwestern counties. That early sea¬

son was closed due to strong local resent¬

ment of excessive use of the resource by an¬

glers from outside this small region of the

state. Proponents of the new “early season”

argued that it would provide additional rec¬

reation for anglers, disperse angling pressure

over the entire state, not increase annual

harvest, and cause little damage to trout

populations. Opposing opinion, however,

centered around a study done in Montana

that revealed high mortality to brown trout,

rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), and

cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki) eggs

and pre-emergent fry caused by anglers wad¬

ing on trout redds (Roberts 1988, Roberts

and White 1992). This Montana study sug¬

gested a linkage between wading-induced

egg and fry mortalities in Nelson Spring

Creek, a tributary to the Yellowstone River,

and reduced adult populations of cutthroat

trout in the Yellowstone River.

Unlike cutthroat trout, which is spring¬

spawning, the two trout species most

common in Wisconsin are brook trout

(Saivelinus fontinalis) and brown trout, both

of which spawn in the fall. Because most fry

of brook trout and brown trout are free-

swimming in Wisconsin when the regular

fishing season opens in May, egg and fry

mortalities due to anglers wading on redds

had not been an issue. However, the

proposed early trout fishing season posed a

potential for such wading-related mortalities

that would be at least partially dependent

upon timing of fry emergence from stream-

bed gravels.

A search of the scientific literature on egg

incubation-fry emergence periods of fluvial

brook trout and brown trout in Wisconsin

yielded few papers. Miller (1970) quantified

the fry emergence period of brook trout in

Lawrence Creek in central Wisconsin, and

Hausle and Coble (1976) contributed ad¬

ditional observations on the incubation pe¬

riod of brook trout eggs in both natural and

artificially constructed redds in Lawrence

Creek. Avery (1980) reported observations

on brown trout spawning and fry emergence

during 1976— 78 in Trout Creek in south¬

ern Wisconsin. The objective of the present

study was to quantify the duration and peak

spawning of brown trout as well as the tim¬

ing of fry emergence in Emmons Creek in

central Wisconsin. This information would

help the DNR assess potential egg and fry

mortality for brown trout from angler wad¬

ing in the southern half of Wisconsin, where

brown trout are the dominant species and

where most angling would occur during the

proposed early season because of milder

weather and ice-free stream conditions.

Study Area

Emmons Creek is typical of many high

quality trout streams in central Wisconsin.

It originates from 6.5-ha Fountain Lake in

Portage County and flows east-northeast 9.7

km before entering the 293-ha Chain O’

Lakes in Waupaca County. Numerous

springs augment the flow of Emmons Creek

throughout its entire length. Gravel sub¬

strates are common and provide ample

spawning habitat for a wild resident brown

trout population that averages 1,740 fish/

km (Avery and Hunt 1981). Sand is the

dominant substrate. More than half the

64

TRANSACTIONS

AVERY and NIERMEYER: Tinning of Spawning and Fry Emergence of Brown Trout

Figure 1. Emmons Creek study area.

stream is in state ownership (public fishing

and hunting areas), and little livestock graz¬

ing or row-crop agriculture occurs in the

watershed. Streamflow is very stable, aver¬

aging 0.62 m3/s. Gradient approximates 2.8

m/km. Stream temperatures rarely exceed

18.5°C, alkalinity ranges from 161-186 mg/

1 CaC03, and pH ranges from 7. 9-8. 2

(Avery and Hunt 1981). Aquatic vegetation

is sparse, and the water remains clear except

for brief periods following extended heavy

rainfall events. The food base for brown

trout consists primarily of aquatic and ter¬

restrial invertebrates. Instream habitat is

good with undercut banks and woody de¬

bris providing important instream cover. In

addition to the resident stream population,

wild brown trout in the Chain O’ Lakes as¬

cend Emmons Creek in the fall to spawn.

A 1.2-km reach of Emmons Creek was se¬

lected for study in the upper half of the wa¬

tershed immediately below the Stratton

Lake Road bridge (Figure 1).

Materials and Methods

Trout Spawning Period

Weekly reconnaissance of the 1 .2-km study

area was made between 3 October 1993

and 26 January 1996 to count brown trout

redds and determine the spawning period.

Each redd identified was numbered con¬

secutively, and the date was recorded. Dis¬

tance from the “pit” of each redd (Reiser

Volume 87 (1999)

65

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

and Wesche 1977) was triangulated (mea¬

sured) to two numbered wooden stakes

driven into the nearest streambank. The

two stakes were placed parallel to the

streamflow and separated by 3. 0-4. 5 m.

Frequently, from three to six redds were tri¬

angulated to the same two stakes. Triangu¬

lation of individual redds prevented re¬

counting of previous redds on subsequent

visits to the stream and helped determine

the occurrence and amount of redd super¬

imposition.

Egg Incubation and Fry Emergence Period

In late January 1996, 20-m stream segments

were selected in the upper, middle, and

lower reaches of the 1.2-km study area in

which trout fry could be visually counted

along both stream margins. Stream seg¬

ments were selected below concentrations

of trout redds that had been constructed

throughout the entire spawning period. Fry

counts were made weekly between 8 Feb¬

ruary and 23 April. We carefully entered the

stream below each study segment and

waded slowly up the middle of either the

right or left half of the stream, tallying all

fry seen within the study segment. Fry were

counted in water depths less than 30 cm.

This generally excluded the stream thalweg

due to its greater depth, higher water ve¬

locities, and attendant poor fry visibility.

We exited the stream above the study seg¬

ment, returned to the lower end, and re¬

peated the procedure in the other half of

the stream. All fry counts were made be¬

tween 1 1:00 and 13:30 hours with the aid

of polarized sunglasses. Fry counts were dis¬

continued with the 25 April count because

on 3 May fry sought cover so quickly at my

approach that an accurate count was impos¬

sible.

Stream margins of two of the three 20-

m segments were electrofished using a bat¬

tery-powered, pulsed, dc back-pack electro¬

fishing unit on 15 March 1996 to verify the

presence or absence of fry. Similar to the

fry counts, electrofishing was conducted in

water depths less than 30 cm and excluded

the thalweg. Stream margins of all three 20-

m segments were electrofished on 1 9 April

1996 to compare numbers of fry captured

with numbers of fry counted.

On 19 April 1996, five redds constructed

during the first half of the spawning season

were excavated to observe the degree of egg

and pre-emergent fry development and to

correlate development with the date of redd

construction and counts of free-swimming

fry. Three additional redds, constructed

during the six-week peak spawning period,

were excavated on 26 April, and five redds,

constructed near the end of the peak spawn¬

ing period, were excavated on 3 May for the

same purposes. A piece of window screen

attached to a wooden frame hinged verti¬

cally in the middle (effective height and

width, 105 x 125 cm) was held downstream

from the redds to catch eggs and fry dis¬

lodged as the redds were dug up with a

shovel. Eggs and pre-emergent fry impinged

on the screen were removed either manu¬

ally with forceps or orally with a plastic suc¬

tion tube (9.0 mm inside diameter), placed

in a container, and counted.

Water temperature was recorded near the

lower end of the study area from 29 Sep¬

tember 1995 through 17 May 1996 using

a RTM 2000 thermograph (Ryan Instru¬

ments, Inc., Redmond, Washington) pro¬

grammed to record hourly. Mean daily wa¬

ter temperatures (MDT) were computed

from the hourly readings. Incubation and

hatching periods are expressed in terms of

both time and accumulative Centigrade

thermal units. Centigrade thermal units

were calculated as the sum of mean daily

water temperatures above 0°C.

66

TRANSACTIONS

AVERY and NIERMEYER: Timing of Spawning and Fry Emergence of Brown Trout

Results

The Spawning Period

The spawning period for brown trout in

Emmons Creek covered approximately 3.2

months, beginning 12 October 1993 and

ending 19 January 1996 (Figure 2; Table

1). During this period, 162 trout redds were

constructed in the study area. Peak spawn¬

ing activity occurred during the six-week

period of 28 October through 8 December

1995 when 77% (124) of the identified

redds were constructed. The median date

of spawning (i.e., the date on which 50%

of the redds had been constructed) was 20

November. Spawning began when MDTs

dropped below 12.7°C and increased sub¬

stantially in early November when MDTs

dropped below 9.0°C. Mean daily water

temperatures during the peak spawning pe¬

riod declined from 8.8°C to 0.6°C.

Approximately 27% (44) of trout redds

were at least partially superimposed upon

redds constructed from one to six weeks

prior (Table 1). Of the superimposed redds,

48% (21) occurred on redds constructed

the previous week. Some of the latter redds

may have been incomplete when first ob¬

served, i.e., part of a multiple-pit spawning

site constructed by the same female (Hawke

1978, DeVries 1997), rather than new

redds constructed by totally different fish.

Peak superimposition, 33 of 44 superim¬

posed redds, occurred during the six-week

peak spawning period.

Egg Incubation and Fry Emergence Period

Emergence of brown trout fry from gravel

substrates began in mid- to late-March

1996 and peaked during late April (Table

2). Fry were first observed along the stream

margins in two of the three reference

Figure 2. Chronology of brown trout spawning in Emmons Creek, fall/winter 1995-96.

Volume 87 (1999)

67

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Continued from Table 1.

68

TRANSACTIONS

AVERY and NIERMEYER: Timing of Spawning and Fry Emergence of Brown Trout

stations on 22 March. The week before, fry

were neither observed nor captured with

electrofishing gear. Fry observed in late

March tended to hold their position along

the shallow stream margins at the careful

approach of an observer.

On 19 April 1996, 46 fry (0.8 fry/m of

stream) were observed in the three stations

and represented a four- to six-fold increase

from fry numbers observed during each of

the four previous weekly counts (Table 2).

Electrofishing also captured 19—47 fry per

station and provided a conservative estimate

that only 47% of the fry present were be¬

ing counted. Numbers of fry counted in the

three stations peaked at 58 (1.0 fry/m of

stream) on 25 April. Many fry observed on

25 April were extremely wary and quickly

found cover when they detected the ob¬

server.

Eleven of thirteen trout redds con¬

structed before (two redds) or during

(eleven redds) the six-week peak spawning

period (28 October to 8 December 1995)

and excavated on or after 19 April 1996

contained primarily dead eggs or fry, cor¬

roborating the emergence of most live fry

during the last two weeks of April (Table

3.) The two remaining redds (numbers 12

and 13 in Table 3) were excavated on 3

May 1996 and contained primarily live,

pre-emergent fry. Since 30 redds (19% of

the total) were constructed subsequent to

the peak spawning period (Table 1), fry

from these late redds probably emerged

even later in May. Peak spawning and peak

fry emergence approximated 22 November

1995 and 25 April 1996, respectively; there¬

fore, residence of eggs and pre-emergent fry

in streambed gravels approximated five

months or an equivalent of 636 Centigrade

thermal units (Tables 1 and 2).

Discussion

The spawning period and peak spawning

activity of brown trout in Emmons Creek

were similar to those observed for brown

trout in Trout Creek located in southern

Wisconsin but much later than in Minne¬

sota, Michigan, and Ontario streams. Avery

(1980) observed brown trout spawning in

Trout Creek between 19 October and 12

January during 1976-77 and 1977-78, with

peak spawning activity occurring in Novem¬

ber through mid-December. Sorensen et al.

(1995) observed brown trout spawning in

Valley Creek, Minnesota, between 12 Oc¬

tober and 22 November 1990-92. During

1976-78, Anderson (1983) observed brown

trout spawning from the first week of Oc¬

tober through November in six other Min¬

nesota streams with peak spawning occur¬

ring between 13 October and 14 November.

The spawning season approximated 1 5 Oc¬

tober to 10 November in a Lower Michi¬

gan stream during 1969-71 (Hansen 1975),

while Witzel and MacCrimmon (1983) ob¬

served brown trout spawning between 8

October and 19 November in five south¬

western Ontario streams during 1977-78.

Although peak emergence of brown

trout fry occurred in late April 1996 in

Emmons Creek, peak emergence of brown

trout fry in Trout Creek occurred four to

six weeks earlier in late February through

March 1976-78 (Avery 1980). Mean

weekly temperatures in Trout Creek aver¬

aged 2.2°C warmer in December 1975

through early January 1976 than for the

same period in 1995-96 in Emmons Creek.

Thus, while brown trout spawn about the

same time in central and southern Wiscon¬

sin, warmer water temperatures in southern

Wisconsin generally contribute to earlier

Volume 87 (1999)

69

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Table 3. Brown trout eggs and pre-emergent fry observed in 13 redds excavated in

Emmons Creek on 19 and 26 April and 3 May 1996 (TU = accumulative Centigrade

thermal unit; DE = dead eggs; D = dead; L = live; S = sac; F = fry).

1 DF

8 LF

a Computed from 10/10/95, two days prior to the date the first redd was observed.

b Redd number 2 was superimposed on redd number 1 .

c Thousands of white sucker eggs present.

emergence of brown trout fry than in simi¬

lar high-quality trout streams in central

Wisconsin.

In relation to the proposed early trout

fishing season opening 1 March in Wiscon¬

sin, the majority of brown trout eggs and

pre-emergent fry will still be in the gravel

when the fishing season opens. Although

brook trout spawn one to three weeks ear¬

lier than brown trout (Witzel and Mac-

Crimmon 1983, Sorensen et al. 1993) and

in central Wisconsin emerge from instream

gravels three to four weeks earlier than

brown trout (Miller 1970), some eggs and

pre-emergent brook trout fry will also be in

the gravel when the early fishing season

opens. This study clearly suggests that an¬

glers wading in Wisconsin trout streams dur¬

ing March and April could increase egg and

fry mortalities by walking on trout redds.

