Cyndy Patrick
I am wearing so many layers I can hardly move.
Sitting in the 17-person Voyageur canoe is uncomfortable, not so much due to the hard seat but to all those layers, every piece of clothing that I packed for my week at Wisconsin Master Naturalist training. This means long underwear, a flannel shirt, a puffy, a standard winter ski jacket, a down vest — and, for this canoe trip, a life jacket. There is no possibility of unearthing my camera from whatever interior pocket it might be in. Even so, the only part of me that’s warm on this November day is my hands, thanks to my supermittens.
In the prow of the canoe, retired DNR hydrogeologist Sharon Schaver points out something called cross-bedding in the layers of Cambrian sandstone we pass as we paddle the Wisconsin River, just north of the Dells. This is sandstone you have doubtless seen if you have ever taken an Upper Dells boat tour (and if you live in Wisconsin long enough, you will inevitably end up taking an Upper Dells boat tour).
Cross-bedding, I now know, was caused by the blowing of sand dunes, back when this rock was sand, 510 to 520 million years ago. The layers are clearly visible. Some are horizontal, but some skew in wild diagonals, others almost vertical. No matter how many times I’ve seen the rock formations of the Dells of the Wisconsin River, it never before occurred to me to think about them as rocks instead of scenery.
Or to consider that this is a completely different kind of rock than what I’d seen earlier in the summer in Door County, where the Niagara Escarpment pokes out. That whitish rock, called Silurian Dolomite, stretches from Niagara Falls through Ontario and then down the spine of the Door peninsula. Knowing this solves another mystery: Why Door County Brewing Co. named one of its beers “Silurian Stout.”
No more for me the catchall phrase “rock outcropping.” I am in training to become a Wisconsin Master Naturalist.
Wisconsin’s program takes a bunch of willing volunteers and gives them a crash course in the state’s natural history. The hope is that they then disperse, like milkweed seeds, back to their home territories, to grow their knowledge and share what they’ve learned, volunteering as citizen scientists, educators and land stewards.
But from a more personal perspective, the class puts its participants square in the moment: What is this place where we live? What am I looking at right now? And what is happening to it all?
I’ll be honest. My major motivation behind signing up for master naturalist training was because this particular five-and-a-half day session took place at Upham Woods, the University of Wisconsin-Extension learning center and camp just north of Wisconsin Dells.
Like a lot of Madison schoolkids, I had a sixth-grade camping experience at Upham that profoundly influenced my adult love of nature. The idea of going back for a week beckoned as an escape from adulthood — more or less, an escape from everything. While I was there, the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s election came and went, with my barely having the time to notice.
The Upham training was one of 10 master naturalist training courses held in the state in 2017, most over a succession of weekends. This week-long version features classroom instruction in the morning, with guest lecturers from various fields introducing the class to Wisconsin animals, plant communities, geology, conservation history and “interpretation” — in other words, how participants can take this information and give it back to the public.
Morning classroom instruction is interspersed with short bursts of field work, right out the door of the Upham Woods nature center. Afternoons are devoted to longer field trips. On the docket: the Aldo Leopold Foundation near Baraboo, the International Crane Foundation, the Ice Age Trail and the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge, all brief car trips from the Dells. There’s no test at the end of the course, but each participant comes up with a capstone project to present to the group and to take back to the public in some way.
Linda Falkenstein
Training costs $250 (scholarships are available). The fee goes toward underwriting the costs of the host organization, class materials, and the administration of the program; other support comes from the UW-Madison Foundation and the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin. A perk at Upham: staying in the dormitory is free. And because participants have come from places as far-flung as Green Bay, Eagle River and Racine, the dorm is about half full.
Among my 16 fellow participants are a retired therapist, a young mother, a DNR wastewater specialist, two seasonal employees for Milwaukee County Parks, a longtime Upham Woods volunteer, a recent transplant to Wisconsin who is already a Texas master naturalist (and a former nature interpreter at Yellowstone!) and a retired couple heavily involved with the Boy Scouts. The group is more diverse in age than I had expected, ranging from millennials to baby boomers, but not diverse in race — there’s just one African American. There are slightly more women than men.
The thick binder of ancillary information plunked down in front of us on the first day is intimidating. The first class, on the geology of the state, underlines my status as a former English major. What’s the difference between a rock and a mineral? Oops. Did I ever study that? I think back to my ninth grade biology class and remember nothing.
Still, no one seems to be snoozing or making “oh no, this is soooo elementary” faces. Maybe I’m not the only one who has forgotten.
Along with most of the others in my class, it was simply love of the outdoors that brought Maureen Potter to the course. “I love learning new things all the time, and since being outdoors and everything about nature is interesting to me, this was like a dream,” says Potter. “It’s so cool we live in a society where people share their knowledge like this.” With the youngest of her kids finally off to college, Potter — a lawyer turned homeschooler — decided “to do all those things I’ve been waiting to do for myself, and this was one of them.” The impetus, she says with a laugh, was “selfish. Did I come into this with a keen desire to volunteer? No, but I left with it.”
