Monarchs return in force to the Monarch Trail

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I stand chest deep in flaming goldenrod and brilliant white boneset—riveted by the sight of a dozen or so monarch butterflies on a single clump of boneset. When a breeze tosses the flowers the butterflies all rise, swirl around my head. But even more marvelous, as the breeze plays over the field of wildflowers, dozens—maybe hundreds—more monarchs suddenly appear, dipping, twirling and swerving all about.

Then, just beyond this amazing and beautiful dance of delicate wildlife, a stream of rush hour traffic rumbles down Swan Boulevard.

I continue my walk along the Monarch Trail, which circles around the recently completed Echelon Apartment complex at the north end of Innovation Park on the Milwaukee County Grounds in Wauwatosa. On the west side the trail runs along the top of a long, narrow berm crowned by dying poplars. Here, next to Interstate 41, the growl of traffic is incessant. But butterflies all over the hillside are oblivious to that.

It is monarch migration season. These fluttering, fragile and remarkably resilient insects are pausing here on their incredible journey from summer habitats in Canada to their winter retreat on a mountain in central Mexico. The Monarch Trail and a friends group to maintain it were established in 2005 when it was feared that construction of Innovation Park might destroy the rare and sensitive monarch roosting sites.

That fear appeared to be justified. As expected, construction during the past several years created enough disturbance that the numbers of monarchs stopping here during the annual migration dropped precipitously. Despite this, the trail was diligently maintained and the disturbed habitat reseeded with hundreds of native, wildlife-friendly plants. The biggest concern remained: Would the dislodged monarchs ever return?

Seeing the numbers rebound is what makes this year’s migration so exciting!

The migration occurs over several days and is not completely predictable. I missed a big night on Thursday. Barb, the director of the Friends, counted around 400 roosting that day alone. While not quite as many as were seen prior to 2005, when as many as a thousand could be counted on a single night on a single sycamore, she says there haven’t been this many since 2010. The full moon rising as they settled in for the night was a bonus.

I canceled my Friday evening plans so as not to miss them all. I delight in watching them forage on the flowers and fly about, frustrated only by the impossibility of conveying the magic of it all in a single still photo. (I did try to capture a sense of what I was seeing in a short video, which you can see on YouTube.)

The “urban wilderness” to which I so frequently refer has always been a metaphor. In my urban explorations am drawn most often to places where the urban is at least somewhat backgrounded by nature, where my imagination can restore the sense of a wilderness if not the substance. It is a worthwhile endeavor, I think, to love nature in this way, in a city. But here on the Monarch Trail a stark truth is revealed. Wildlife doesn’t need to imagine a wilderness. It just needs the right conditions on the ground.

Here, sandwiched between three-story apartment blocks and a busy freeway, is nature sufficient to nourish these monarchs. Today’s enchanting dance of the butterflies was far from inevitable, though. It took substantial commitments of time and resources to save this place. Developers were convinced to sacrifice a portion of their territory, scientists engineered a restoration plan and volunteers put in thousands of hours. A few of them have come to witness the fruit of their labor.

The work remains unfinished. The habitat, revitalized as it has been, remains vulnerable. The many partners who have helped make this day possible must continue their vigilance and commitment. And, sadly, new threats continue to dog unprotected vestiges of the County Grounds that if lost will adversely affect not only the monarchs, but many other species that might find this place wild enough to flourish.

The celebrities of this story are the monarchs, of course. But this story isn’t about butterflies as much as it is about us.

In fact, whether we accept it or not, the fate of butterflies is inextricably tied to our own. It is about the kind of world we want to live in, the kind of experiences we want our children and grandchildren to have.

A few lines from a poem by Rumi comes to mind:

What will our children do in the morning
if they do not see us
fly?*

The Monarch Trail has proven that there are many people who want butterflies to be part of their world. Three weeks ago hundreds of people from all over the Milwaukee area attended an annual celebration hosted by the Friends of the Trail to mark the beginning of the migration season (see previous post.)

As dusk draws the flowers into shade, one by one the butterflies begin to gather. They flutter toward the trees and cluster together, clinging to leaves and bare branches. A small crowd of people stand below, craning their necks to watch. Now and then the butterflies startle, quivering their wings in unison, open and shut, open and shut. After a while they are still. Then they vanish in deepening darkness.

A cloudbank obscures the moonrise. But the sunset made up for it.

I return before dawn on Saturday. A few clusters of monarchs remain where I’d seen them the night before. But many already are letting go, floating away on the breeze, like autumn leaves. The moon is still full. As I watch it set beyond the trees I breathe an inaudible bon voyage to the monarchs setting off for Mexico.

*To read the entire poem by Rumi, which is lovely, click here.

To see more photos of the County Grounds go to my Flickr album.

