Judith Davidoff
The city is delaying weed cutting in the Vilas Park lagoon while investigating the best time to remove vegetation.
Last spring, Sue Ellingson recalls enjoying a walk around the Vilas Park lagoon, where she was serenaded by a chorus of frogs and toads nesting in the weeds near the shoreline.
“They were just going crazy,” says Ellingson, a former city alder who lives near the park and is fond of observing wildlife around the lake. “There were a lot of other creatures too — turtles laying eggs, ducks, geese, goslings, ducklings. It’s obviously a pretty good habitat for wild creatures.”
But as she continued on her walk, Ellingson started worrying about what would happen to the animals when the weed cutters arrived to clear plants out of the lagoon, as they do each spring. Sure enough, Ellingson returned for a walk a few days later and saw the mechanical weed cutter parked nearby; the lagoon was deadly silent.
“There was no sound at all. All the toads were gone,” she says. “It was sort of horrible.”
Devastated by the apparent amphibian mass-death, Ellingson contacted Madison Parks Division Superintendent Eric Knepp, whose department schedules the weed cutting, and County Board Supervisor Chuck Erickson, chair of the Dane County Lakes and Watershed Commission. “Everyone was concerned,” Ellingson says. “And they were responsive, too.”
A series of conversations over the past year grew to include the nonprofit Friends of Lake Wingra and the state Department of Natural Resources. The talks resulted in a new approach to lagoon management that’s in effect this spring. At the city’s directive, the county’s weed-cutting operations in the Vilas Park lagoon are on hold until later this summer. Meanwhile, volunteer citizen scientists are observing and collecting data on aquatic wildlife to help determine the safest time to manage the plants.
Weed cutting in the spring is done for aesthetics and to curtail smells from decomposing plant matter, and in the fall it’s an important part of preparing the lagoon for ice skating in the winter, Knepp says. If left unmanaged, excess weeds can slow the flow of stormwater, causing trash to become trapped in the lagoon.
Knepp says the parks division takes environmental concerns into account at all its locations, but he notes that land management tactics are not “primarily conservation-oriented” in community parks with high levels of human activity. “The lagoon is right in the middle of one of the busiest parks in the system,” he says. He welcomes the concerns of citizens, however, and is eager to work with partners in the community “to come up with the best balance possible” for managing the lagoon.
Ben Yahr, president of the Friends of Lake Wingra, has taken the lead on organizing volunteers to serve as “lagoon observers.” Observation began last week, with Yahr and a few others walking and paddling through the area around sundown (when amphibians are most likely to be calling and breeding), documenting the sights, sounds and weather conditions.
“We were pretty surprised to hear that there wasn’t a scientific or data-based approach to managing aquatic plants in the lagoon,” Yahr says. “Our goal through this citizen science monitoring project is to develop a very deliberate, science-based approach to balancing the ecological health [of the lagoon] with recreational uses.”
Rori Paloski, a DNR amphibian expert, briefed the volunteers on Wisconsin’s 12 native frog and toad species — nine of which are believed to be present in the lagoon — and their lifecycles, habitats and behaviors. The citizen observers will document their findings using an adapted version of the Wisconsin Frog and Toad Survey, which is part of the Wisconsin Aquatic and Terrestrial Resources Inventory and is one of the longest-running amphibian monitoring projects in North America.
Yahr hopes the data collected this year will be the first of a multi-year study on biodiversity in the lagoon ecosystem. If successful, he foresees the observation efforts expanding into other parts of the lake and involving other plant and animal species, both invasive and native. But more volunteers are needed to make that happen.
“This year we’re starting simple,” Yahr says, “but we want to keep an open dialogue with the city and county.”