Wisconsin’s program is most closely modeled on Minnesota’s, with a little bit of Texas mixed in. “It’s not a new concept,” says says Wisconsin Master Naturalist program director Becky Sapper. “Most states have a type of certified [naturalist] volunteer.” Though the idea behind a formal Wisconsin program was “more of a group idea,” Sapper credits Kate Reilly, the program’s first director, with the big push. Reilly retired in 2015; Sapper succeeded her. (Current UW-Madison Arboretum director Karen Oberhauser was instrumental in creating Minnesota’s program.)
The goals of the master naturalist program are broad, says Sapper. “We want to create a network of volunteers aware of our state’s natural resource issues.” The overall curriculum is the same, but the host agency tailors content to the needs of its region. “It’s a massive amount of content to squeeze into 40 hours,” Sapper says.
Sharon Schaver, the retired geologist who shows us the geology of the Dells on the first day, tells me that “You can only give tools and a little hunger,” adding that master naturalist participants are “excellent learners; they’ve all achieved things in their lives. You want to give them the resources to ask the questions.”
In our week, we learn or re-learn some basics, rock vs. mineral, ectothermic vs. endothermic, vascular vs. non-vascular plants, but also about specific issues facing Wisconsin. How overdeveloped water edges threaten turtle and other amphibian nesting areas. How to identify the freshwater mussels of the upper Midwest, so that as citizen scientists we could participate in the Wisconsin Mussel Monitoring Program — you may have heard of the invasive zebra mussel, but there are also native mussels (threatened by the zebra) that are indicator species for lake and river health. We walk the paths of the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge, prime bird habitat created out of drained, failed farmland during the Great Depression, now restored to sedge meadow, savanna, prairie and pine-oak forest, and there (theoretically) learn to tell a sedge from a grass.
We also get a taste of what stewardship is all about. This is the focus as we head out on Thursday afternoon (high temp: 32 degrees) to a volunteer work day clearing invasives on the Ice Age Trail near Merrimac. It’s windy where we park out on Highway 113, but, once we climb the hill to the spot where other volunteers are cutting down the invasive red cedar trees, we’re protected and soon start shedding layers as we take loppers and hand saws to remove the lower branches and drag them to a big brush pile. Someday, this hilltop will look like the next one over, a native prairie with open views to the Wisconsin River.
The lopping, sawing and dragging is nothing I can’t handle; the worst part of the task is probably the near-45 degree angle to the slope we’re on, painful to the instep and the ankle.
There’s a sense of camaraderie in the shared purpose and sense of accomplishment as the underbranches clear out and the lead sawyer chainsaws down the trunks. Even so, I’m tired of poking myself with the spiny branches and say, “In the last hour and a half I’ve grown to hate the red cedar...it is a nasty species.”
Melissa, who works with a nature nonprofit in northern Wisconsin, replies that the red cedar is “just doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s just not supposed to be doing it here.” Leigh, the former Yellowstone guide, looks around at the trees philosophically. “Today, we are agents of death,” she says.
Our main classroom coordinators at Upham Woods are Max Myers and Marc Nutter. They’re particularly helpful at teaching interpretive techniques, because they have groups of schoolkids and campers coming through Upham year ’round.
None of this is super complicated, but it’s surprising how much of an effect just being in the moment can have. One technique is known as the five-second survey. The instructor asks group members to observe the area around them for five seconds. Then they’re asked to close their eyes and remember “something red,” or “something with a rough texture” or “something alive.”
It’s all about becoming receptive to what lies all around you, and this is as good a lesson for adults as it is for kids. “Being curious is more important than being correct,” stresses Myers. In the same vein: “A sense of wonder is more important than scientific accuracy.”
My scribbled notes from this session read “Twitter FB Instagram Rachel Carson.” While these may seem to be different channels that don’t remotely cross, “for kids today, tech is intermediary to nature,” says Nutter. The Upham staff are introducing kids to nature through something called DOTS kits, suitcases that contain cameras, digital microscopes, infrared thermometers and thermal imagers that provide a heat map of an area, and a mobile weather station (recording wind speed, temperature and the like). These upload data onto the kit’s iPad and from there to an online portal that translates it into maps, tables and charts.
It’s also a thrill to see images of spider webs, moss, even dirt, taken with the microscope, enlarged on the iPad screen. A trail-cam stationed on Blackhawk Island on the Upham property shows kids what animals have been there previously, solving the problem of shy wildlife and kids eager for elusive sightings.
After master naturalists graduate from the program, “education” is the area that most volunteers are interested in: in 2017, 45 percent of post-training volunteer hours went to education and interpretation; in previous years, it was 50 percent.
Mary Gruhl was in the first “pilot class” in Ashland in 2012. “For me, it was wonderful to see the big brush strokes, and to understand the interrelatedness,” says Gruhl. Since her training, Gruhl has created a booklet that explains insect interrelationships with garden plants. She teaches at the Northern Great Lakes Visitors Center and credits her training for making her a “much more complete interpreter for the public.”