Whether or not such wading mortality oc¬

curs, and to what extent such additional

mortality (if it occurs) will express itself at

the population level, will be directly related

to the wading activity of anglers and the re¬

cruitment dynamics of trout in each stream.

70

TRANSACTIONS

AVERY and NIERMEYER: Timing of Spawning and Fry Emergence of Brown Trout

Tentative Management Conclusions

The special regulation early trout fishing sea¬

son proposed by the DNR in 1995 was ap¬

proved by the Natural Resources Board in

May 1996 and took effect beginning 1

March 1997. As approved, the early season

has a “sunset clause” after three years, at

which time DNR fisheries staff will review

the pros and cons of the season and recom¬

mend changes if any are determined to be

needed. Comparisons of the fall 1997 year

class strength in several central and south¬

ern Wisconsin trout streams with the long¬

term average year class strength in the same

streams failed to show any detectable effect

of the early trout fishing season on year class

strength (L. Claggett, personal communica¬

tion 1998).

Acknowledgments

Grateful appreciation is extended to Law¬

rence Claggett, Wisconsin DNR Coldwater

Fisheries Ecologist; DuWayne F. Gebken,

Wisconsin DNR Aquatic Ecological Systems

Section Chief; Robert L. Hunt, retired

Wisconsin DNR Cold Water Research

Group Leader; Michael Bozek, Assistant

Leader Cooperative Fisheries Unit, Univer¬

sity of Wisconsin-Stevens Point; William

Thorn, Minnesota DNR; and Bruce C.

Roberts, Beaverhead-Deerlodge National

Forest-Wisdom, Montana, for technical

review of manuscript drafts. Funding for this

study was provided through the Federal Aid

in Sport Fish Restoration program and by the

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Literature Cited

Anderson, D.W. 1983. Factors affecting

brown trout reproduction in southeastern

Minnesota streams. Minnesota Depart¬

ment of Natural Resources. Investiga¬

tional Report No. 376, St. Paul.

Avery, E.L. 1980. Factors influencing repro¬

duction of brown trout above and below

a flood water detention dam on Trout

Creek, Wisconsin. Wisconsin Depart¬

ment of Natural Resources. Research Re¬

port 106, Madison.

Avery, E.L., and R.L. Hunt. 1981. Popula¬

tion dynamics of wild brown trout and

associated sport fisheries in four central

Wisconsin streams. Wisconsin Depart¬

ment of Natural Resources. Technical

Bulletin 121, Madison.

DeVries, P. 1997. Riverine salmonid egg

burial depths; review of published data

and implications for scour studies. Cana¬

dian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sci¬

ence 54:1685-98.

Hansen, E.A. 1975. Some effects of ground-

water on brown trout redds. Transactions

of the American Fisheries Society

1 04(1): 1 00 — 1 0.

Hausle, D.A., and D.W. Coble. 1976. In¬

fluence of sand in redds on survival and

emergence of brook trout (Salvelinus

fontinalis). Transactions of the American

Fisheries Society 105(1): 5 7-63 .

Hawke, S.P. 1978. Stranded redds of quinnat

salmon in the Mathias River, South Island,

New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of Ma¬

rine and Freshwater Research 12:1 67-7 1 .

Miller, J.M. 1970. An analysis of the distri¬

bution of young-of-the-year brook trout,

Salvelinus fontinalis (Mitchell), in Law¬

rence Creek, Wisconsin. Ph.D. thesis.

University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Reiser, D.W., and T.A. Wesche. 1977. De¬

termination of physical and hydraulic

preferences of brown and brook trout in

the selection of spawning locations. Wa¬

ter Resources Series No. 64. Water Re¬

sources Research Institute, University of

Wyoming, Laramie.

Volume 87 (1999)

71

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Roberts, B.C. 1988. Potential influence of

recreational use on Neson Spring Creek,

Montana. Master’s thesis. Montana State

University, Bozeman.

Roberts, B.C., and R.G. White. 1992. Ef¬

fects of angler wading on survival of trout

eggs and pre-emergent fry. North Ameri¬

can Journal of Fisheries Management

12:450-59.

Sorensen, P.W., J.R. Cardwell, T. Essington,

and D.E. Weigel. 1995. Reproductive

interations between sympatric brook and

brown trout in a small Minnesota stream.

Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic

Science 52: 1958-65.

Witzel, L.D., and H.R. MacCrimmon. 1983.

Redd-site selection by brook trout and brown

trout in southwestern Ontario streams.

Transactions of the American Fisheries Society

112:760-71.

Ed L. Avery is an Advanced Research Scientist

with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Re¬

sources. He has published more than 25 peer-re¬

viewed and popular articles focusing on salmo-

nid research and the management of coldwater

ecosystems. Address: Department of Natural Re¬

sources, Rivers and Streams Research Station,

11084 Stratton Lake Road, Waupaca, Wiscon¬

sin 54981. Email: averye@dnr. state, wi. us

Kent Niermeyer is a Natural Resource Techni¬

cian 3 with the Wisconsin Department of

Natural Resources. He has spent the past 29

years assisting in salmonid research statewide.

Address: Department of Natural Resources,

Rivers and Streams Research Station, 11084

Stratton Lake Road, Waupaca, Wisconsin

54981. Email: niermk@dnr. state, wi. us

72.

TRANSACTIONS

Terry Balding

Detections of Red-Shouldered Hawks

(Buteo lineatus) Using High Volume

Tape-Recorded Broadcasts

Abstract Conspecific tape-recorded broadcasts (N - 196) were used from

1986 to 1989 to evoke 71 detections of the red-shouldered hawk

(Buteo lineatus). The objective of this study was to determine the

effect of decibel (db) level on detections. During 1987—1989 a

significantly greater number (P < 0.05) of red-shouldered hawk

detections occurred with a 130 db tape-recorded broadcast when

compared to 95 db broadcast. Results suggest that a 130 db tape-

recorded broadcast could be used to increase the number of detec¬

tions of red-shouldered hawks during the courtship and nesting

season.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (1987) recognizes the

red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus) as a species of man¬

agement concern, and the Wisconsin Department of Natural

Resources (1991) lists the red-shouldered hawk as a threatened

species in Wisconsin. Therefore, it is important to learn more

about this species. One method would be to select a perma¬

nent survey route, use a tape-recorded broadcast to evoke de¬

tections, and then monitor the trend over a period of years.

The red-shouldered hawk in Wisconsin is often associated

with heavily wooded flood plain forests (Robbins 1991). In

this habitat it usually spends much of its time below the canopy

and does not voluntarily vocalize often; consequently it is typi¬

cally a difficult bird to locate. Johnson et al. (1981) suggested

that a broadcast could increase the chances of encountering

some species of birds when compared to conventional survey

techniques. Conspecific broadcasts have been shown to elicit

detections in the red-shouldered hawk (Fuller and Mosher

1981, Balding and Dibble 1984, Fuller and Mosher 1987,

TRANSACTIONS

Volume 87 (1999)

73

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Johnson 1989, Mosher et al. 1990, McLeod

1996). Balding and Dibble (1984) reported

more detections to conspecific broadcasts

than heterospecific hawk broadcasts with

red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis), broad¬

winged hawk (Buteo platypterus), and red¬

shouldered hawk. Great horned owl (Bubo

virginianus) broadcasts have also been used

effectively to produce red-shouldered hawk

detections (Iverson 1987, Devaul 1989,

Iverson and Fuller 1991, Mosher and Fuller

1996).

Most studies using broadcasts to elicit a

raptor detection used a tape player that pro¬

duced a broadcast volume, measured in deci¬

bels (db), of about 100 db (Fuller and

Mosher 1987, Devaul 1989, Johnson 1989,

Mosher et al. 1990, McLeod 1996). This db

level can generally be heard by humans 750

m from the speaker, assuming the human

hears well and there are no barriers or back¬

ground noises (Mosher et al. 1990). Bald¬

ing and Dibble (1984) suggested that a

broadcast with 130 db, which could be

heard by humans at 1600 m (pers. obs.),

would result in a greater number of detec¬

tions. Flowever, that work was with three

species and did not focus on the red-shoul¬

dered hawk. The focus of this study, con¬

ducted 1987-1989, was to test whether

more stations would have detections using

130 db volume compared to a conventional

portable tape-recorder volume (95 db), spe¬

cifically on red-shouldered hawks, using a

conspecific broadcast.

Study Area

Because of the proximity of the Chippewa

River in west-central Wisconsin and the oc¬

currence of red-shouldered hawk habitat in

the riparian corridor, the lower Chippewa

River was established as the study area (Fig¬

ure 1). A 70 km reach of the Chippewa

River from near Rock Falls, Wisconsin, to

the confluence with the Mississippi River

was used as a transect. Natural landmarks

were used to identify twenty-eight perma¬

nent broadcast stations along this transect,

approximately 2.5 km apart.

Methods

Two surveys were completed each year

(1987-1989) between 4-12 April and 5-15

June. These dates were used because by 4-

12 April, migrant red-shouldered hawks

have passed through the area, and residents

are in courtship (Buss and Mattison 1955).

During 5-15 June the birds are with nest¬

lings (Buss and Mattison 1955). The incu¬

bation period was avoided because of specu¬

lation that study activities might increase the

risk of nest predation. Broadcasts were not

conducted after the nestling period because

they may have generated detections from the

fledglings and biased the estimate of the

adult population. Surveys began at 0800 hr

and were completed the same day around

1600 hr and were only conducted on days

with <16 kph wind and no precipitation.

Data from April and June surveys were

paired by year and analyzed using a paired

£-test (a< = 0.05). Balding and Dibble

(1984), using conspecific broadcasts with

three Buteo species, found when five conspe¬

cific broadcasts were given at a broadcast sta¬

tion the majority (93.8%) of the birds were

detected during the first three broadcasts.

Therefore, in this study only three conspe¬

cific broadcasts were used at each station

with one-minute intervals between broad¬

casts to detect red-shouldered hawks either

aurally, visually, or both. If a red-shouldered

hawk was detected, no further broadcasts

were given at that broadcast station. Dur¬

ing surveys the speaker was directed toward

one shoreline (arbitrarily decided), then the

74

TRANSACTIONS

BALDING: Red-shouldered Hawk Detections with Tape-Recordings

Figure 1. Seventy kilometer transect on the Chippewa River, Wisconsin, for tape-

recorded call census of the red-shouldered hawk, 1986-1989.

opposite shoreline, and finally back to the

original direction. A boat with an outboard

motor was used to carry equipment and

move between stations.

At each broadcast station there were two

series of three conspecific broadcasts used.

The first series of broadcasts used the maxi¬

mum volume of a Marantz Superscope tape

recorder. A Simpson model 886 sound level

meter was used to determine that this vol¬

ume, hereafter referred to as low db, regis¬

tered 95 db one meter from the speaker. If

Volume 87 (1999)

75

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

no response occurred to the first series of low

db broadcasts at a station, then a second se¬

ries of three broadcasts were given, this time

using the tape recorder connected to a Sanyo

P6060 amplifier and a hand-held Atlas 30-

watt speaker. With this combination a

broadcast was generated that was 130 db one

meter from the speaker, hereafter referred to

as high db broadcast. Within years the pro¬

portion of detections from high db were

paired with the proportion of detections

from low db and analyzed using a paired t-

test (a< = 0.03).

The experimental design used (three low

then three high db broadcasts at one station)

was based on the assumption that detection

probability would not increase with the

number of broadcasts. This assumption is

supported by data from Balding and Dibble

(1984). where five sequential high db broad¬

casts from each station resulted in detections

of 38, 26, 28, 2, and 2. Johnson (1989) and

McLeod (1996), working with the red¬

shouldered hawk and using methodology

with four conspecific 100 db broadcasts and

six conspecific 100-110 db broadcasts, re¬

spectively, also observed there was not an

increase in birds detected with an increase

in the number of broadcasts.

The above design was chosen over visit¬

ing the same broadcast station several times

and each time randomly choosing three high

or three low db broadcasts. Repeated visits

to the same broadcast station risk habitua¬

tion, when animals become non-responsive

or less responsive because of repeated expo¬

sure to the same stimuli. Johnson et al.

(1981) suggested that habituation to repeti¬

tive broadcasts may lower detection rates.

However, Johnson (1989), Devaul (1990),

and Mosher et al. (1990) found little evi¬

dence of habituation in the red-shouldered

hawk. Additionally, subsequent replications

may be broadcast in a different part of the

breeding cycle where response rates may be

different. McLeod (1996) observed that re¬

sponse rates dropped as the season pro¬

gressed.

Data collected at each station included

date; weather; time of day; broadcast vol¬

ume; number of birds detected per station;

number of broadcasts given before detection;

number of vocalizations given per bird; di¬

rection from the speaker when the bird was

detected; whether the bird was detected au¬

rally, visually, or both; and estimated dis¬

tance of the broadcast from the detected

bird.

The red-shouldered hawk tape recording

used in this study was purchased from the

Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and ma¬

nipulated by University of Wisconsin-Eau

Claire media development to consist of three

“keeahh’s” and four “keeyip’s” (Crocoll

1994). Using high db broadcasts, a prelimi¬

nary survey was completed on 26 June 1986

to determine if red-shouldered hawks were

present along the transect.

