Michael Kienitz
Swampers haul the plant limbs that have been cut and stack them for burning.
Pearl Harbor Day in western Dane County breaks cold as the sun peeks under the clouds, delivering the promise of a perfect day for hard labor. It’s not wet, nor is it too cold or too warm as the soft light of December splays across the fields and hillsides on the edge of the Driftless, that bumpy corner of Wisconsin not smushed by the glaciers.
It is not yet 8 a.m. at Dane County’s Festge Park and a hard-hatted Jim Parry, our sawyer for today’s “work day,” is already down the hill, buzzing over fallen trees and attacking the stands of buckthorn that for years have strangled this 160-acre park.
We are the first “swampers” to arrive. Our job is to haul and stack what’s been cut for burning.
By 9 a.m. there are eight of us, dragging and piling buckthorn and honeysuckle limbs. Wild grape vines cling to the branches that once supported them, making the task of cleaning up all the harder. I extract a thorn from my knuckle as we take a break to watch two bald eagles wheel high above Black Earth Creek, our wildlife moment.
It is an effort to keep up with Parry, who wields his chain saw like a boss, stopping only occasionally to mouth quick warnings before trees come crashing down. The mission today is to cleanse one-half acre of the park. Over the past decade, 60 acres of the park’s 120 acres of natural areas have been restored to open forest and prairie, largely by volunteers.
“It was a tangled mess,” remembers Gary Nelson, a retired photojournalist and president of the Friends of Festge and Salmo Pond, the twin parks that straddle Highway 14 one mile west of Cross Plains. “You couldn’t walk off the trail. It was an ecological disaster.”
Before it was a park, Festge was part of a farm, and before that it was oak savanna, a hilly prairie dotted with bur oaks, and open woodland composed mostly of oak and hickory. From the park’s overlook, you can look down on Black Earth Creek and the original Festge farmstead. On the horizon to the southwest float the hazy profiles of Blue Mounds.
Like most of the swampers, Nelson is older, and rescuing Festge Park from the pernicious invasive plants that have overrun southern Wisconsin is a big part of his retirement lifestyle. He’s been volunteering in the park for almost a decade. The mean age of today’s work party, all volunteers, is easily in the mid-60s. Many, like Parry and swampers Dave Earles, Bob Virnig and “Half-Day Dave,” a friend of this writer, routinely show up to clear and restore natural areas in Dane County’s trails and parks. Working at Festge has its benefits, though, like the egg sandwiches and bananas delivered to the work site by intrepid volunteer Jeanette Hoard.
Volunteer groups like the one today at Festge are active throughout Dane County, helping reclaim some of the estimated 10,000 acres of natural areas included in the park system. According to Dane County Parks Director Darren Marsh, there are active volunteer projects at a number of Dane County properties, although not all of them have a pure ecological restoration focus like the one at Festge. The county abets such efforts by providing planning, training, equipment and technical guidance, and it leverages the hours invested by volunteers to secure grants and other support for the effort required to restore park natural areas.
“We’ve got our hands full trying to manage all these areas,” notes Lars Higdon, the Dane County botanist and naturalist who helps guide restoration efforts. Often, he says, people think you can just “be hands off and let nature take its course. Nothing could be further from the truth. We need people to actively manage these lands.”
For Virnig, who by mid-morning is covered with so many sticktights he could be Velcroed to a wall, volunteering for swamper duty is “somethin’ to do.” For Half-Day Dave, it is a great way to get outside and, more philosophically, confront a disruptive force that has robbed our parks of their native flora and ambiance.
He also appreciates the social dynamic: “I like it because it is a bunch of oddballs. This is not something normal people do.”
Land in the Dane County Park system: 13,000 acres
Land in the natural areas of Dane County Parks: 10,000 acres
Estimated hours volunteers contribute each year to Dane County Parks: 66,500
Estimated monetary value of volunteer labor performed annually in Dane County Parks: $1.6 million
Annual visitors to Dane County Parks:3 million
To volunteer: Contact Rhea Stangel-Maier, Dane County Parks volunteer coordinator, 608-224-3601, stangel-maier@countyofdane.com.
