It was cold and blustery when I arrived at the marsh that day, but the first thing I saw was a huge flock of cranes idling on the edge of open water. I managed to squeeze off a few shots as they took flight. Within minutes they were all gone.
I had been invited to attend a meeting at the Horicon Marsh Education and Visitors Center, which is in the State Wildlife Area in the southern third of this vast marsh. Not to be confused with the National Wildlife Refuge, which makes up the northern two thirds. Did you know Horicon is the largest freshwater marsh in the country?
Speaking of largest, I've heard that we grow the largest muskrats in the country right here in the marsh, too. And in great abundance. I can't say whether this guy is fully grown or not. He/she slipped underwater shortly after I made the shot.
The mammoth is a kind of mascot for the Wildlife Area. Horicon Marsh was home to them before they went extinct 10,000 or so years ago. The cause may have been hunting or--get ready for it--climate change.
I was there for a meeting of a group called the Niagara Escarpment Resource Network (NERN). The Niagara Escarpment is a geologic feature that runs over 1,000 miles from Southeast Wisconsin through Ontario to New York. The Niagara Falls fall over it. This is a visible outcropping of the escarpment just east of Horicon Marsh on property recently acquired by the Milwaukee Audubon Society. During the Ice Age, two lobes of the continent-wide glacier split along the escarpment. On one side it scooped out Green Bay, Lake Winnebago and Horicon Marsh. On the other it scooped out Lake Michigan.
My NERN guides also took me to see this long-abandoned iron mine in a section of the escarpment nearby. It is owned by the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee, which enables the DNR bat program to study the tens of thousands (give or take) of bats that hibernate inside over the winter.
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