News: OnEarth Magazine

by Dave Mayfield
Illustrations by Dean W. Biechler

Sanctuary in Sauk County: the accidental prairie. William J. Pielsticker

he May morning was crowded with birdsong as Michael Mossman stepped into the still-dewy pasture. Binoculars bounced against the chest of his bib overalls. But for this field scientist, one of the Midwest's top specialists in grassland birds, they didn't serve much purpose. He makes 95 percent of his identifications with his ears.

"Hear that little two-note buzz," Mossman whispers. A savanna sparrow. Moments later, from out of a whistling mayhem of eastern meadowlarks, he sifts the fluting of a single western meadowlark. "Hear it?" he asks. "Richer, more melodic, kind of happier." Soon, he is tuning in the gurgles of bobolinks and the trills of upland sandpipers.

In Wisconsin's Sauk County, at a most unlikely site, the forty-eight-year-old Mossman -- a bearded Robin Williams look-alike who works for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources -- has stumbled upon one of North America's most splendid symphonies of grassland birds. We are on the grounds of the Badger Army Ammunition Plant, and the notes are bouncing off buildings, whistling along steam pipes, clattering against storage tanks.

"This place is just so magical," he says. "I've walked all over this state, and I've never heard so many meadowlarks or bobolinks. Badger is just full of their songs."

Henslow's Sparrow

In the untidy pastures of a broken-down piece of the country's war machine, some of America's most imperiled birds have found a sanctuary from concrete sprawl and factory-style farming. The plant has been out of operation for three decades, and some 1,400 buildings on the site are falling down fast. But every spring, the pastures between the old warehouses and powder magazines prove perfect not just for meadowlarks and bobolinks, but for such lesser-known grassland denizens as dickcissels, grasshopper sparrows, and sedge wrens.

Mossman has documented ninety-five different types of nesting birds at Badger. But it is the two dozen or so species specific to grassland ecosystems that have rallied his community behind a rather ambitious idea. The people of Sauk County want to turn most of the Army plant, now in the process of shutting down for good, into a prairie reserve.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, 61 percent of grassland bird species have suffered significant population declines since 1966 -- more than any other bird group. Only 13 percent of wetland birds and 21 percent of woodland birds have seen significant declines in that period.

Bobolink

The reasons for the grasslanders' demise are many. First and foremost, 99 percent of America's original prairie is gone. The next-best home for grassland birds had long been farms and ranches, but things have changed there, too. In the east, development has consumed millions of acres of farmland, and forests have grown back over hundreds of thousands more acres. Other changes, even further-reaching, have to do with economic pressures on agricultural landowners. Farmers who once left field edges unplowed have been planting more and more of that land with intensive crops such as corn or soybeans. And instead of cutting hayfields just once a year, they're mowing two or three times -- killing baby vesper sparrows, dickcissels, and other hatchlings still confined to their ground-level nests. Studies have found that fewer than 10 percent of bobolink nestlings survive in early-cut alfalfa fields. Pesticides and fertilizers may add more stress. All in all, the nation's farmland has turned into a death trap for grassland birds.

ntil recently, few suspected Badger had come to the birds' rescue. From the front of the plant, by the chain-link fence that runs four miles along U.S. Route 12, the place looks off-putting and forlorn, its tattered beige buildings an ugly contrast to the lush green forests of the Baraboo Hills behind.

When Badger's 7,354 acres were declared Army surplus in 1997, federal land disposers floated plans to redevelop much of it into an industrial park. To most in Sauk County, that sounded at first like a sensible idea. But conservationists weren't so sure. In 1996, the Nature Conservancy had reported after an exhausting survey that military installations harbor more threatened and endangered species per acre than any other federally owned lands. One of the main reasons: minimal human disturbance. The conservancy did some cursory work on Badger itself in 1993, and found about seventy bird species. And so Mossman and his cohorts asked the Army: Before writing off Badger, how about letting us take a good look inside the fence?

Laurie Grace

That's how Mossman ended up inside the plant for the first time in May 1998, as part of a team of plant and animal surveyors from the local chapter of the Society for Conservation Biology. He had grown up in Baraboo, just over the hills. He'd done his graduate field studies for the University of Wisconsin-Madison all over those same hills, often coming right up to the Army's fence. "It was always a mysterious place to me," he says now, "a blank spot on the map."

And he didn't much care for the place. In Mossman's mind, Badger had caused too much pain and suffering -- starting with the eighty farm families whose land had been seized to build the plant at the beginning of World War II, and right on through to its present-day neighbors whose wells have been contaminated by plumes of toxic groundwater running off-site. Then, of course, there was Vietnam. Mossman had been a teenager with a rapidly developing social conscience when that conflict heated up. Badger's workers had made ingredients for most of the small-arms ammunition used by U.S. troops in Southeast Asia, and it hurt to know that his home county was contributing so much to the killing half a world away.

