Posts filed under ‘Environmental History’
All eyes on the eagles: Eagle Days 2012
Cashel Nelson, 8, looks through a scope at the eagle overlook in Prairie du Sac during Bald Eagle Watching Days 2010 while his friend from Madison's Goodman Community Center Qarly Haywood, 8, awaits her turn.By Jeremiah Tucker, Sauk Prairie Eagle.
Randy Jurewicz, a retired biologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, helped organize the first official Eagle Watching Days in Sauk Prairie 25 years ago. The event, he said, grew out of a national census of eagles organized by the National Wildlife Federation.
“We tried to get volunteers to go out all over the state and look for bald eagles,” Jurewicz said. “Now, it’s pretty easy to get people to look for eagles where they’re pretty certain to see them and enjoy them.”
It was more difficult, he said, to persuade volunteers to traipse into regions where there were almost no eagles and confirm their absence for the official count.
“So we said, ‘You do this, and we’ll tell you what, the second Saturday of January in Sauk City, we’ll all get to see eagles together,’” Jurewicz said. “We were trying to entice these volunteers to go to these areas and report a few eagles, if any, and guarantee that by coming to Sauk City we’d show them some eagles and have hot chocolate and free spotting scopes.”
At the time, it was a well-kept secret that every winter when some Sauk Prairie residents decamped for warmer locales, other snowbirds arrived seeking the open water around the dam, the bluffs surrounding the Wisconsin River and the easy food available on the wide-open farming fields.
“The birding community knew about it,” Jurewicz said. “Bird watchers would know about it and they would share it, but the general public didn’t know about it, the public in Southeastern Wisconsin didn’t know about it and certainly not the people in Rockford and Chicago and other places where people are now coming to view it.”
For a few years, Jurewicz and some of his co-workers in the DNR continued to hold a small, informal eagle-watching event in Sauk Prairie. Once the Sauk Prairie Area Chamber of Commerce and the local conservation group Ferry Bluff Eagle Council signed on as co-sponsors, it became the community event Bald Eagle Watching Days.
This weekend is the 25th anniversary of the first Bald Eagle Watching Days. To mark the occasion Kay Roherty, the event’s chairwoman, said they’ll release a rehabilitated eagle into the wild in VFW Park, necessitating the closing of the boat ramp to accommodate the expected traffic.
“It’s been a few year since we’ve had a release,” Roherty said. “We brought that back for the 25th anniversary.”
Roherty, who has been chairwoman of the event for the last 10 years, said Bald Eagle Watching Days generally brings about 1,500 people into Sauk Prairie. She said over the last 25 years visitors from all over the United States have attended.
“I remember once there was someone from Turkey, but I think he was visiting people in this country,” she said.
While the event has grown from its modest beginnings to include live birds of prey shows, wildlife photography seminars, guided bus tours and multiple exhibits, the primary draw remains seeing bald eagles soaring in their natural habitat.
The eagle numbers remain firm this year. During a recent aerial survey, the DNR counted 186 eagles between Petenwell Lake and the Mississippi and said one of the hot spots was Prairie du Sac. That number is close to the 20-year average.
Jeb Barzen, director of field ecology for the International Crane Foundation, organizes a twice-monthly roost count of eagles in the greater Sauk Prairie area for the Ferry Bluff Eagle Council. Three weeks ago, he said, the count was 162 eagles.
The most recent count showed 45 eagles in the area.
Barzen said the unusually warm weather means that the birds aren’t concentrated around the river as they have been in the past when the freezing weather pushed them to the open water.
“This warm weather simply means that even if we have a lot of birds in the area, the birds are likely going to be spread out from the Prairie du Sac Dam to Lone Rock,” Barzen said. “That’s a pretty big area, even to take 160 birds and spread them out in.”
He warned that the eagle viewing might be sparser than it has during past eagle watching days.
Even so, Jurewicz, who still assists in planning Bald Eagle Watching Days, said visitors will be assured to see eagles whether it’s in the wild or the eagle release on the bank of the Wisconsin River and the live birds of prey show at the River Arts Center.