Results and Discussion

Over all years combined, the 1986 prelimi¬

nary survey and the 1987—1989 surveys, red¬

shouldered hawks were detected at 36% (71

of 196) of the broadcast stations. Sixty-seven

percent (48 of 71) of the responding red¬

shouldered hawks vocalized more than twice,

38% (27 of 71) moved closer to the broad¬

cast, and 73% (32 of 71) vocalized but were

never seen. Likewise, Johnson (1989) re¬

ported 70.6% of red-shouldered hawks vo¬

calized but were not seen. In this study, on

only one occasion was a bird detected by vi¬

sual means but not heard vocalizing. It ap¬

pears the red-shouldered hawk is more likely

to be detected when it vocalizes in response

to a broadcast rather than be detected only

visually.

76

TRANSACTIONS

BALDING: Red-shouldered Hawk Detections with Tape-Recordings

Comparison of Detections

Between Courtship and Nestling Stage

Using high db broadcasts, there was no sig¬

nificant difference (paired A test = 1.73, N

= 3 years, P > 0.05) in the number of red¬

shouldered hawks responding between

courtship stage and nestling stage. Therefore,

in this study high and low db broadcasts

from April and June were pooled within

years. Mosher et ah (1990), using 100-110

db broadcasts, also noted no difference be¬

tween red-shouldered hawk contacts among

breeding stages, pre-incubation through

post-incubation. However, Johnson (1989)

and McLeod (1996), using 100 and 100-

1 1 0 db respectively, found more detections

during courtship.

Effect of Volume

Results from the three survey years (1987 —

1989) indicate that significantly more detec¬

tions (paired A test = 4.78, N = 3 years, P <

0.05) occurred while using high db (mean

= 1 6.3/year) than with low db broadcasts

(mean = 3.0/year). On five occasions birds

within an estimated 100 m did not respond

to the three initial low db broadcasts, but

were subsequently detected during the high

db broadcasts. It is not known from what

distance the red-shouldered hawk can hear

a low db broadcast, but if we assume that

the red-shouldered hawk can hear the low

db at 100 m, it would appear that it re¬

sponds to the high db and not the low db,

because of greater volume. Anecdotally, it is

possible the bird is responding to a loud

noise similar to the gobbling response wild

turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) have to loud

noises (pers. obs.).

All detections resulting from low db broad¬

casts were from an estimated distance of 400

m or less, while 22 of the 49 detections result¬

ing from high db broadcasts were from an es¬

timated distance of more than 400 m. Prob¬

ably some detections resulting from the high

db broadcast were from birds that may not

have heard the three low db broadcasts.

The direction that the speaker was

pointed also influenced detections. For the

years 1987-1989, significantly more birds

(38 of 58; %2 = 5-59, P < 0.05) responded

when the speaker was directed toward them,

regardless of whether the broadcast was low

or high db. Since, when the speaker is

pointed toward the bird, it is louder than

when it is pointed away, it may have caused

the birds to perceive the call as closer than

it really was. Because initial speaker direc¬

tion was arbitrarily decided, it is possible

there was a bias of pointing the speaker in

the direction a bird was expected. However,

there was no significant (%2 = 0.71, P > 0.05)

relationship between the number of birds

detected and the direction the speaker was

initially pointed.

These data suggest using a high db broad¬

cast (130 db) red-shouldered hawk tape-re¬

cording will result in more red-shouldered

hawk detections than with the standard por¬

table tape recorder volume. Further, the data

indicate there may be more detections from

birds that are very close, as well as from more

distant birds.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the knowledge that Eugene

Jacobs so graciously shared with me about

the natural history of the red-shouldered

hawk. Special thanks are extended to my

wife, Nancy Balding, who helped me gather

data throughout the study. I appreciate the

helpful comments of my colleagues during

the preparation of this manuscript, T.

Duyfhuizen, D. Lonzarich, J. Rohrer, T.

Ho, P. Kleintjes, D. Wittrock, and the ar¬

ticle referees.

Volume 87 (1999)

77

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Literature Cited

Balding, T.A., and E. Dibble. 1984. Responses

of red-tailed, red-shouldered, and broad¬

winged hawks to high volume broadcast re¬

cordings. Passenger Pigeon 46:71— 75.

Buss, I.O., and H.M. Mattison. 1955. A half

century of change in bird populations of

the lower Chippewa River, Wisconsin.

Milwaukee Public Museum Publications

in Ornithology 1:11-77.

Crocoll, S.T. 1994. Red-shouldered hawk, Bu-

teo lineatus (Falconiformes: Accipitridae). In

The Birds of North America , No. 107. The

Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia,

and The American Ornithologist’s Union,

Washington, D.C. 20 pp.

Devaul, H.D. 1989. A theoretical and em¬

pirical evaluation of a method of estimat¬

ing area occupied for breeding woodland

hawks in Maine. M.S. Thesis. University

of Maine, Orono. 59 pp.

Fuller, M.R., and J.A. Mosher. 1981. Meth¬

ods of detecting and counting raptors: a

review. Studies in Avian Biology 6:235-46.

Fuller, M.R., and J.A. Mosher. 1987. Rap¬

tor survey techniques. Pp. 37-65 in F.A.

Giron Pendleton, B.A. Millsap, K.W.

Cline, and D.M. Bird, eds. Raptor man¬

agement techniques manual. National

Wildlife Federation Scientific Technical

Series No. 10. Washington, D. C.

Iverson, G.C. 1987. Woodland nesting rap¬

tor survey. Eyas 10:6-7.

Iverson, G.C., and M.R. Fuller. 1991. Area-

occupied survey technique for nesting

woodland raptors. Pp. 1 18-24 in B. Giron

Pendleton, D.L. Krahe, M.N. LeFranc Jr.,

K. Titus, J.C. Bednarz, D.E. Andersen,

and B.A . Millsap, eds. Proceedings of the

Midwest Raptor Management Symposium

and Workshop. National Wildlife Federa¬

tion Scientific Technical Series No. 15.

Washington, D.C.

Johnson, R.R., B.T. Brown, L.T. Haight, and

J.M. Simpson. 1981. Broadcast recordings

as a special avian censusing technique.

Studies in Avian Biology 6:68— 75.

Johnson, G. 1989. Status and breeding ecol¬

ogy of the red-shouldered hawk in north

central New York. M.S. Thesis. State Uni¬

versity of New York College of Environ¬

mental Science, Syracuse. 100 pp.

McLeod, M.A. 1996. Red-shouldered hawk

habitat use and detection to call-broadcast

surveys in north-central Minnesota. M.S.

Thesis. University of Minnesota.

Mosher, J.A., and M.R. Fuller. 1996. Survey¬

ing woodland hawks with broadcasts of

great horned owl vocalizations. Wildlife

Society Bulletin 24:431-536.

Mosher, J.A., M.R. Fuller, and M. Kopeny.

1990. Surveying woodland raptors by

broadcast of conspecific vocalizations.

Journal of Field Ornithology 61:453— 61

Robbins, S.D., Jr. 1991. Wisconsin birdlife. Uni¬

versity of Wisconsin Press, Madison. 702 pp.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 1987. Migra¬

tory nongame birds of management con¬

cern in the United States: the 1987 list.

U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and

Wildlife Service, Office of Migratory Bird

Management, Washington D.C. 27 pp.

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

1991. Endangered and threatened species

list. Department of Natural Resources,

Wisconsin Bureau of Endangered Re¬

sources, Madison. 4 pp.

Terry Balding has been studying red-shouldered

hawks and bivalve mollusks of the Chippewa

River basin since 1980. Terry is a professor of

biology at the University of Wisconsin-Eau

Claire. Address: Department of Biology , Uni¬

versity of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Eau Claire, WI

54702. Email: baldinta@uwec.edu

78

TRANSACTIONS

Thomas L. Eddy

A History and Vascular Flora

of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County,

Wisconsin

Abstract Mitchell Glen supports a climax forest “island” that occupies a

narrow post-glacial gorge along the Platteville-Galena

escarpment three miles southeast of Green Lake in Green Lake

County , Wisconsin. Since the time of European settlement in

the Green Lake region , circa 1840, and before then by Native

Americans, the glen area has been recognized for its high quality

natural features and admired for its scenic aesthetic landscape.

Although a modern-day county flora exists (Eddy 1996), no

formal study of the Mitchell Glen flora had been previously

undertaken. A total of 234 vascular plants were identified from

plant collections obtained during 1997 and 1998, representing

75 families and 177 genera. Voucher specimens are deposited in

the University ofWisconsin-Oshkosh Herbarium (OSH).

The known distribution ranges were extended for 23 species

previously unreported for the county, including plants with

boreal affinities (Eddy 1996). Mitchell Glen s shaded cliffs with

cold-air drainage and springs at the base of the gorge render a

moist, cool microclimate that sustains certain species more

typical of northern Wisconsin.

Oak savanna and tallgrass prairie covered most of the

immediate area surrounding Mitchell Glen (Finley 1976).

Although most of the prairies and oak openings were placed into

cultivation during the latter half of the 1800s, original maple-

basswood forest occupies Mitchell Glen and represents the only

significant tract of climax woodland in Green Lake County.

The main feature of this report is a catalog of vascular plants,

supported by vouchers, that grow in Mitchell Glen, Green

Lake County, Wisconsin (Figure 1). Despite its noteworthy

geology, prominent topographical features, and apparently rich

biological diversity, no systematic collecting or formal study

TRANSACTIONS Volume 87 (1999)

79

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Figure 1. Location of Green Lake County in east central Wisconsin (U.S. Department of

Agriculture 1977).

of the Mitchell Glen flora had been previ¬

ously undertaken. Besides contributing to

the broader regional botanical record, the

catalog of species serves as a basis of com¬

parison with the flora of the same area in the

future and with the flora of similar south¬

ern mesic forests in the upper Midwest.

A secondary objective of this study exam¬

ines the presettlement flora of Mitchell Glen,

circa 1834. The names of specific plants,

notably trees, and general references to the

vegetation that are mentioned in the origi¬

nal land survey records, old letters and

books, and earlier studies, specifically reports

of Indian antiquities, are used to establish a

historical record of the local flora. Along

with this evidence an examination of the his¬

tory of land use in and around Mitchell

Glen documents the environmental impact

of both natural processes and human-related

activities on the glen flora.

During this study the known distribution

ranges were extended for 23 species that had

been previously unreported for the county

80

TRANSACTIONS

EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

(Eddy 1996). New county records are

mainly due to the fact that rich mesic cli¬

max woodlands are scarce in the county and

until recently have not been closely exam¬

ined and methodically botanized.

In contrast to the surrounding open up¬

lands, Mitchell Glen’s shaded cliff habitat

with cold-air drainage and springs at the base

of the gorge render a moist, cool microcli¬

mate that sustains certain plants with boreal

affinities. Among the species more typical of

northern Wisconsin but which occur at

Mitchell Glen are Acer spicatum, Aster

macrophyllus, Dire a palustris , Diervilla

Ionic era, Equisetum pratense, Lycopodium

lucidulum, and Taxus canadensis.

The oak savannas and tallgrass prairies

that once covered most of the immediate

area surrounding Mitchell Glen (Finley

1976) were placed into cultivation during

the latter half of the 1800s, but original

maple-basswood forest survives in Mitchell

Glen and represents the only significant tract

of climax woodland in Green Lake County.

Although the Mitchell Glen flora is com¬

prised of communities representative of the

original vegetation cover that include rare

species, no state threatened and endangered

plants were observed during the study.

Location

Mitchell Glen is located in the town of

Brooklyn, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

at parallel 43°48’57” north latitude and the

meridian 88°34’34” west longitude. It is

situated in NW lL SE lL section 35, Town¬

ship 16 North and Range 13 East (Figure

2). The study area is comprised of approxi¬

mately 20 acres.

Two state geographical provinces divide

Green Lake County roughly in two (Mar¬

tin 1965). The northwestern half lies on the

western edge of the Central Plain and is

characterized by gently rolling topography.

The southeastern half of the county, which

includes Mitchell Glen, is part of the East¬

ern Ridges and Lowlands and is interrupted

by numerous escarpments and valleys.

Nearly all of Green Lake County, includ¬

ing the area surrounding Mitchell Glen, is

classified as natural division 5c (Hole and

Germain 1994). Characteristic of this natu¬

ral division is undulating to rolling topog¬

raphy that supports oak savannas and prai¬

rie growing on silt loams over calcareous till.

Land classified as division 5cp, directly south

and east of Mitchell Glen, historically sup¬

ported extensive prairies.

The county is slightly below Wisconsin’s

tension zone, a region of transition between

Wisconsin’s northern hardwood province

and the prairie-forest province (Curtis 1959).

Although oak savanna is the dominant veg¬

etation cover throughout the county, some

species that are more typical north of the ten¬

sion zone are established here.

In a 1977 report by the East Central Wis¬

consin Regional Planning Commission,

Mitchell Glen was one of two sites in the re¬

gion (from a list of 10 potential locations)

that were recommended for development as

a regional park. While there are no current

plans for developing such a park at or near

Mitchell Glen, the fact that the area was rec¬

ognized for its unique aesthetic and natural

features underscores the high quality natu¬

ral landscape for which Mitchell Glen is re¬

nowned.

Geology, Soils, Water Resources

Mitchell Glen occupies a narrow post-glacial

gorge that was eroded by glacial meltwater

from the Green Bay Lobe approximately

12,500 years before the present. The upper

bedrock is Platteville-Galena dolomite; be¬

neath this is St. Peter sandstone, which forms

Volume 87 (1999)

81

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Figure 2. Green Lake County, Wisconsin (Adapted from the Wisconsin Department of

Transportation 1988).

the steep-sided walls of the glen. Mitchell

Glen, which is approximately 100 ft deep

from the floor to the top of the Platteville-

Galena escarpment, drains the cultivated up¬

lands that are to the southeast (Figure 3).

