August 2 Curtis Prairie

Today I led a tour on Curtis Prairie at the UW Arboretum where twenty-mile-per-hour gusts kept us dry in the humid heat and provided a sense of adventure. We identified and distinguished a slew of sunflowers, including yellow coneflower and rosinweed, ox eyes and cup plants, prairie blazing stars and black-eyed susans. We saw an amazing field of rattlesnake masters and a sorrowing field of invasive reed canary grass. Dedicated in 1934, the prairie then was no more than a collection of fallow farm fields and horse meadows. The first tasks for the 200 CCC men who arrived in Madison in 1935 was to rip up acres of open turf. Plantings came quickly then, with 42 trial species over the next few years. A photo of Aldo Leopold and three friends standing over a small burned over plot shows that experiments with fire started shortly thereafter. Curtis Prairie is the oldest restored tall-grass prairie ecosystem in the world, and gives a stunning, yet limited, feel for what the original 2 million acres of Wisconsin prairie offered. Curtis has over 300 native plant species, including joe-pye weed, which support a vast collection of insects (see swallowtail butterfly), invertebrates, mammals, fungus, and birds. And yet it is besieged on all sides - by major highways, stormwater retention ponds, fast moving woody plants, and 230,000 invasive humans. Curtis Prairie is an island in an ecological ocean, and a history book revealing our connection to the land.