Paul Doxsee of Stevens Point trained in 2015 at Hartman Creek State Park. He knew from the beginning what he wanted to do for his capstone project: reopen a nature center at Jordan County Park outside Stevens Point, which had closed entirely in 2010 when funding for the onsite naturalist dried up. He recruited several of his classmates to help and approached the director of Portage County Parks. He feels that having the master naturalist credential opened the door for them with the county. For the past three summers, the center has been open on weekends.
Master naturalist training also gave Doxsee “a lot more confidence, enough background in a lot of things, to handle whatever comes.”
“You don’t have to know everything,” says Doxsee. “Pick something to call your home turf. People can tell when you’re excited about something,” he advises.
In addition to creating new displays for the center, which were “caught in a time warp,” Doxsee and other Jordan Park volunteers have helped make a turtle crossing, volunteered with spotting invasive species and borer beetles, and participated in a dragonfly monitoring program with the DNR on the Plover River.
“They had no data at all on the Plover River species, and we said ‘okay, that’d be fun,’ so we work with them identifying the hatchling’s exuviae,” Doxsee says. “We pick up the little shells and the DNR identifies what kind of critters they are. We have the basic nature center, but have also branched out into other things that are very much citizen science.” He figures he’s volunteered 250 hours last year — and this spring he was awarded the 2018 Outstanding Project Award.
Linda Falkenstein
Laurie Elwell of Madison trained in 2015 at the UW-Madison Arboretum. Field trips didn’t stray far from the Arboretum itself, the first restored prairie in the world, but also took in Picnic Point and the UW-Madison’s Lakeshore Nature Preserve. Elwell, who owns land near Muscoda on the Wisconsin River, was alarmed by her neighbors planting grass right up to the river, as opposed to creating a shoreline buffer zone for wildlife and to protect water quality. As a capstone project, Elwell created a “best practices” pamphlet for property owners on the Lower Wisconsin Riverway: “A Property Owner’s Guide to a Healthy River.”
“It’s all about finding a little niche and doing what I can,” says Elwell. She’s worked with the Lower Wisconsin State Riverway Board on distribution of the pamphlet, and, like Doxsee, thinks “being able to say you’re with this program gives you credibility.”
Since the first pilot classes in 2012, the Wisconsin Master Naturalist program has produced 663 graduates; 252 are still “active” — that is, have officially logged the 40 hours volunteering and eight hours of advanced training each year that re-ups the master naturalist certification.
Volunteers live in 62 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties. The program has also trained 115 certified master naturalist instructors, associated with 50 partner organizations throughout the state. In 2017, 20,500 volunteer service hours were logged by those 252 volunteers, which the state values at $444,000.
With budget cuts hewing conservation efforts to the bone, this is work that simply wouldn’t get done otherwise — Paul Doxsee points to the Plover River dragonfly survey as an example: “Because we were there, that survey got done. Jobs aren’t being lost in this. They are careful with what things they turn over. Some things fit, some things don’t.”
Sapper expects the number of volunteer hours devoted to citizen science projects to rise in 2018, after the first-ever state-based conference devoted to citizen science opportunities was held in March.
“There are some amazing examples of volunteer service, capstone projects that have just blown instructors away, and that’s what inspires me and keeps me enthused,” says Sapper.
There are already 16 training sessions scheduled for 2018 and more may be added. Sapper is busy revising “the binder.” She’ll be adding more inclusive history on naturalists of the past — Native Americans and women (my own capstone project on women naturalists of the upper Midwest will go toward that revision).
Sapper also wants to update the chapter on human influences, to focus more on what we can do. “Not ‘What have we done?’” says Sapper, “but ‘What is the power that we hold as individuals and groups to make a difference?’ I want it to be more of a call to action.”
The Dells was both an odd and a perfect place to study the biomes of Wisconsin. (Biome: a large naturally occurring community of flora and fauna occupying a major habitat.) Naturally speaking, the area is the intersection of the Northern mixed hardwood forest, the Southeastern Wisconsin till plains, and the Driftless area. In 50 years, this same tension zone between the Northern hardwoods and southern broadleaf vegetation could well be in the U.P.
Right now, the tension is between massive riverside waterpark developments and a fragile ecosystem. It’s an ever-present reminder that nature is not something that exists apart from people.
Now that I’m a master naturalist, I don’t feel like I’ve mastered anything. But I am more observant. See those oak trees? That tree will hold its leaves all winter, until spring, when the new leaves push them off. Look at this rock along this railroad track. The mauve-ish looking stuff? That’s Baraboo quartzite, probably mined at Rock Springs, in Sauk County.
The title of master naturalist “doesn’t mean so much to me,” my classmate Maureen Potter reflects as we discuss getting together again to do some of our required advance training and volunteer hours for 2018, “because really, you can walk away from the class not knowing very much. It’s up to you. I feel like more than anything, they’re giving you a responsibility to go out and volunteer...and to keep educating yourself.”
