April Project Updates

County: Ozaukee

By Peter Ziegler, WWA Project Director

I hope many of you have been able to get out and see the spring migration. I happened to hit a few prime days where I was able to view just about every species of duck that normally migrates through Wisconsin, and on two occasions even had large groups of Specklebelly geese to entertain me. Probably my greatest sighting were the 75+ tundra swans resting on a restored wetland that I was able to watch pretty closely while listening to them chatter calmly amongst themselves. It’s pretty rewarding this time of year when you see hundreds of waterfowl using wetlands you restored. When I say “you”, I’m referring to WWA and its membership. To look at some of these places and know that years prior there was no or little habitat to attract these birds, and now hundreds are using a site your support helped restore, we should all feel rewarded from those efforts we have each provided to WI conservation.

In an update to an Ozaukee County project site we began work on back in February, 20 days after we broke drain tile the water returned as you can see from these pictures taken in February (top) and March(bottom) . It did not take long as you can see in the pictures.

This field had been farmed for 75+ years. The interesting thing is this site is located on top of a hill, and the top of the divide between two watersheds. It goes to show that not only the typical low areas will be good wetland restoration sites. If conditions are right and historic wetlands are present, as in this case, we can usually bring them back to life. Some significant erosion from past land uses has also taken place here, so some additional grading is planned soon to restore some of the broadness and curves of the original topography at this location. It will be surrounded by native grassland adding to the wildlife benefit.