Monarch migration celebration on Milwaukee County Grounds

Monarch waiting to be released to the wild (click to enlarge)

The Friends of the Monarch Trail held their annual celebration to mark the start of the monarch butterfly migration season on Sunday, August 28. The Monarch Trail is located at the north end of Innovation Park. It circles around the perimeter of the now-complete Echelon Apartment complex. A large crowd of monarch admirers gathered to bid safe travels to the butterflies as they begin their annual 2,500 mile journey to Mexico.

The tour begins

Festivities included food, face painting, live music by Ceol Cairde “Music of Friends”, and butterfly life-cycle displays. The main event was a tour guided of the trail by Friends director Barb Agnew. She explained the significance of the County Grounds as a roosting site and stopover for monarchs and described restoration efforts undertaken by the Friends.

 

Mke Regional Medical Center backdrop to Monarch Trail

Restoration includes many new seedlings

Trail includes interpretive signage

Director Agnew leading tour

Milwaukee skyline visible from the trail

The oak grove

Echelon Apartments backdrop the trail

Monarch caterpillars on milkweed

New plantings along the west berm section of the trail

Stiff goldenrod in full bloom

Monarch chrysalis display

To see more photos of the County Grounds go to my Flickr album.
 
For more information about the Friends of the Monarch Trail visit www.theMonarchTrail.org

Moonrise illuminates the Milwaukee County Grounds

It's easy enough to look up the phases of the moon online and plan ahead to be in a place to catch it full and rising. But I'm not that organized. I was on my way home from somewhere this week when I turned onto Discovery Parkway in the County Grounds and saw it. As further good luck would have it (and I swear that's all it was) I had my camera in the car.

The question was where to stop, what to have in the foreground. While most anything would do if all I wanted was to capture the moon itself, I thought it would be symbolic to identify the location. Hence the watertower. The best place to be to get the watertower to line up with the moon was on the construction site where a new hotel is being built for Innovation Park. Hence the crane.

If I moved a dozen yards or so south I got this view of the moon through the Medical Center power plant stacks. If you know that I live within walking distance of the County Grounds it will come as no surprise when I say that I walk there often. These are not the usual kinds of images I try to use to represent what I consider a jewel in the Milwaukee County urban wilderness. But there you have it.

You can see more typical representations of the County Gounds on my Flickr album.

Flying Squirrels in the Milwaukee County Grounds

  A rare, up-close look at an elusive urban critter.

An edited version of this story was first posted at Milwaukee Magazine on February 9, 2016.

A small, gray face peered inquisitively out of the nest at me with eyes large enough to qualify for an animated feature film. Cute. But I was in no position to appreciate it. I was a dozen or more feet in the air, on a ladder. My fancy DSLR camera hung uselessly from my neck. I couldn’t lean back far enough to focus on the little creature. As I fumbled in my coat pocket for my iPhone another of the furry occupants suddenly appeared, this one poised to flee through the nest’s circular opening.

That’s when things got really interesting!

Wil-O-Way Woods, where this was happening, is a 45-acre remnant hardwood forest in Wauwatosa. It is surrounded by what is commonly known as the Milwaukee County Grounds and managed by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. The DNR is partnering with a private non-profit organization to create what will be called a Forest Exploration Center. These unusual little flying squirrels are just one of the reasons this rare urban forest is worth exploring.

We had parked our cars in the Wil-O-Way Underwood parking lot. Through the leafless trees it was easy to spot the closest nest box. We entered the woods on a well-packed trail then quickly forged a new path through the snow to reach the tree with the box. Our squadron of five was comprised mostly of wildlife enthusiasts. Gary Casper, the biologist in charge of monitoring the squirrels, led our group.

Casper scampered up the ladder and opened the front of the box. He announced what he found inside: a few acorn fragments and debris that indicated the box had been used. No nest had been built in it and it was otherwise vacant. One of the volunteers dutifully recorded Casper’s findings and we moved on through the forest.

We crossed a ski trail and fresh snowshoe tracks. In many places holes had been scrabbled in the snow by animals looking for sustenance or nesting materials. Scat the size and color of roasted coffee beans confirmed the unsurprising presence of deer. Even small urban forests like this one have a variety of users, human and non-human. Managing such a forest can involve juggling diverse interests and constituencies. With its many interconnected segments administered by different agencies, the County Grounds presents particularly complex management issues.

For example, when I asked who it was that hired him, Casper replied, “It’s complicated.” Casper himself works for the UWM Field Station. The flying squirrel project, which includes surveying and monitoring a variety of other species as well, is part of a wildlife assessment for the Milwaukee Estuary Area of Concern. It is administered through the Great Lakes Office of the DNR—which, in a quirk of bureaucratic irony, is separate from the DNR office that oversees Wil-O-Way—and funded by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Area along Swan Blvd. that recently was cleared; brush piles will also be removed.

We trudged between trunks of oak, hickory, maple and ash, some too large to reach around. Flying squirrels require a mature forest to survive, which speaks well of the quality of this isolated urban woodland. But many of the other species that grace Wil-O-Way Woods travel freely between the various parcels making up the County Grounds. Unfortunately, according to Casper, this parcel is small enough to suffer from “edge effect,” meaning predators will penetrate the woods from adjacent areas.