Torrential surface runoff that cascades

from the crest of the glen empties into

Mitchell Glen Creek, a small spring-fed rivu¬

let that begins at the base of the falls.

Mitchell Glen Creek is a tributary of Dakin

Creek, a minor stream that enters Green

Lake’s inlet, Silver Creek at NW lU NW XU

Section 33, R13E, T16N (Figure 3).

According to the county soil survey

(1977), soils of the Kidder-Rotamer-

Grellton association that are found at

Mitchell Glen vary from moderately well-

drained to well-drained loams. The subsoils

are mainly of loam, clay loam, and sandy

clay loam underlain by calcareous, gravelly

sandy loam glacial till.

Three marl pits in the vicinity of Mitchell

Glen were excavated in the past and used

as a source for “sweetening” acidic soils and

as an ingredient for mortar cement and

whitewash.

82

TRANSACTIONS

EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

Figure 3. Topographic features of Mitchell Glen and immediate surrounding area. The

glen is a post-glacial gorge eroded by glacial meltwater. Note that the elevation at the

crest of Mitchell Glen is 950 feet above sea level — the base of the glen is 850 feet.

Mitchell Glen Greek (unnamed) begins at the southeast base of the gorge (arrow) and

drains into Dakin Greek, a tributary of Silver Creek, Green Lake’s inlet (United States

Geological Survey 1980).

Volume 87 (1999)

83

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Original Vegetation Cover

Original Land Survey Records

The original government land survey for the

Mitchell Glen area, certified in 1835,

contains the most comprehensive record of

the vegetation prior to European settlement.

The field notes of the surveyors contain

references to the vegetation, as well as to

specific trees, making it possible to interpret

the general vegetation cover for the Mitchell

Glen area (Figure 4). Wherever possible,

individual trees that intersected section lines

were recorded, along with bearing trees that

helped identify corners. To supplement and

verify entries, surveyors recorded a summary

of the vegetation along the section lines and

often included sketch maps of each town¬

ship (Figure 5). When the survey of interior

section lines of a township was completed,

a general summary of the vegetation for the

township was written.

According to the surveyors’ field notes,

the original vegetation cover of Green Lake

County was predominantly oak savanna

(Finley 1976) (Figure 6). Oak forest was

prevalent throughout much of the county,

giving way to wetlands vegetation along the

lower Grand River and throughout most of

the Fox River Valley and its tributaries.

Where the canopy was one-half or more

open, surveyors often acknowledged the

scattered spacing of trees and recorded the

vegetation as oak opening, a transitional

community between oak forest and grass¬

lands. Because the field notes fail to

consistently mention the spacing between

trees, it is possible that areas of what is

mapped as oak forest may have actually been

oak opening (Finley 1976).

Where the oaks diminished in numbers,

notably on the flat uplands in the south¬

eastern townships, the landscape was

essentially treeless and covered by tallgrass

prairie. In the northern half of T15N R13E

the prairie succeeded into oak forest and

openings. A short distance farther north, in

the southwestern quarter of T16N R13E,

where the Platteville-Galena escarpment

overlooks Silver Creek, the oak openings

abruptly gave way to a small area of sugar

maple-basswood forest known as Mitchell

Glen. Prior to European settlement the

forest may have been spared from periodic

conflagrations, due in part to prevailing

northwest winds, the presence of wetlands

to the north and northwest, which helped

to contain the blazes, and the irregular

topography that may have acted as a natural

firebreak.

Completion of the survey of interior lines

for T16N R13E, which includes Mitchell

Glen (NW V4 SW V4 section 35), was

certified March 31, 1835, by Deputy

Surveyors James H. Mullett and John

Mullett (General Land Office 1834). Based

upon written summaries of the vegetation

along section lines and the marker trees

recorded in the original land surveys for

quarter section and corner posts, section 35

was bounded by tallgrass prairie on the

south and southeast (Figure 7). As the

grasslands approached Mitchell Glen they

graded into oak openings, which were

established up to the rim of the glen. Large

tracts of oak opening habitat were reported

northeast and southwest of Mitchell Glen,

while floodplain forest and other wetlands

occupied the lowlands to the northwest.

In short, maple-basswood forest at

Mitchell Glen existed then, as now, as an

“island” climax woodland. A similar climax

forest island, South Woods, occurs three

miles northeast along the southeast edge of

Ripon. Both tracts of maple-basswood forest

are established along the Platteville-Galena

escarpment where post-glacial gorges indent

the edges of the escarpment.

84

TRANSACTIONS

EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

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Figure 4. A copied page from the original land survey field notes for T16N RISE. The

entry begins by surveying the section line north between sections 35 (Mitchell Glen)

and 36. Note the vegetation changes from prairie to oak opening, then to woodland, all

within a mile distance (General Land Office 1834).

Volume 87 (1999)

85

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Figure 5. A copy from the original land survey map for “Township No. 16 North Range

No. 13 East in the Territory of Michigan. . . Certified this 31 day of March 1835,” show¬

ing Mitchell Glen (star), part of present-day Green Lake County, Wisconsin (General

Land Office 1834).

Tallgrass prairie is well-documented im¬

mediately south and southeast of Mitchell

Glen where surveyors “Set post corners Sec¬

tions 35 and 36 in Mound in Prairie Land

High Rolling first Rate.” Land along the

south section line of section 35 was charac¬

terized as . Rolling first rate Prairie and

Timbered White Black and Bur Oak.” Near

here, the field notes refer to a “trail” that oc¬

cupied the southwest quarter of section 35

and ran diagonally from southwest to north¬

east of section 36. The trail was originally an

Indian trail between Fort Howard, Green Bay

and Fort Winnebago, Portage, then later be¬

come known as part of the Military Road.

Within sections 35 and 36 the trail generally

followed the Platteville-Galena escarpment

across upland prairies and oak openings.

86

TRANSACTIONS

EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

K = OAK FOREST

white oak, black

oak, bur oak

E = PINE FOREST

white pine, red pine

marsh, sedge meadc

wet prairie, lowlam

shrubs

bur oak, white oak,

black oak

J = CLIMAX FOREST*

sugar maple,

basswood, red oak,

white oak, black oak

includes Mitchell Glen

Figure 6. Original vegetation cover of Green Lake County, Wisconsin, circa 1834

(Adapted from Finley 1976).

Surveying north between sections 35 and

36, the land was described as . . rolling

second rate First part [southern half] roll¬

ing prairie Last part [northern half] wood¬

land — Timbered with W. B & Bur oak

[white, black and bur oaks, Quercus alba, Q.

velutina , Q. macrocarpa] . B. & W Ash

[. Fraxinus nigra and probably green, not

white ash, F. pennsylvanica] Aspen [Populus

tremuloides] Elm \Ulmus sp.] Ironwood

[Ostrya virginiana] Sugar Maple [Acer sac-

charum] Lynn [probably linden, i.e., bass¬

wood, Tilia americana ] Butternut [Juglans

cinerea] etc.”

The field notes confirm that oak open¬

ings occupied the area between grassland and

forest. South of the north corner post be¬

tween sections 25 and 36 the “. . . First

20.00 [20 chains or one-quarter mile] Tim¬

bered with sugar Maple Lynn [basswood] W

& B Ash Ironwood etc. Last part — Thinly

timbered with W. B and Bur oak.” Follow¬

ing this same section line one mile south

(T15N R13E) the field notes state: “Wood¬

land rolling second rate. Scattering W. B &

Bur oak Prairie level second rate — Red root

[Ceanothus americanus] rosin-weed [ Silphi -

urn sp.] rose-willow \Salix bebbiana ?] etc.”

Volume 87 (1999)

87

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Figure 7. An enlarged portion of original land survey map for section 35 T16N R13E,

the area occupied by Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin. Marker trees and

prairie at quarter sections and corner posts, as well as section line summaries from the

field notes are displayed (General Land Office 1834).

Floodplain forest was encountered along

the north section line between sections 26

and 35. From west to east the surveyors de¬

scribed “Land First part Blk Ash swamp Last

part rolling timbered with W. B & Bur oak

Maple Aspen Cherry [Prunus serotina?\ etc.”

Further evidence of floodplain woodlands

was noted at post corner sections 26, 27, 34

and 35: “Land except swamp rolling second

rate. W. B and Bur oak Swamp timbered

with W. and Black Ash Maple [Acer

saccharinumV\ Elm willow [Salix sp.] etc.”

Based upon the original land survey

records it is apparent that the vegetation

cover for most of the immediate area sur¬

rounding Mitchell Glen was oak savanna

and tallgrass prairie. Upland prairie, which

graded into oak opening, flanked the south¬

ern margin, while extensive oak openings

occupied the areas southwest and northeast

of Mitchell Glen. Historically, recurrent

fires greatly influenced the vegetation cover

by diminishing woody climax succession

and favoring oak savanna. Although most

of the prairies and oak openings were placed

into cultivation during the latter half of the

1800s, the dominant vegetation cover for

Mitchell Glen remains maple-basswood for¬

est. It is the only significant tract of climax

forest in Green Lake County.

Native Americans and European

Settlement

Mitchell Glen and the surrounding lands are

noted for having been the site of the largest

camp of Winnebago Indians in the Green

88

TRANSACTIONS

EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

Lake area (Heiple and Heiple 1978). There

is strong circumstantial evidence that the use

of fire by Winnebago Indians, the primary

inhabitants of the region, indirectly influ¬

enced the vegetation cover (Dorney 1981).

The presence of oak savanna and open wet¬

lands throughout Green Lake County, in¬

cluding those surrounding Mitchell Glen,

support this view because all of these plant

communities originate from recurrent fires

and depend on periodic burnings for their

continuation.

Among the Indian antiquities in Green

Lake County, thirteen Indian campsites,

three main planting grounds, and numer¬

ous food caches have been discovered within

the immediate vicinity of Mitchell Glen

(Brown 1917). The Indian planting

grounds, which yielded much corn, were

found in oak openings and on the prairie

where fire may have been utilized to main¬

tain open habitat (Dorney 1981). The

nearby oak forests yielded great quantities

of acorns, which were ground, dried, and

stored in buried caches for use in winter.

In 1840 Anson Dart and his family es¬

tablished the first permanent European

settlement on Green Lake. A son, Richard

Dart, then twelve years old, later reflected

on the resourcefulness of local Native

Americans:

The Winnebago used to make small mounds

to preserve their provisions. When plentiful,

they dried fish in the sun till they were as dry

as powder, then put them in big puckawa

sacks. The squaws also picked up bushels of

acorns. In deep holes, below frost-line, they

would bury their fish and acorns together,

twenty bushels or so in a place, and cover

them over with a mound of earth. When the

deer had gone south, and game was scarcer

they would come and camp on these mounds

and dig up fish and acorns for their winter

food, and live on this provender until spring

opened or game appeared. (Dart 1910)

Maple sugar was made from Acer saccha-

rum in at least two localities west and north

of Mitchell Glen, SW XU section 35 and SW

lU section 26 (Brown 1917). The maple

sugar was stored in birch bark baskets that

were fashioned from Betula papyrifera.

“. . . We had no sugar, save maple made by

Indians, and this was very dirty. The natives

used to pack this sugar in large baskets of

birch-bark, and sell it” (Dart 1910).

The area woodlands also supplied wood

for fuel, poles and bark for wigwams, and

wood for making tools and weapons.

Wooden bowls were carved out of ash,

Fraxinuss pp., and American basswood, Tilia

americana (Heiple and Heiple 1978). Shag-

bark hickory, Carya ovata, and red cedar,

Juniperus virginiana, both of which are

found at Mitchell Glen, were utilized to

make hunting bows (Brown 1917).

In 1835, one year after the township was

surveyed, the first European settler to occupy

land that included the glen was a trader

named James Powell (Heiple and Heiple

1978). Twenty-six years later, Archibald and

Laura Mitchell purchased 1 60 acres of land,

which included the glen, NW lU SE XU sec¬

tion 35. The Mitchells’ third son, Stephan

Decatur Mitchell, or S.D. Mitchell, eventu¬

ally acquired the glen, and this is when the

name “Mitchell Glen” became attached to

the site.

S.D. Mitchell was an amateur collector

and enthusiastic student of Indian antiqui¬

ties. His letters and reports to Charles E.

Brown, then President of the Wisconsin Ar¬

chaeological Society, were incorporated into

Brown’s 1917 paper, “The Antiquities of

Green Lake.” Numerous references to spe¬

cific trees and the vegetation cover appear

in Mitchell’s letters to Brown as he related

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

his findings. In a letter dated February 4,

1903, Mitchell described the forest nearby

his home: “About Eighty rods to the North

west of my residence on same Section [33]

you will observe a conical mound this

mound was in the limets [sic] of what at one

time was one of the finest shugar [sic] bushes

[Acer saccharum] that I ever saw ...” (State

Historical Society of Wisconsin 1888).