All of this slid into the background, however, as Mossman did the field study. Every morning, before sunrise, he would tie a kerchief atop his head and set off on straight-line transects -- north-south, south-north, back and forth as methodically as a survey ship radar-charting the ocean bottom. But in this case, the surveyor's instruments were his ears, and what he was charting was an ocean of birdsong.

Every 500 meters (the spacing key to preventing double-counts), Mossman halted his march and started counting. Everything he heard for the next five minutes went into his notebook. Over five weeks and 42 miles, he stopped and counted at 136 points on the Badger land. By the time it was over, Mossman had documented what is likely one of the half-dozen most important grassland bird populations in the upper Midwest.

For the biologist, the memory of that first study remains "joyful, just joyful." Badger's tally included 30 pairs of upland sandpipers, pigeon-sized birds once hunted nearly to extinction; an astonishing 500 pairs of eastern meadowlarks, a species believed to have lost nearly two-thirds of its numbers over the last three decades; and as many as 10 pairs of Henslow's sparrows, secretive little birds that Mossman recognized by their unmistakable hiccupping and sneezing as they scampered through the grass. Nationwide, the Henslow's sparrow population has dropped almost 95 percent since 1966.

The morning when Mossman heard an upland sandpiper in one ear and a worm-eating warbler in the other convinced him he'd happened on something truly extraordinary. He was doing a separate survey that day in the hills above Badger, in Devil's Lake State Park, just outside the fence. The warbler likes deep forests; the sandpiper is happiest roaming hundreds of acres of wide-open grasslands. And yet here they were, just hundreds of meters apart, merrily contradicting one another. "It was almost inconceivable," he says. "It hit me that there may not be any other place where you can hear both of those birds at the same time."

Spurred in large part by Mossman's findings, conservationists put forth a new vision for the Badger land. The Community Conservation Coalition for the Sauk Prairie, co-founded by Curt Meine, a researcher at the Baraboo-based International Crane Foundation, is pushing for an oversight board to coordinate several different uses of the land.

One part of the site would become a state-run prairie reserve. Meine proposes to use a portion of that land to test techniques that the nation's farmers could use to leave more room for wildlife on their land -- scheduling pasture burns when birds aren't nesting, and limiting the passes farm machinery makes through crop fields, for instance. A second part would be a dairy farming lab run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which already leases land at Badger's southern end. Still a third part would become a bison pasture for Wisconsin's Ho-Chunk Nation, Native Americans whose ancestors ceded millions of acres to the U.S. government in the 1830s. They plan not only to reintroduce bison to Badger, but also to resume religious ceremonies at the burial grounds of their ancestors.

Eastern Meadowlark

The county is solidly behind Meine and Mossman, with community leaders from farmers to the executive director of the Baraboo Area Chamber of Commerce rallying for conservation. A citizen committee has all but unanimously endorsed the plan for several uses and an oversight board. The support is no accident, says Meine. "We looked for ways to let people be a part of the process, not be alienated from it," he explains. "People started to feel like something was happening because of them."

As for Mossman, he has become a key part of the movement for preservation -- though not in the way one might expect. The ghosts of human history now sing as loudly to him from across Badger's land as the birds he first heard there three years ago. He is the founding chairman of the Badger History Group, which has sponsored a lecture series on Badger, a public television documentary, and a reunion of former ammunition workers. The group has also worked closely with Meine. Thanks to that collaboration, the other project endorsed by the citizen committee is a museum at Badger to memorialize all those who once lived and worked on the land. "This place becomes even more rich when you add the human history onto the natural history," Mossman says. "More and more, I think of Badger as a place to reconcile all kinds of old wounds."

Whether Mossman and Meine's vision can be realized at Badger is still uncertain. Wisconsin's Republican governor, Scott McCallum, has backed the conservation plan. But it may cost hundreds of millions of dollars to dismantle the crumbling buildings and clean up chemical contamination. Special legislation in Congress may be needed to fund prairie restoration and the proposals for "ecologically sustainable" agriculture. Still, for now, the birds have a home -- the meadowlarks and bobolinks, dickcissels and sandpipers. Come next spring, their music will echo again down the old gunpowder avenues, singing of peaceful contentment in a refuge that looks anything but.

Prairie Revival: Grasslander | A Prairie Primer | A Farewell to Arms | Resources

OnEarth. Fall 2001
Copyright 2001 by the Natural Resources Defense Council

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