Wil-O-Way Woods is contiguous with the MMSD’s 90-acre flood control basins. Swan Boulevard is all that separates the DNR parcel from the 55-acre County Grounds Park, administered by Milwaukee County Parks Dept., and 69-acre Innovation Park, the new multi-use property being developed by the UWM Real Estate Foundation.

--> Area along Swan Blvd. that recently was cleared; native trees are to be planted.

While Innovation Park eventually will be mostly built out, it also includes 11 acres of protected wildlife habitat popularized as the Monarch Trail. Innovation Park’s accelerator building was where I had met Gary Casper that very morning. We were there for a meeting prompted by a forestry management decision to clear a broad swath of brush and timber along Swan Boulevard. The discussion veered from clear-cutting to integrated management of the County Grounds puzzle.

Up the ladder again, Casper tells us that there are telltale signs of rodent activity on top of the second box. Again there is no nest, only scraps of food and bits of scat on the inside. Our recorder jots notes and we proceed onward.

At the third box we hit pay dirt. Disturbing the nest as little as possible, Casper counted five squirrels curled up in a furry ball. Chewed leaf litter and shredded wood made up the bulk of the nesting materials but something that looked like blue yarn was threaded throughout the mix.

Buoyed by our discovery, we wove through the trees, moving from box to box and repeating the procedure. Though nearly all bore signs of activity, most were vacant. Casper explained that the squirrels typically congregate in winter to benefit from their combined body heat. Come spring they usually spread out and raise their young in separate nests.

In addition to flying squirrels, the UWM study includes bats, dragonflies, various birds, and the animal Casper told me excites him most: a rare species of terrestrial crayfish that depends on scarce ephemeral wetlands. The purpose of the three-year study is to survey and monitor the target species; rank each one’s status as impaired or stable populations; and to recommend restoration projects that would improve habitats where they would be most effective.

Tree clearing took place on DNR propoerty, across Swan Blvd. from Innovation Park
where the Echelon Apartments are under construction.

An integrated, collaborative management plan on the County Grounds could greatly enhance efforts by all parties to ameliorate existing impairments and restore healthy habitats. Neil O’Reilly, an instructor in UWM’s Conservation and Environmental Studies Program, provided a cogent example: a forester concerned with sustainable timber management might choose to keep or cull a very different selection of trees than a wildlife specialist would. Birds, bats, flying squirrels and many other animals often inhabit very particular niches in the fabric of the forest. That these naturally wary animals are easily missed by the untrained eye is made abundantly clear by our foray through the woods.

At box number nine (out of ten) we were again rewarded with an inhabited nest. This time things became far more exciting when the squirrels, which are nocturnal, were startled awake and began to move about. It may have been my fault. Casper had agreed to let me climb the ladder and try to get photographs. I was fumbling with my iPhone, trying to get it to focus on the squirrel heading for the exit hole.

I have to admit I should have anticipated what it did next. They’re called flying squirrels for a reason, after all! But I’d never seen one before. I wasn’t ready when, instead of scurrying up the tree trunk like any other squirrel, it leaped straight out. Spreading wide its fore and hind legs, the membrane of skin connecting them stretched taut and it floated about ten feet to a nearby tree trunk. Those watching on the ground gasped with exclamations of delight.

Trying not to lose my balance on the ladder, I managed to catch a glimpse of about half the enchanting flight. I didn’t even feel the tiny claws poking through the denim of my jeans until someone called out, “There’s one on your leg!” In the commotion surrounding the first squirrel’s flight a second one had slipped out the front of the open nest box and onto my clothes. I quickly closed the box.

I felt little prickles descending my leg. Then it was gone; I didn’t see where. “They’re very tame,” Casper said with a grin as I stepped off the ladder.

The wildlife assessment is in its third and final year. Casper told me that while this species is fairly common statewide, the Wil-O-Way flying squirrels would be classified as an isolated population. This kind of mature upland hardwood forest is very uncommon in an urban setting. He concludes that preserving the Wil-O-Way habitat “may be a locally significant conservation priority.”

One of the squirrels primary predators

I have tramped through Wil-O-Way Woods countless times and over the years I’ve been lucky enough to spot many kinds of wildlife. Deer, of course, but also coyotes, ground hogs, skunks, snakes, hawks, owls and innumerable smaller birds. Squirrels too—they’re so ever-present I scarcely notice them. But I will be eternally grateful to Gary Casper for this marvelous gift: enabling me to see flying squirrels. Due to their nocturnal behavior I’d never have known they were here.

Now I won’t be able to walk through these woods again without remembering the phantom prickling of my skin and feeling the unseen presence of flying squirrels.

A healthy forest would be thinned of invasive species; 

but deadfall would be left to provide wildlife habitat.

To see more of my photos from the Milwaukee County Grounds, go to my Flickr album.