Nearly 260 prairie enthusiasts gathered Feb. 29 on a beautiful leap-year day at UW-Platteville campus for the 32nd annual TPE Conference and Banquet. Hosted by the Southwest and Prairie Bluff chapters, with coordination by Chapter Support staff, the team gained access to the building at 6:30 a.m. and scrambled to open […]
Historically significant and emblematic of the wildness that once existed along the towering bluffs of the Mississippi River, the timber rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus) continues to survive in isolated pockets. Revered and respected by Native Americans, with some tribes calling it “Grandfather,” it was vilified by European settlers and now only thrives in the most remote […]
By Pam Richards Last summer a variety of prairies were discovered at Lake Carroll – a four-season recreational community between Lanark and Pearl City, Ill. Carroll County is the southern-most region of the TPE-monitored areas. These finds included a remnant, a planted prairie, and golf course prairies. Both the remnant and planted prairies were featured […]
What do TPE member and emeritus professor Tom Brock have in common with rock-n-roll star Steve Miller? In addition to never hearing of the other, they both were awarded Honorary Doctorate degrees from UW-Madison in May. Tom received the degree for his pioneering work on thermophilic (heat-loving) bacteria he had isolated and characterized from the […]
We watched the world strike for action on climate change last month. As we work for conserving prairie and savanna ecosystems in the region, support is growing for taking better care of our global ecosystem. At an Earth Day celebration in Madison earlier this year, TPE member Ron Endres met Eman Ghanem, a director at […]
This past winter the monarch butterfly populations overwintering in northern Mexico increased significantly for the first time in recent years. The butterflies used over 6 hectares of land at their winter roosting sites. This is significant, as the goal of the Mid-American Monarch Conservation Strategy is to increase the average to around 6 hectares of […]
By Jim Vonderharr Many Rivers Chapter has recently started partnerships with several educational entities. We were contacted in the spring of 2017 by Amber Gremmels, a middle school science teacher in New Ulm, Minn. The New Ulm School District has two vacant residential lots next to it that were just being mowed. She envisioned converting […]
This introduction to the concept of resilience and how it applies to our prairie restoration work was an article published in the August 2019 Prairie Promoter. Those of us who were at this year’s TPE conference in Menomonie were introduced to resilience during the keynote address. As a review, resilience is simply the ease at which a […]
This summer marks my seventh year with TPE and completes our 50th land protection project. One of the special responsibilities that comes along with completing all these projects is the care we give these sites by burning, brushing and planting more prairies and savannas. Now that TPE is accredited, one additional activity we must do […]
Our work helping to restore Moely Prairie, a 23.5-acre remnant sand prairie on the outskirts of Prairie du Sac, has been one big exercise in repaying some of the attention I owe to wild places and beings. Here is my story of paying down the staggering debt. It was a sun-splashed July day. As my wife […]