In 1903 Mitchell posted a draft to Brown

entitled “Green Lake Report,” which in¬

cluded a list of Indian sites and descriptions

of the vegetation cover, as well as specific

uses of local plants by the Winnebago tribe

in and around Mitchell Glen. Mitchell re¬

lated how the Native Americans utilized lo¬

cal plants and animals, as explained to him

by Richard Dart (then 77 years old):

Before the building of the dam at Dartford

there was a bar at the north east portion of

the lake to the South and east of where the

Plasant [Pleasant] Point Hotell [sic] now

stand which was at that time grown up to

rushes the watter [sic] about five feet in depth

here during the summer the Indians speared

thousand and thousands of huge dog fish

these they Jurked [sic] or dried over a slow

fire and together with acorns they cached or

buried these in pits when winter came one

[on] and food became scarse [sic] they built

their huts or Wigwams over these caches and

boiled these fish and acorns together which

became a black mass. . . . (State Historical So¬

ciety of Wisconsin 1888)

Continuing, Mitchell went on to explain

the loss of floodplain forest north of Mitchell

Glen by the damming of Green Lake:

It might be well to state here that the intire

[sic] shoar [sic] line of the lake was changed

by the building of a dam across the out let

called the Pucyann [Puchyan] River at

Dartford in the year 1844. This dam Raised

the level of the lake some Four feet or more

flooding a large tract of very heavy tim¬

ber. . . some years since parties removed the

over flowed stumps in the shallow watter [sic]

between this [Silver Creek inlet, SW lU sec¬

tion 26] and the Lake. . . . (State Historical

Society of Wisconsin 1888)

South from the inlet “This whole tract

[NW lU section 35] to the south and west

also to the east dureing [sic] the knowlage

[sic] of the writer has been one vast tract of

heavy timber portions of which has been

since removed (from) the land and converted

into plowed fields. . . ” (State Historical So¬

ciety of Wisconsin 1888).

Mitchell’s references to maple trees fur¬

ther underscored the dependence of Native

Americans and early settlers on the tract of

climax forest in and around Mitchell Glen.

Approximately one mile northwest of

Mitchell Glen, a campsite on Silver Creek,

SW lU section 26, used by the Winnebago

tribe was described as

... a small island known as sugar creek island

this is surrounded on the north and west by

silver creek and on the south and east by

swamps this island formerly was covered with

heavy maple timber here again was shown the

hacking gouging present of the Indians mode

of taping [sic] the maple with his rude imple¬

ments. . . . (State Historical Society of Wis¬

consin 1888)

About a quarter mile north of Mitchell

Glen, SE V4 NW V4 section 35, Mitchell

states that “This site was one of the finest

maple groves [Acer saccharum] in the state

my Father at one time cut one Maple that

made 7lh cords of 4 ft wood These trees all

showed that they had been taped [sic] for

ages by the Indians. . . . (State Historical

Society of Wisconsin 1888).

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

Oak woods and openings bordered edges

of the maple-basswood forest. In a letter to

Brown on March 4, 1904, Mitchell described

five trees around Indian corn hills in SW V4

NW V4 section 35 as . . three of Oak

[Quercus sp.] and two of Cherry [Prunus

serotina] the largest oak is four ft eight inches

in circumference the other is smaller (State

Historical Society of Wisconsin 1888).

As the Green Lake area became more

settled, more land surrounding Mitchell

Glen was placed into pasture and cultiva¬

tion. By reporting the date when an Indian

site was disturbed or destroyed, Mitchell in¬

advertently documented destruction of the

vegetation cover and changes in land use sur¬

rounding Mitchell Glen. In 1904, for ex¬

ample, Mitchell laments that “. . . the tim¬

ber has been removed [SE lU NE V4 section

34] and in the early spring the Octogon [sic]

the wolf and part of the cornfield [Indian

corn] will be plowed for the first time

. . . Nearly all the damage [to effigy mounds]

. . . has been done within the last three

years” (State Historical Society of Wiscon¬

sin 1888). Mitchell noted even earlier

changes to the prairie southeast of Mitchell

Glen, NW V4 SW V4 section 36:

1862 first Plowed and yearly since . . . The

peculiarity about these mounds is their iso¬

lation from other mound and distance from

watter [sic] they are about one and a half

miles east a little south of the lak [sic] on high

table land about 400 feet above the lake on

the edge of Green Lake Prairie. Alass [sic]

there is but little sembalance [sic] to a mound

left the distructive [sic] plow has for more

than 40 year been accomplishing their

ruin. . . . (State Historical Society of Wiscon¬

sin 1888)

Elsewhere, about a quarter mile northwest

of Mitchell Glen, SE V4 NE V4 section 34,

Mitchell reports that “. . . two of the lizard

tails [effigy mounds] were plowed about

1858. More were plowed 1903 and more

. . . will be Plowed this season.”

Post-settlement to Present-day

The earliest known formal study to include

the Mitchell Glen flora is from 1889 by Mrs.

C.T. Tracy, a Ripon College botany instruc¬

tor. While many of the plants listed in her

Catalogue of Plants Growing Without Cul¬

tivation in Ripon and the Near Vicinity are

known from Mitchell Glen, Mrs. Tracy spe¬

cifically cites Mitchell Glen as the location

for two species: Impatiens capensis Meerb. (L

fulva as listed by Tracy) and Coreopsis

tripteris L. While I. capensis is common on

wet soils along Mitchell Glen Creek, there

are no known vouchers of C. tripteris for

Green Lake County, or Wisconsin for that

matter (Theodore S. Cochrane, personal

communication, 2 April 1999). (Other old

specimens, e.g., Carex shortiana, Phoraden-

dron serotinum, and Silphium asteriscus, bear¬

ing identical Ripon College labels, whether

collected by “J. Clark,” “Mrs. C. Tracy,” or

someone else, also must be excluded from

the Wisconsin flora for lack of specimen

vouchers (Theodore S. Cochrane, personal

communication, 2 April 1999).

Although many of the typical woodland

ephemerals that grow at Mitchell Glen oc¬

cur elsewhere in the county, some species are

exclusive to the glen. Showy orchis, Orchis

spectahilis, for example, was “discovered” in

1994 and is known only from Mitchell Glen

(Eddy 1996). Similarly, Hamamelis virgin-

iana, Symphoricarpos albus, and Symphori-

carpos occidentals are not rare in the south¬

ern half of Wisconsin but are recognized in

the county only from Mitchell Glen.

Cold-air drainage along the shaded cliffs

and cold springs at the base of the gorge

create a boreal micro-habitat for certain

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

northern plants. Among the species more

typical of northern Wisconsin, and which

may be viewed as northern relics, are Acer

spicatum , Aster macrophyllus , Dirca palustris,

Diervilla lonicera, Equisetum pratense,

Lycopodium lucidulum , and Taxus cana¬

densis. The fact that T. canadensis is nearly

inaccessible because of the very steep slopes

on which it grows may explain why it has

not been extirpated by browsing white-tail

deer.

Twenty-three species are “new” to the

county, in that they were not known from

the county prior to 1996. These county

records listed below represent 2.4% of the

total county flora (currently 951 species)

and are based on voucher specimens col¬

lected after publication of the county flora

(Eddy 1996).

Acer spicatum Lam.

Aster macrophyllus L.

Aster shortii Lindley

Carex amphibola Steudel

Car ex blanda Dewey

Carex projecta Mackenzie

Cynoglossum amabile Stapf & Drumm.

Dirca palustris L.

Equisetum pratense Ehrh.

Erysimum cheiranthoides L.

Galium concinnum T. & G.

Hamamelis virginiana L.

Hydrophyllum virginianum L.

Lactuca serriola L.

Laportea canadensis (L.) Wedd.

Panicum bore ale Nash

Phlox divaricata L.

Rubus occidentals L.

Symphoricarpos albus (L.) S. F. Blake

Symphoricarpos occidentals Hook.

Taxus canadensis Marshall

Ulmus rubra Muhl.

Viburnum rafinesquianum Schultes

var. rafinesquianum

Although the vascular plant diversity of

Mitchell Glen compared with similar Wis¬

consin forests is difficult to measure, the site

is evidently richer than average. Based upon

plant inventories for southern mesic forests

in the State Natural Area system, an aver¬

age number of vascular plants on a 40-acre

tract is roughly 150 species (Thomas Meyer,

personal communication, 1 April 1998).

According to Meyer, in forests grown on cal¬

careous till or where limestone bedrock nears

the surface, which is the case at Mitchell

Glen, the number of vascular plants is about

175 species. These data may not be in ac¬

cord with the 234 species cataloged for the

glen and bordering uplands. However, when

considering the approximately 40 common

weeds that were among the 234 plants col¬

lected, as well as several prairie and savanna,

not forest species, the variety in Mitchell

Glen generally corresponds to the number

of species suggested by Meyer.

The origin of Mitchell Glen is similar to

that of Parfrey’s Glen, a 488-acre state natu¬

ral area in Sauk County. Parfrey’s Glen is a

post-glacial gorge cut into Cambrian sand¬

stone conglomerate of the Baraboo Hills and,

like Mitchell Glen, receives cold-air drainage

that supports a collection of northern plants,

as well as shaded cliff plants on steep rock out¬

crops. Eighty-eight vascular plants are reported

in a partial list compiled for Parfrey’s Glen

(Thomas Meyer, personal communication, 1 1

November 1998). Of these, 32 species or 36%

are common to the Mitchell Glen flora, in¬

cluding plants with northern affinities. Com¬

bined with the plants on the Parfrey’s list that

are identified to genus only, there are 45 spe¬

cies or 51% common to the Mitchell Glen

flora. Considering its rich plant diversity,

coupled to similarities with other preserved

southern mesic forests, Mitchell Glen stands

as a high-quality refugium for native biota in

east-central Wisconsin.

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

Past and Present Land Use

Land uses that affect the vegetation cover of

Mitchell Glen area are ongoing. Four years

ago nearly 30 acres of mature hardwood for¬

est was selectively logged directly northwest

of the glen, SE lU NE V4 section 35. Har¬

vested trees were mainly red and white oak,

but included some bur oak, sugar maple,

and basswood (John Koerner, personal com¬

munication, 7 January 1999). One year ear¬

lier area landowners successfully persuaded

a local excavator to abandon plans to quarry

gravel at a site less than one mile from

Mitchell Glen.

Directly south and east of Mitchell Glen

is land that has been under cultivation for

over a century, an activity that has obviously

destroyed the original vegetation cover. Fur¬

thermore, because the row-cropped fields fail

to slow and contain water during rains and

snowmelts, torrents of surface water stream

into the southeast comer of Mitchell Glen,

further eroding the edges of the soil grade

that borders the gorge. The excessive surface

runoff causes silting and flooding along

Mitchell Glen Creek and intermittently dis¬

rupts the bottomland vegetation. Patches of

reed canary grass, Phalaris arundinacea, and

stinging nettle, Urtica dioica , have become

firmly established on the moist alluvium.

By comparing the present-day vegetation

cover of Mitchell Glen with old photographs

and postcards it is evident that the edges of

the glen and former openings have become

more overgrown with woody growth. Alys

Gredler, a former resident of the area com¬

mented:

The greatest impression I had in going

through the glen was how different it was

from the pictures I have. It was quite obvi¬

ous that it was almost ninety years older than

it appeared in the pictures. The trees were

much younger and smaller and the glen was

very much less crowded with plant life

. . . The upper glen where the Mitchell fam¬

ily cemetery is located must have at one time

been fairly clear land but is very wooded now.

(Alys Gredler, personal communication, 16

November 1998)

Prairie and savanna groundlayer species

can still be observed growing along the mar¬

gins in semi-shade. Along the north and

south rims and on gently sloped terraces

overlooking Mitchell Glen Creek, pioneer

trees are present. The absence of fire and

other habitat disturbances that impede

woody succession have allowed aspen, black

cherry, and boxelder to become established.

Ironically, bur, white, and black oaks, trees

once common to nearby oak openings, were

not observed growing within the study area.

In addition, in oak openings and wood¬

lands that were logged and pastured, Euro¬

pean buckthorn, Rhamnus cathartica, has

become naturalized and at times forming

thickets. Left unmanaged, buckthorn devel¬

ops a dense understory that shades out na¬

tive species.

Both accidental and deliberate introduc¬

tions have adversely affected the groundlayer

cover. For example, periwinkle, Vinca minor,

was planted many years ago in the Mitchell

family cemetery. It has since spread to the

surrounding area, forming large evergreen

mats that crowd out native groundlayer spe¬

cies.

The present-day landholders of Mitchell

Glen are cognizant of the need for its long¬

term protection by implementing sustainable

land management practices. One option to

achieve this aim is to prepare a conservation

easement that specifies what land uses are

acceptable and unacceptable. When attached

to a deed, a conservation easement can as¬

sist protecting the land into perpetuity.

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Methodology and Catalog Design

Plant collections were obtained during the

1997 and 1998 growing seasons. In addi¬

tion to the glen, common weeds growing

along buildings and lanes, and in lawns and

cultivated fields were collected. Voucher

specimens were identified and deposited in

the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Her¬

barium (OSH). Besides plant collections,

numerous 35 mm slide photographs of in¬

dividual plants and entire communities were

taken to further document the Mitchell

Glen flora and general vegetation cover.

Plant families in the catalog are alphabet¬

ized within the major plant groups, as are

the genera and species within a family. No¬

menclature strictly follows Gleason and

Cronquist (1991). The treatment of nar¬

rowly defined species and most infraspecific

taxa is avoided, as is the listing of synonyms.

General locations, brief habitat descrip¬

tions, and the frequencies are stated for most

species. Plants collected during this study

that are not included in the Green Lake

County flora (Eddy 1996) are noted as

county records. Collection numbers cited are

my own and correspond to the voucher

specimens deposited at OSH.

Summary of Taxa

Presently, the total number of cataloged vas¬

cular plants at Mitchell Glen is 234 species

(Table 1). A summary of the number of

families, genera, and species for the three

largest dicot and three largest monocot fami¬

lies is compiled in Table 2.

A single family, the Asteraceae, represents

about one-fifth or 21% of the total number

of dicots. The monocots are largely repre¬

sented by the Poaceae and Cyperaceae,

which when combined, account for 67% of

the total number of monocots. The com¬

bined number of species of the three largest

dicot and three largest monocot families ac¬

counts for 43% of the total Mitchell Glen

flora (Table 2).

