Bryn Scriver
Emeritus professor John Magnuson mentors a high school student during a volunteer event.
There once was a very tech-oriented student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. East Coast media had reported his award-winning innovations, and he’d laid the groundwork for a start-up.
Then something funny happened on Bascom Hill. “I knew nothing about botany,” he recalled, but an upperclassman gave him an impromptu though profound lesson, using a nearby tree.
Jeff Miller/UW Madison
A pair of owlets flank an adult great horned owl in the Lakeshore Nature Preserve.
It was an epiphany that sent him “flying to the woods and meadows in wild enthusiasm.” It changed the course of his life, as well as the nation’s attitude toward the environment. In the early 1860s young John Muir set aside clock-making and embarked on the career that made him America’s greatest naturalist and father of the national parks system.
Thus is the power of the UW’s Lakeshore Nature Preserve, the university’s largest classroom.
Just a quick bike or bus ride from downtown is “a treasure that the campus community and larger Madison community value for its scenic and native landscape, teaching and research opportunities, and recreational and relaxation pursuits,” says David Drake, UW-Extension wildlife specialist and a professor in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology.
The preserve holds more than 300 of the campus’ 930 acres. It includes four miles of Lake Mendota shoreline, forests, prairies, wetlands and oak savanna. Drake and his fellow faculty use the preserve for classes. “It offers a very convenient and easy-to-access place to teach students about natural resource management,” he says.
Around 75 permits for research projects are issued each year, and, besides other classes, the preserve hosts a four-semester honors program in biological science. Others use it, too.
Bryn Scriver
A bumble bee visits a western sunflower in Willow Creek Woods.
“Beavers, otter, raccoon, skunk, possum, deer, coyotes, red fox, mink, muskrat and groundhogs all use the Lakeshore Nature Preserve,” Drake says. “There are also plenty of reptiles and amphibians out there, and Picnic Point is a birding hotspot, especially during migration. A few years back a birder observed 83 species — nearly 25% of all birds found in Wisconsin — in just two hours during spring migration.”
“All of this is open and available to the public,” notes Gary Brown, director of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve.
It wasn’t called that when Muir began bringing plant specimens to his dorm, where he kept them in a bucket in his room. In fact, it wasn’t called anything until fairly recently. Even the concept of a preserve was slow to crystallize.
“There was really nothing that protected it,” says Brown. “It was sort of the back 40, and that was the way most people treated it.”
Then came a new campus master plan in 2005, an assessment of resources and their potential for development in years to come. Natural areas were included for the first time. A new emphasis was placed on bringing academics outdoors, and natural areas were collected and rechristened as the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, with the emphasis on “preserve.”
“There’ve been several attempts at development, even back in the early 2000s,” says Brown. He recalls one serious discussion. “‘Let’s just build a new chancellor’s residence out on Picnic Point!’ And I’m like, ‘Are you kidding?’”
Only three full-time staff manage the preserve. Thousands of hours of volunteer work are necessary each year. Help comes from students, community members and groups such as the Friends of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve. As for the future, “One of the big things that we’re looking forward to is creating an outreach center of some sort,” says Laura Wyatt, preserve program manager. There’s nowhere for volunteers and students to meet, nothing to host school visits, nowhere even for equipment to be stored.
“I feel the Lakeshore Nature Preserve is part of the fabric of what we are,” Wyatt adds. “It represents that environmental ethic that we have.”
Much of that ethic is of course due to Muir. He came back to visit about 20 years after leaving school. He looked around and lingered, he wrote, profoundly moved by memory and setting, and when he departed he was crying.
An ongoing calendar of events is at lakeshorepreserve.wisc.edu/events-calendar.