“Where else can you go some place with your family and get an entire’s day of entertainment and, outside of gas and food, everything else once they get there is free?” Jurewicz said. “There are bus tours; people don’t even have to drive around town.”
Reprint of an article posted in the Sauk Prairie Eagle Wednesday, January 11, 2012 3:17 pm
Get Kids Outside Note: 2012 will be our 4th year attending this event. Our first year, we took 8 kids. This year we’re taking 60 kids and parents!
The Big Burn: Our Outdoor Heritage & Connection to Louv & Creativity
I just finished reading The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt & the Fire that Saved America, by Timothy Egan.
It’s the first historical book I couldn’t put down.
It’s the riveting story of how Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot invented the radical notion of conservation and masterminded a new agency: the National Forest Service. It’s also the dramatic story of the first Forest Service employees and the massive fire they fought in August 1910. The Big Burn – 3 millions acres of scorched earth – secured the future of the Forest Service and the legacy of Roosevelt, Pinchot and the brave fire fighters who took on an impossible task.
Roosevelt and Muir at Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park
If ever there was an outdoor President, it was Teddy Roosevelt. He thrived in the outdoors and it was his persona that inspired the movement to save vast tracks of land from clear-cutting. In addition to Pinchot, Roosevelt was friends John Muir. Muir’s prophetic voice was very influential to this story and fueled Roosevelt’s bold conservation initiatives which included designating the first National Monuments and congressional designation of Yosemite National Park.
After reading this book, I’m clear that America’s psyche was founded on wide open spaces. As a people, we constantly pushed toward open land until there was no more open land and resources left. All forested land would have been logged if Roosevelt hadn’t stepped in and made conservation a household word. Roosevelt, Muir and Pinchot loved the west and talk eloquently about the healing powers of nature, hiking, and the need to preserve places for desperate city dwellers. This remains even more true today. Cities are larger. Technology keeps us tied to computers and machines. Lives are moving faster than ever before and open spaces continue to shrink. In 1908, most people still lived on farms. Today, just a handful remain closely connected to the land. Kids have become increasingly removed from the very source of rejuvenation.
Richard Louv would likely take this one step further and say that without nature we are removed from a powerful source of creativity.
While Louv cites no study that proves this, it could be said that wilderness, or more broadly, outdoor adventure and exploration, fueled the invention and creativity that built this country. This does makes sense. Out of all the things that we have in America that no one else in the world has, it’s our wide open spaces and unsurpassed natural beauty and resources. We have Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Glacier National Park, the Boundary Waters and many, many, more places. To be sure, there are beautiful places everywhere, but ours are so accessable. Furthermore, our outdoor legacy is our history. Good or bad, our history is full of adventure and outdoor exploration. Today, we have a parks system that makes visiting these places relatively easy and interpretive programs that make our visits meaningful. It makes sense that Roosevelt and Pinchot hatched the idea of conservation just as the frontier had closed. Could it be that in addition to saving something for future generations, Roosevelt didn’t want to lose what made us American? If we chopped down all the trees, perhaps we wouldn’t recognize ourselves or who know who we are. Would we still know how to think big thoughts or dream big dreams?
Louv writes in his book about how a young Benjamin Franklin and his friends created a water diversion system in their spare time, claiming that the land fueled his genius for invention.
It certainly can’t hurt. Where else, but in the outdoors, do all the senses become piqued. Who isn’t moved by the Grand Canyon and come away a slightly different person? I know I was. My visit makes me all the more hungry to return because I never know what magic will happen. There is a timelessness in huge places. A feeling of being small and of knowing your place against such a massive backdrop. I take heart in that knowledge because it keeps me humble knowing that I can’t change most of anything in the world. I am but a visitor.
I hope to give kids that feeling by getting them outside. We may not get to the Grand Canyon, but I can assure you that the landscape is no less healing and no less a place to hatch big ideas then it was in Roosevelt’s time. It’s certainly a place to start.