Table 1. Summary of Major Plant Taxa at

Mitchell Glen.

Table 2. A comparison of the three largest

dicot and three largest monocot families.

94

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

CATALOG OF SPECIES

PTERIDOPHYTES

LYCOPODIACEAE (Clubmoss Family)

Lycopodium lucidulum Michx. Rare, one site;

moist shaded sandstone shelf above Glen

Creek. (4235,4531)

EQUISETACEAE (Horsetail Family)

Equisetum hyemale L. var. affinis (Engelm.)

A. A. Eaton. Rich shaded slope, growing

beside E. pratense. (4604)

E. pratense Ehrh. Rare, one site; rich shaded

slope. COUNTY RECORD. (4312, 4533)

ADIANTACEAE (Maidenhair Family)

Adiantum pedatum L. ssp. pedatum. Rich

wooded slopes. Locally common. (4346)

ASPLENIACEAE (Spleenwort Family)

Asplenium rhizophyllum L. Local on shaded

sandstone cliffs. (4497)

Cystopteris bulbifera (L.) Bernh. Shaded sand¬

stone outcrops. Uncommon. (4336, 4494)

Dryopteris carthusiana (Villars) H.P. Fuchs.

Rich woods along Glen Creek. Common.

(4361)

D. intermedia (Muhl.) A. Gray. Rich woods

along Glen Creek. Common. (4535)

Woodsia obtusa (Sprengel) Torr. Locally

abundant on shaded sandstone outcrops.

(4335, 4492, 4496, 4534)

OSMUNDACEAE (Royal Fern Family)

Osmunda claytoniana L. Rich woods along

Glen Creek. Uncommon. (4530)

POLYPODIACEAE (Polypody Family)

Polypodium virginianum L. Locally common

on moist shaded sandstone cliffs. (4234,

4493, 4628)

GYMNOSPERMS

CUPRESSACEAE (Cypress Family)

Juniperus virginiana L. Dry disturbed woods.

Common. (4279, 4305)

PINACEAE (Pine Family)

Pinus resinosa Aiton. Local on rocky ledge

alone north rim of glen; four mature trees.

(4639)

TAXACEAE (Yew Family)

Taxus canadensis Marshall. Local on steep

wooded rocky slopes along south wall of

Mitchell Glen. COUNTY RECORD.

(4509)

DICOTYLEDONS

ACERACEAE (Maple Family)

Acer negundo L. Common in disturbed

woods, fencerows, clearing. (4295)

A. saccharum Marshall. Throughout rich

woods. (4300)

A. spicatum Lam. Local on steep wooded

slopes along south wall of Mitchell Glen.

COUNTY RECORD. (4338, 4347,

4647)

AMARANTHACEAE (Amaranth Family)

Amaranthus hybridus L. Common weed.

(4523, 4553)

ANACARDIACEAE (Cashew Family)

Rhus glabra L. Dry opening along northeast

rim of Mitchell Glen. Common. (4633)

Toxicodendron radicans (L.) Kuntze. Occa¬

sional in disturbed woods, paths, clearings.

(4519, 4656)

Volume 87 (1999)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

APIACEAE (Carrot Family)

Cryptotaenia canadensis DC. Rich woods.

Uncommon. (4345)

Osmorhiza claytonii (Michx.) C.B. Clarke.

Rich woods. Common. (4275)

APOCYNACEAE (Dogbane Family)

Vinca minor L. Planted and escaped about

shaded pioneer cemetery. (4241)

ARIST OLOCHLACEAE (Birthwort Family)

Asarum canadense L. Rich wooded slopes

along Glen Creek. (4264)

ASCLEPIADACEAE (Milkweed Family)

Asclepias incarnata L. One plant in old field.

(4559)

A. syriaca L. Field lanes, old fields. Com¬

mon. (4478)

A. verticillata L. Field lanes, old fields.

(4637, 4660)

ASTERACEAE (Aster Family)

Achillea millefolium L. Field lanes, dry

wooded openings. Common. (4464)

Ambrosia artemisiifolia L. Common weed.

(4582)

A. trifida L. Common weed. (4589)

Antennaria plantaginifolia (L.) Richardson.

Dry wooded openings. (4254, 4280)

Aster ericoides L. Dry wooded openings, field

lanes. Common. (4626)

A. lateriflorus (L.) Britt. Open woods, oak

openings. Common. (4607, 4616)

A. macrophyllus L. Dry wooded opening

along northern rim of Mitchell Glen.

COUNTY RECORD. (4617)

A. sagittifolius Willd. Oak openings. Com¬

mon. (4625, 4636)

A. shortii Lindley. Dry wooded opening

along northern rim of Mitchell Glen.

COUNTY RECORD. (4622, 4631)

Cirsium vulgare (Savi) Tenore. Common

weed. (4502, 4579)

Chrysanthemum leucanthemum L. Common

weed. (4293)

Erigeron annuus (L.) Pers. Common weed.

(4501)

E. pulchellus Michx. Dry open woods. Com¬

mon. (4314)

Eupatorium rugosum Houtt. Rich woods,

thickets. Common. (4595, 4605)

Gnaphalium obtusifolium L. Dry openings.

Common (4621)

Helianthus hirsutus Raf. Dry open woods.

Common. (4575)

Heliopsis helianthoides (L.) Sweet var. scabra

(Dunal) Fern. Open fields. Common.

(4356, 4527, 4569)

Hieracium aurantiacum L. Common weed.

(4325)

H. caespitosum Dumort. Common weed.

(4480, 4482, 4651)

H. scabrum Michx. Dry open woods, oak

openings. Common. (4598, 4620, 4658)

Krigia biflora (Walt.) S.F. Blake Oak open¬

ing above Glen Creek. Locally common.

(4349)

Lactuca canadensis L. Common weed.

(4600)

L. serriola L. Field lanes, open disturbed

soils. COUNTY RECORD. (4583)

Matricaria matricarioides (Less.) Porter.

Common weed. (4557)

Prenanthes alba L. Local on semi-shaded

sandstone shelf above Glen Creek. (4615)

Rudbeckia hirta L. Oak openings. Common.

(4561,4653)

Senecio pauperculus Michx. One site; oak

opening on natural terrace above Glen

Creek. (4296)

Solidago canadensis L. Field lanes, old fields.

Common. (4558, 4594)

S. flexicaulis L. Dry woods, oak openings.

Common. (4606)

S. rigida L. var. rigida One site; dry open¬

ing along northeast rim above Mitchell

Glen waterfalls.

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

S. ulmifolia Muhl. Oak openings. Common.

(4608)

Sonchus oleraceus L. Common weed. (4591)

Taraxacum officinale Weber. Common

weed. (4273)

Tragopogon pratensis L. Field lanes, open

habitats. (4499)

Xanthium strumarium L. Common weed.

(4545, 4576, 4577)

BALSAMINACEAE (Touch-me-not Family)

Impatiens capensis Meerb. Damp soils along

Mitchell Glen Creek. Common, (s. n.)

BERBER! DACEAE (Barberry Family)

Caulophyllum thalictroides (L.) Michx. Rich

woods. Common. (4267)

Podophyllum peltatum L. Throughout

woods. (4278)

BETULACEAE (Birch Family)

Betula papyrifera Marshall. Occasional along

edges of glen. (s. n.)

Ostrya virginiana (Miller) K. Koch. Through¬

out rich woods. (4567, 4599)

BORAGINACEAE (Borage Family)

Cynoglossum amahile Stapf & Drumm. Gar¬

den escape; waste ground along old build¬

ing. COUNTY RECORD. (4603)

Hackelia virginiana (L.) I. M. Johnst. Dry

woods. Common. (4540, 4580)

BRASSICACEAE (Mustard Family)

Barb area vulgaris R. Br. Common weed.

(4242)

Brassica nigra (L.) Koch. Common weed.

(4556)

Cardamine concatenata (Michx.) O.

Schwartz. Throughout rich woods. (4245)

Erysimum cheiranthoides L. Disturbed habi¬

tats. COUNTY RECORD. (4517)

Hesperis matronalis L. Common garden es¬

cape. (4274)

CAMPANULACEAE (Harebell Family)

Campanula rapunculoides L. Garden escape.

(4571)

Lobelia siphilitica L. Damp soils along Glen

Creek. Common. (4613)

L. spicata Lam. var. spicata Oak openings.

Common. (4471)

CAPRIFOLLACEAE (Honeysuckle Family)

Diervilla lonicera Mill. Dry and rocky

wooded openings. Uncommon. (4510,

4619)

Lonicera x bella Zabel. Woods, thickets.

(4281,4302)

Sambucus canadensis L. Woods, thickets.

Common. (4253, 4488)

S. racemosa L. ssp. pubens (Michx.) House.

Rich shaded slopes. Common (4573)

Symphoricarpos albus (L.) S.F. Blake Rare

county-wide; dry wooded opening along

northern rim of Mitchell Glen. COUNTY

RECORD. (4614, 4629)

S. occidentalis Hook. Rare county-wide;

wooded clearing above Glen Creek.

COUNTY RECORD. (4624).

Viburnum lentago L. Occasional throughout

woods. (4487)

V rafinesquianum Schultes var. rafines-

quianum. Dry woods along southern rim

of Mitchell Glen. COUNTY RECORD.

(4511,4623)

CARYOPHYLLACEAE (Pink Family)

Arenaria lateriflora L. Woods, openings.

Common. (4344)

Cerastium vulgatum L. Common weed.

(4289)

Silene latifolia Poiret. Field lanes, disturbed

habitats. Common. (4330, 4505, 4521)

CHENOPODIACEAE (Goosefoot Family)

Chenopodium album L. Common weed.

(4518,452 6, 4549)

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CLUSIACEAE (Mangosteen Family)

Hypericum punctatum Lam. Field lanes, dry

openings. Common. (4568)

CONVOLVULACEAE (Bindweed Family)

Convolvulus arvensis L. Common weed.

(4547)

CORNACEAE (Dogwood Family)

Cornus rugosa Lam. Rocky woods. Com¬

mon. (4532, 4645)

CUCURBITACEAE (Gourd Family)

Echinocystis lobata (Michx.) T. & G. Edges

of woods, thickets. Common. (4546)

EUPHORBIACEAE (Spurge Family)

Euphorbia corollata L. var. corollata. Dry

wooded openings, field lanes. Common.

(4592, 4650)

FABACEAE (Bean Family)

Amphicarpaea bracteata (L.) Fern. Through¬

out woods, openings. (4612)

Coronilla varia L. Roadside. (4515)

Medicago lupulina L. Common weed. (4307,

4525)

M. sativa L. Common along field lanes, old

fields. (4481)

Trifolium campestre Schreb. Common weed.

(4322)

T. pratense L. Common weed. (4327)

T. repens L. Common weed. (4328)

Vicia sativa L. ssp. nigra (L.) Ehrhart. Field

lanes. Common. (4483)

FAGACEAE (Beech Family)

Quercus rubra L. Throughout woods. (4564)

FUMARIACEAE (Fumitory Family)

Dicentra cucullaria (L.) Bernh. Rich wooded

slopes along Glen Creek. (4262)

GROSSULARIACEAE (Gooseberry Family)

Ribes cynosbati L. Rich woods. (4259, 4339,

4642)

HAMAMELIDACEAE (Witch Hazel

Family)

Hamamelis virginiana L. Local on shaded

slopes along Glen Creek. COUNTY

RECORD. (4529)

HYDROPHYLLACEAE (Waterleaf Family)

Hydrophyllum virginianum L. Rich wooded

slopes. Uncommon. COUNTY RECORD.

(4308)

JUGLANDACEAE (Walnut Family)

Carya cordiformis (Wangenh.) K. Koch. Rich

woods above Glen Creek. Uncommon.

(4351,4528)

Juglans cinerea L. Occasional throughout

woods. (4282)

LAMIACEAE (Mint Family)

Leonurus cardiaca L. Common weed. (4465)

Monarda fistulosa L. var. fistulosa. Old fields,

oak openings. Common. (4550)

Nepeta cataria L. Common weed. (4489)

Prunella vulgaris L. Common weed of damp

soils. (4572)

MALVACEAE (Mallow Family)

Abutilon theophrasti Medikus. Common

field weed. (4584)

MONOTROPACEAE (Indian Pipe Family)

Monotropa uniflora L. Dry woods, openings.

Uncommon. (4562)

OLEACEAE (Olive Family)

Fraxinus pennsylvanica Marshall. Occasional

throughout woods. (4472, 4627)

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

ONAGRACEAE (Evening Primrose Family)

Circaea alpina L. Local on moist shaded

sandstone cliff beside waterfalls of Glen

Creek. (4491)

C lutetiana L. Throughout rich woods. (4363)

Oenothera parviflora L. Field lanes, old fields.

(4390)

OXALIDACEAE (Oxalis Family)

Oxalis stricta L. Common weed. (4321, 4334)

PAPAVERACEAE (Poppy Family)

Sanguinaria canadensis L. Rich woods. Com¬

mon. (4266)

PLANTAGINACEAE (Plantain Family)

Plantago major L. Common weed. (4344)

P. rugelii Decne. Common weed. (4504)

POLEMONLACEAE (Phlox Family)

Phlox divaricata L. One site; edge of woods

along northeast rim of Mitchell Glen.

COUNTY RECORD. (4244)

POLYGONACEAE (Smartweed Family)

Polygonum pensylvanicum L. Field lanes,

open disturbed habitats. Common. (4589)

P. persicaria L. Common weed. (4555)

Rumex acetosella L. Common weed. (4585)

R. crispus L. Common weed of damp waste

places. (4323, 4485)

R. obtusifolius L. Damp disturbed soils. (4536)

R. salicifolius J.A. Weinm. Wet soils along

Glen Creek. (4467)

PORTULACACEAE (Purslane Family)

Claytonia virginica L. Throughout rich

woods. (4250)

Portulaca oleracea L. Common weed. (4581)

PRIMULACEAE (Primrose Family)

Dodecatheon meadia L. Locally abundant in

dry openings along southern and northern

rims of Mitchell Glen. (4277)

PYROLACEAE (Shinleaf Family)

Pyrola elliptica Nutt. Rare, one site; oak

opening on natural terrace above Glen

Creek. (4652)

RAN UN CULACEAE (Buttercup Family)

Actaea rubra (Aiton) Willd. Throughout rich

woods. (4261, 4286, 4287)

Anemone quinquefolia L. Throughout rich

woods. (4233)

A. virginiana L. Dry wooded openings.

Common. (4343, 4357, 4362)

Caltha palustris L. Wet soils along Glen

Creek. (4263)

Hepatica americana (DC.) Ker Gawler. Rich

wooded slopes along Glen Creek. (4260)

Isopyrum biternatum (Raf.) T. & G. Rich

woods. Uncommon. (4248)

Ranunculus abortions L. Dry woods. Com¬

mon. (4238)

R. fascicularis Muhl. Wooded openings.

Common. (4284)

R. recurvatus Poiret. Rich woods. Uncom¬

mon. (4288)

Thalictrum dioicum L. Woods. Common.

(4232)

RHAMNACEAE (Buckthorn Family)

Rhamnus cathartica L. Common, generally

naturalized in woods and openings. (4297)

ROSACEAE (Rose Family)

Agrimonia gryposepala Wallr. Dry woods,

oak openings. Common. (4554)

Amelanchier spicata (Lam.) K. Koch. Dry

woods, openings. (4251, 464 0, 4644)

Crataegus coccinea L. One site; beside a lane

in wooded opening on southwest edge of

Mitchell Glen. (4596)

Fragaria virginiana Duchesne. Dry wooded

openings. (4237)

Geum canadense Jacq. Throughout dry

woods. Common. (4355, 4548)

Potentilla recta L. Common weed. (4484)

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P. simplex Michx. Field lanes, disturbed

habitats. Common. (4350)

Prunus americana Marshall. Wooded open¬

ings, thickets. (4240)

P. pensylvanica L. f. Fencerow. (4643)

P. serotina Ehrh. Occasional throughout

woods. (4301)

Pyrus ioensis (A. Wood) L. H. Bailey.

Woods. Uncommon. (4271)

Rubus occidentalis L. Dry woods along south¬

ern rim of Mitchell Glen. COUNTY

RECORD. (4337)

RUBLACEAE (Madder Family)

Galium aparine L. Woods. Common.

(4272)

G. concinnum T. & G. Occasional in dry

woods. COUNTY RECORD. (4473)

G. triflorum Michx. Throughout dry woods.

(4655)

RUTACEAE (Rue Family)

Zanthoxylum americanum Mill. Disturbed

woods, openings along northern rim of

Mitchell Glen. Common. (4316)

SALICACEAE (Willow Family)

Populus tremuloides Michx. Disturbed

woods. (4503)

Salix humilis Marshall. One site; beside field

lane on eastern border of Mitchell Glen.

(4294)

SANTALACEAE (Sandlewood Family)

Comandra umbellata (L.) Nutt. var. umbel-

lata. Dry wooded openings along southern

rim of Mitchell Glen. (4313)

SCROPHULARIACEAE (Figwort Family)

Aureolaria grandiflora (Benth.) Pennell var.

pulchra Pennell. Adjacent to old lane and

local in wooded opening along southern

rim of Mitchell Glen. (4593)

Pedicularis canadensis L. Oak opening on

natural terrace above Glen Creek. Uncom¬

mon. (4352)

Scrophularia lanceolata Pursh. Edge of woods

on eastern border of Mitchell Glen. (4578)

Verbascum thapsus L. Common weed. (4520)

Veronica serpyllifolia L. Common lawn weed.

(4276, 4490)

SOLANACEAE (Nightshade Family)

Physalis longifolia Nutt. Old field next to

field lane. Common. (4479)

Solanum dulcamara L. Field lanes, open

woods, thickets. Common. (4160)

S. nigrum L. Open disturbed soils. (4524,

4602)

TILIACEAE (Linden Family)

Tilia americana L. Throughout rich woods.

(4299)

THYMELAEACEAE (Mezereum Family)

Dirca palustris L. Locally common in woods

along southern rim of Mitchell Glen.

COUNTY RECORD. (464 9)

ULMACEAE (Elm Family)

Ulmus americana L. Occasional dry woods

along southern rim of Mitchell Glen.

(4303, 4618)

U. rubra Muhl. Occasional in rich woods.

COUNTY RECORD. (4601)

URTICACEAE (Nettle Family)

Laportea canadensis (L.) Wedd. Partially

shaded wet soils along Glen Creek.

COUNTY RECORD. (4348, 4597)

Urtica dioica L. var. procera (Muhl.) Wedd.

Disturbed damp soils. Common, (s. n.)

VERBENACEAE (Vervain Family)

Phryma leptostachya L. Throughout dry

woods. (4563)

Verbena hastata L. Damp open habitats.

Common. (4560, 4565)

lOO

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EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

VIOLACEAE (Violet Family)

Viola pubescens Aiton. Woods. (4230, 4265)

V sororia Willd. Woods. (4231, 4239,

4243, 4249)

VITACEAE (Grape Family)

Parthenocissus vitacea (Knerr) A. Hitchc.

Throughout woods. (4304, 4469)

MONOCOTYLEDONS

ARACEAE (Arum Family)

Symplocarpus foetidus (L.) Nutt. Wet soils in

low woods and openings along Glen

Creek. Common. (4258)

CYPERACEAE (Sedge Family)

Carex amphibola Steudel. Woods. Uncom¬

mon. COUNTY RECORD. (4311)

C. blanda Dewey Throughout rich woods.

Common. COUNTY RECORD. (4298,

4332, 4500)

C cephalophora Muhl. Dry open woods. (4511)

C. gracillima Schwein. Low woods. Uncom¬

mon. (4292)

C. pensylvanica Lam. Throughout woods

and openings. (4236, 4246, 4252, 4269,

4270, 4309, 4331)

C. projecta Mackenzie. Low woods. Rare.

COUNTY RECORD. (4475)

C. rosea Schk. ex Willd. Low woods. (4310,

4474)

C. sparganioides Willd. Woods, thickets.

Common. (4358)

C. sprengelii Dewey. Rich woods. Uncom¬

mon. (4290)

C. vulpinoidea Michx. Wet soils along Glen

Creek. Uncommon. (4486)

JUNCACEAE (Rush Family)

Juncus tenuis Willd. Various damp habitats.

(4466)

Luzula multiflora (Retz.) Lej. Woods, clear¬

ings. Common. (4318)

LILIACEAE (Lily Family)

Allium canadense L. Oak opening on natural

terrace above Glen Creek. Common. (4353)

A. tricoccum Aiton. Rich woods bordering

Glen Creek. (4537)

Asparagus officinalis L. Common garden es¬

cape. (4283, 4507)

Erythronium albidum Nutt. Throughout rich

woods. (4247)

Hypoxis hirsuta (L.) Cov. Oak opening on

natural terrace above Glen Creek. Com¬

mon. (4315)

Polygonatum biflorum (Walter) Elliott. Open

woods, thickets. Common. (4333, 4498)

Scilla sibirica Andr. Planted and spreading

about buildings. (4256)

Smilacina racemosa (L.) Desf. Throughout

woods, openings. (4317)

Trillium grandiflorum (Michx.) Salisb.

Throughout rich woods. (4255)

Uvularia grandiflora Sm. Rich woods along

Glen Creek. (4257)

ORCHIDACEAE (Orchid Family)

Liparis lilifolia (L.) Rich. Two sites; local in

oak openings. (4342)

Orchis spectabilis L. Rare, one site; beside a

wooded path along northern rim of

Mitchell Glen. (4181,4285)

POACEAE (Grass Family)

Agrostis gigantea Roth. Open woods. Com¬

mon. (4512, 4514, 4543)

Andropogon gerardii Vitman. Dry opening

along northeast rim above Mitchell Glen

waterfalls. (4634, 4661)

Bromus inermis Leysser. Field lanes, dis¬

turbed sites. Common. (4326, 4506)

Cinna arundinacea L. Low woods, thickets.

(4320)

Dactylis glomerata L. Common weed. (4306,

4324)

Danthonia spicata (L.) P. Beauv. Old fields,

dry woods. Common. (4470, 4566, 4654)

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

Dwitaria saneuinalis (L.) Scop. Common

weed. (4587)

Elymus canadensis L. Dry opening along

northeast rim of Mitchell Glen. (4632)

E. hystrix L. Woods, openings. Common.

(4539, 4570, 4659)

Elytrigia repens (L.) Nevski. Lawns, disturbed

habitats. Common. (4508)

Festuca subverticillata (Pers.) E. Alexeev.

Rich woods. Uncommon. (4477)

Glyceria striata (Lam.) A. Hitchc. Damp

soils along Glen Creek. Common. (4476,

4495)

Leersia virginica Willd. Damp soils along

Glen Creek. Common. (4574, 4611)

Lolium perenne L. Common weed. (4516,

4588)

Milium effusum L. Rich woods along Glen

Creek. Uncommon. (4 542)

Muhlenbergia frondosa (Poiret) Fern. Low

woods. Common. (4610)

Panicum boreale Nash. Wooded opening.

Uncommon. COUNTY RECORD.

(4353)

P. leibergii (Vasey) Scribn. Dry oak open¬

ing. Uncommon. (4340, 4341)

P. miliaceum L. ssp. ruderale (Kitigawa)

Tzvelev. Edge of cultivated field. (4551)

Phalaris arundinacea L. Various damp to wet

open habitats. Common. (4329)

Phleum pratense L. Field lanes, old fields,

clearings. (4359)

Poa compressa L. Field lanes, wooded open¬

ings. Common. (4291, 4319, 4468, 4513)

Setaria glauca (L.) P. Beauv. Common weed.

(4609)

S. viridis (L.) P. Beauv. Common weed.

(4552)

SMILACACEAE (Catbrier Family)

Smilax herbacea L. Occasional in damp

woods. (4635)

S. lasioneura Flooker. Dry woods along

northern rim of Mitchell Glen. (4360)

Acknowledgments

First, I wish to thank the Smith family for

granting me access to study the Mitchell

Glen flora. Their warm hospitality and

friendship made this study a “labor of love.”

Second, I’m beholden to Eric Ratering,

who transcribed the S.D. Mitchell and

Charles E. Brown letters and reports on local

Indian antiquities and shared them with me.

Neil A. Harriman, OSFI, was always

available for consultation, answering an end¬

less barrage of inquiries, and he made the

coffee strong. Thank you, Neil. Thanks is

extended also to Steve Ellis, Brian Neil, and

Tom Schultz, who assisted me with collect¬

ing at various times. Special thanks are ex¬

tended to Steve Ellis, Neil Harriman, and

two anonymous reviewers for proofreading

the manuscript — their suggestions greatly

enhanced the quality of the report.

Literature Cited

Brown, Charles E. 1917. The antiquities of

Green Lake. Wisconsin Archeologist 16:1-55.

Curtis, John T. 1959. The Vegetation of Wiscon¬

sin. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.

657 pp.

Dart, Richard. 1910. Settlement of Green

Lake County. Proceedings of the State His¬

torical Society of Wisconsin (57th annual

meeting), pp. 252-72.

Dorney, John R. 1981. The impact of native

Americans on presettlement vegetation in

southeastern Wisconsin. Transactions of the

Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters

69:26-36.

East Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Com¬

mission. 1977 (March). Regional Park System,

Outdoor Recreation and Open Space Plan for

East Central Wisconsin.

Eddy, Thomas L. 1996. A vascular flora of

Green Lake County, Wisconsin. Transactions

102

TRANSACTIONS

EDDY: A History and Vascular Flora of Mitchell Glen, Green Lake County, Wisconsin

of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts &

Letters 84:23-67.

Finley, Robert W. 1976. Original Vegetation

Cover of Wisconsin (map). (St. Paul: North

Central Forest Experiment Station, Forest

Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture).

General Land Office. 1 834. Land surveyors’ field

notes for T16N R12E. State of Wisconsin,

Board of Commissioner of Public Lands.

Heiple, Robert W., and Emma B. Heiple. 1978

(2nd ed.). A Heritage History of Beautiful

Green Lake Wisconsin. McMillan Printing

Company, Ripon, Wisconsin.

Hole, Francis D., and Clifford E. Germain.

1994. Natural Divisions of Wisconsin (map).

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Martin, Lawrence. 1965. The physical geography

of Wisconsin. 3rd ed. Wisconsin Geological

and Natural History Survey Bulletin 36.

Pauli, Rachel Krebs, and Richard A. Pauli. 1977.

Geology of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan (. In¬

cluding Parts of Adjacent States). Kendall/

Hunt Publishing Company, Dubuque, Iowa.

232 pp.

State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 1888.

Catalogue of the S.D. Mitchell Archaeologi¬

cal Collection from Green Lake and Mar¬

quette counties, Wisconsin (January 1st,

1888). Archives Division, Register of the

Charles E. Brown Papers, 1889-1946 (Box

26 Folder 1).

Tracy, Mrs. C.T. 1889. Catalogue of plants

growing without cultivation in Ripon and the

near vicinity. (Unpublished).

United States Department of Agriculture. 1977.

Soil Survey of Green Lake County, Wiscon¬

sin. (Soil Conservation Service).

United State Geological Survey. 1980. Green

Lake quadrangle (map), 7.5 minute series.

University of Wisconsin-Extension, Geological

and Natural History Survey. 1981. Bedrock

Geology of Wisconsin (map).

Wisconsin Department of Transportation. 1988.

Green Lake County (highway map). State

Office Building, Madison, WI.

Thomas Eddy is a past recipient of the National

Association of Biology Teacher’s OBTA ( Out¬

standing Biology Teacher Award) and the Kohl

Teaching Fellowship Award. He teaches for the

Green Lake School District and for Marian Col¬

lege, Fond du Lac. Mr. Eddy is a founding mem¬

ber of the Green Lake Conservancy Foundation,

Inc. and serves on numerous committees and or¬

ganizations involved with natural areas preser¬

vation. He is author of “A Vascular Flora of

Green Lake County, Wisconsin, ” which appeared

in the 1996 Transactions. Address: 426

Walker Avenue, Green Lake, WI 54941.

Email: tleddy@vbe. com

This paper is dedicated to a young man who loved Mitchell

Glen like no other 17-year-old could. For those of us who

shared time in the glen with him, a walk through Mitchell Glen

will never be the same. So, Augie, this Mitchell Glen flora is

fondly dedicated to you.

In Memoriam

August DeForest Zebediah Smith

June 16, 1980 - January 20, 1998

Volume 87 (1999)

103

; \

Joan Jass and Jeanette Glenn

Measuring the Degree of Variation

in Wisconsin Pyganodon grandis

(Say 1829) (Mollusca: Bivalvia:

Unionidae)

Abstract Variation in the ubiquitous and abundant freshwater bivalve

Pyganodon grandis was studied using museum specimens collected

across Wisconsin from 1973 to 1977. Data on six shell traits were

gathered for each specimen: 1) beak sculpture, 2) overall length,

3) height, 4) width, 5) anterior-to-beak length of the right valve,

and 6) darkness of the periostracum. Data from the Wisconsin

specimens were subsequently pooled into three regional groupings

representing sites from the northeast, the southwest, and an

intermediate tension zone. Comparison of three groups revealed

statistically significant differences and indicated a high degree of

intraspecific variation.

Variation in populations of the ubiquitous and abundant

freshwater bivalve genus Anodonta was analyzed in Canada

by Clarke (1973). In order to assess the taxonomic importance

of such variation, Clarke conducted a statistical analysis of shell

traits and compared the results to ecological and geographic

data from Canadian collecting sites. In the past the extreme

variability displayed by Anodonta has given rise to a number

of subspecific divisions. In Wisconsin for example, F.C. Baker

(1928) found two subspecific level taxa in addition to the stan¬

dard Anodonta grandis. Turgeon et al. (1998) have placed this

species in the genus Pyganodon.

Clarke’s analysis revealed strong correlations between site

geography and the following shell traits: 1) beak sculpture, 2)

anterior-to-beak length/length overall, 3) width/length over¬

all, and a lesser degree of correlation to 4) height/length over¬

all. He also found good to fair correlations between site ecol¬

ogy and anterior-to-beak length/length overall, as well as

darkness of the periostracum.

TRANSACTIONS Volume 87 (1999)

105

TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

In Wisconsin, this taxon is also wide¬

spread and abundant. Mathiak’s five-year

survey (1973-1977) (Mathiak 1979) ranked

it second in both number of sites from

which he collected it (N = 202) and in total

number of specimens collected (N = 1039).

The Mathiak site map for this species shows

collecting localities well distributed over the

state. The Milwaukee Public Museum

(MPM) subset of the Mathiak collection in¬

cludes Pyganodon grandis (giant floater)

specimens from two-thirds of Wisconsin’s

72 counties. We measured these specimens

to examine the degree of variation present

within the state. A high degree of within-

state variability in aquatic invertebrate traits

was reported by Parejko (1987), who found

statistically significant north/south differ¬

ences in the life history parameters of sev¬

eral Wisconsin species.

Methods

The traits in Clarke’s study that showed

some significance were those measured in

MPM specimens of P. grandis : 1) beak

sculpture, which Clarke scored 1-4 (1,2 =

not in Wisconsin, 3 = double loop, 4 =

nodulous); 2) length overall; 3) height; 4)

width; 3) anterior-to-beak length, right valve

(traits 2-3 measured to the nearest tenth of

a millimeter with a dial caliper); 6) darkness

of the periostracum, arbitrarily scored as

light = 1, medium = 2, dark = 3. Four of

these traits (2-5) represent morphometric

variables, while traits 1 and 6 represent con¬

tinuous, nonnumeric traits that have been

assigned to numeric classes for purposes of

analysis.

For possible correlations with geography,

shells collected by Harold Mathiak (1979)

in a statewide survey of Wisconsin water¬

ways were chosen for this study (N = 139).

Data from these specimens, part of a repre¬

sentative subset of his collection selected for

donation to MPM by Mathiak, were ex¬

pected to give a good indication of the de¬

gree of geographic variation to be found

within the state, since his study included lo¬

calities from across Wisconsin. Collecting

sites were subsequently pooled into three

ecological regions, following Curtis’s divi¬

sion of Wisconsin into a northeastern prov¬

ince of northern hardwoods, an intermedi¬

ate tension zone, and a southwestern

province of prairie-forest (Curtis 1971). He

divided the state into these three regions by

mapping the ranges for 182 species that

reached their northern or southern limits in

Wisconsin. North of the area where these

range lines cross the state is the northeast¬

ern province, south of it is the southwest¬

ern province, and the summed region cov¬

ered by the 182 range lines is the tension

zone, where geology, climate, and environ¬

mental factors have combined to exert a de¬

fining selective pressure on those species.

Our pooling of Mathiak’s collecting sites

included creeks and rivers from both Great

Lakes and Mississippi River drainage basins

in the northeastern as well as in the south¬

western region. A £-test was used to compare

northeastern and southwestern shells, using

the means of the six measured traits (SAS

1987), with a Rvalue of 0.05 or less as the

level chosen to indicate statistical sig¬

nificance.

Results

Table 1 shows the results of t- tests on six

measured shell traits as well as the results

from tests on three ratios derived from the

original measurements. All tests showed a

statistically significant difference between

northeastern and southwestern groups of

shells. The P values for these tests ranged

from a very highly significant level of less

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JASS and GLENN: Measuring the Degree of Variation in Pyganodon grandis

Table 1. North/south comparison of shell traits in Wisconsin.

than 0.00001 to 0.0431, all falling below the

0.05 level chosen for statistical significance.

Northern shells had darker color, beak sculp¬

ture less consistently double-looped, and

widths, heights, lengths, and anterior-to-

beak measurements that were smaller than

those in the southern group.

Tension zone shells (N = 17) had means

that were generally intermediate between

north and south values: beak = 3.21, width

= 33.8 mm, height = 52.4 mm, length =

91.0 mm, anterior-to-beak = 27.7 mm,

darkness = 2.35, anterior-to-beak/overall

length = 0.30, width/overall length = 0.37,

heigh t/overall length = 0.58.

Discussion

C.T. Simpson (1896) produced one of the

early summaries dealing with classification

in the group he called the “pearly freshwa¬

ter mussels.” Among the features he consid¬

ered key characteristics for this group were

the beak with its sculptural details and “re¬

mains of the nuclear shell.” Simpson fol¬

lowed the biological rule of reliance on the

characteristics of embryonic stages to deter¬

mine the relationships within a group un¬

der study.

However, a disadvantage to relying

heavily on such traits as beak sculpture is

that they may be shown only in very young

or well-preserved shells. Though beak details

can be definitive for such specimens, by the

time they have reached adulthood, many

shells have beaks significantly damaged by

mechanical erosion and/or dissolution from

acidic waters. In certain areas, virtually ev¬

ery shell collected may show such damage.

Clarke and Berg (1959) created a key to

northeastern North American species of

Unionacea that would allow most identifi¬

cations to be made without the use of beak

sculpture characters, because they were so

often obliterated in adult specimens. Nearly

20% (N = 27) of the specimens in our Wis¬

consin dataset had the beak too damaged for

scoring.

As other studies had done, Clarke and

Berg (1959) compared typical members of

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TRANSACTIONS of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters

this species to its described subspecies on the

bases of shell measurements and ratios de¬

rived from them. As mentioned previously,

Baker (1928) found two subspecies in the

state in addition to the typical A. grandis, A.

g. plana and A. g. footiana. He additionally

listed as other species entities that today are

considered part of the P. grandis complex:

A. gigantea, A. kennicottii, A. marginata and

A. corpulenta. While our study did not fo¬

cus on possible taxonomic implications of

morphometric variation, data from Wiscon¬

sin specimens illustrate the high degree of

variability of shell traits within this taxon,

whether the material studied is considered

to be representative of several species as it

was by malacologists of the past such as

Baker or as an entity that includes several of

those formerly accepted species in synonymy

as more recent researchers have done. Table

2 gives a comparison of these variables from

Wisconsin specimens.

The most basic geographical correlation

with measured shell traits that Clarke (1973)

found in his analysis of Canadian specimens

was the smaller size of northern populations

due to a shorter growing season. Our results

show that this contrast can also be seen in

the analysis of specimens collected over a

much smaller area, in a statewide rather than

a countrywide survey. However, an alternate

pooling of data from the Wisconsin collect¬

ing sites on the basis of their township val¬

ues, which are calculated simply on distance

north of the Illinois state line, yielded a cor¬

relation less strong than the results we

present in Table 1, which were based on the

ecological regions of Curtis (1971). There¬

fore the regions of Curtis, which were origi¬

nally derived from plant species ranges, gave

the better key to analysis of zoogeographic

variability in the state, presenting a more so¬

phisticated picture of the climatic and other

similar phenological stresses on Wisconsin

species than straightforward north/south dif¬

ferences.

Cummings and Mayer (1992) confirm

that P. grandis is widespread and common

throughout the entire Midwest. Habitats

they list as typical range from ponds to

creeks and rivers. This ability to survive in

widely differing habitats is no doubt key to

the widespread distribution of this species.

In fact, had P. grandis been like many other

relatively thin-shelled species that are more

restricted to pool habitats, it would not have

ranked where it did in Mathiak’ s tabulated

results (Mathiak 1979). Mathiak generated

lists ranking all of the species he collected:

one list was based on the number of collect¬

ing sites where each species was found (fre¬

quency), and another was based on the num¬

ber of specimens collected of each species

(abundance) . Pyganodon grandis ranked sec-

Table 2. Range of measurements, Pyganodon grandis complex.

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JASS and GLENN: Measuring the Degree of Variation in Pyganodon grandis

ond to only one other of the 45 species in

both of these lists. The totals for the top-

ranked species were 236 sites and 1161

specimens; the third-ranked species’ num¬

bers fell to 169 and 721. Further evidence

of the wide tolerance of P. grandis is the

record this species holds for survival at a wa¬

ter depth of very low oxygen and tempera¬

ture (living at a depth of 102 ft in Lake

Michigan, Reigle 1967).

Cummings and Mayer (1992) also point

out the extreme variability in this taxon; for

example, they note that the umbos are lo¬

cated more toward the center than the an¬

terior in the large-river form of the species

they call P. grandis var. corpulenta (= Baker’s

Anodonta corpulenta , Table 2). Buchanan

(1980) still listed A. grandis corpulenta as a

subspecies, as did Burch (1975). These re¬

searchers differentiated the subspecies by its

length/height ratio of less than 1 .6 and an¬

terior/length ratio almost up to 0.5.

Any wide-ranging species, such as P.

grandis , is usually assumed to be made up

of a series of subpopulations, each with its

own morphological as well as physiological

characteristics. These characteristics include

seasonal growth patterns and reproductive

phenology. For example, Surber (1914) re¬

ported finding gravid A. corpulenta in the

spring (April) and fall (October, November)

but gravid A. grandis in the fall only (Sep¬

tember, October). A species complex such

as that represented by P. grandis may thus

be expected to contain considerable diver¬

sity in life history traits as well as morpho¬

logical traits.

In spite of a degree of diversity so high

that some prior researchers have divided the

taxon into subspecies, we have considered

all specimens in our study as simply P.

grandis. Our focus was zoogeographic rather

than taxonomic, to use shell traits to ana¬

lyze the degree of variation within speci¬

mens collected during one five-year survey

of Wisconsin’s waterways. Statistical analy¬

sis of P. grandis shell traits showed signifi¬

cant differences correlating with the ecologi¬

cal regions delimited for Wisconsin by

Curtis (1971). This met our two goals of

highlighting the great deal of variation

within this taxon and also, more specifically,

of showing that this variability follows a

zoogeographic pattern in which significant

differences occur between populations in

northern and southern ecological regions of

Wisconsin.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the donation

from Flarold A. Mathiak of Pyganodon

grandis specimens collected during his state¬

wide survey to the Milwaukee Public Mu¬

seum collection and the comments of

Marian E. Havlik, La Crosse, Wisconsin,

and Dr. David H. Stansbery, Curator of

Mollusca, The Ohio State University Mu¬

seum of Biological Diversity, Columbus,

Ohio, on earlier versions of this paper. Ini¬

tially a poster presentation at the 1998 an¬

nual conference of the Wisconsin Academy

of Sciences, Arts & Letters, our manuscript

subsequently received significant beneficial

input from Transactions reviewers.

Literature Cited

Baker, F.C. 1928. The freshwater Mollusca of

Wisconsin. Part II. Pelecypoda. Bulletin 70.

Wisconsin Geological and Natural History