Author: Ann-Elise Henzl

Combating Inland Invasives

  • Eurasian Watermilfoil is one of the non-native species that has invaded inland lakes. (Photo courtesy of National Park Service)

Invasive plants, fish and other creatures are threatening many inland lakes. Environmentalists and property owners are trying to stop the spread…before the invaders dramatically alter the smaller bodies of water. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Ann-Elise Henzl reports:

Transcript

Invasive plants, fish and other creatures are threatening many inland
lakes. Evironmentalists and property owners are trying to stop the
spread…before the invaders dramatically alter the smaller bodies of
water. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Ann-Elise Henzl reports:


It’s strange to think that plants and animals from Europe, Asia and Africa
are living in small lakes in the Midwest. Boaters have taken invaders
there…after picking them up in the Great Lakes.


The big lakes are home to more than 160 aquatic invasive species,
including Eurasian Watermilfoil. The stringy plant grows in thick
clusters that get up to 12 feet tall.


“I have seen lakes where if you fell out of the boat in these massive
weeds and you weren’t wearing a life jacket, I don’t care how good a
swimmer you are, you would sink. You can not struggle your way
through these thick entanglements of weeds.”


Ted Ritter leads an effort to reduce aquatic invasive species…in
Wisconsin’s Vilas County.


(Sound of pontoon motor)


On one afternoon he takes his pontoon boat on a lake that had an
infestation of Eurasian Watermilfoil.


“It is a very aggressive plant and it has no natural predators to control its
growth, it grows up to two inches a day.”


When Eurasian Watermilfoil finds conditions it likes, it takes over
quickly. A piece as small as two inches can break off, and float away to
create a new plant.


Eurasian Watermilfoil is widespread in northern Michigan… northern
Wisconsin and other places. It’s one of dozens of aquatic invasive
species on the move in the region.


One of the worst invaders is zebra mussels. They can ravage a lake’s
ecosystem.


(Sound of motor boat)


So far, they’ve made it to just one lake in northern Wisconsin. Mike
Preul with the Lake Superior Chippewa scuba dives there, to count the
mussels. Three years ago, he found 7 adults per square meter. This year,
he counted more than 14-hundred:


“They’re still increasing. What they’ve seen in other systems is that just
like with any other exotic species they’ll come in, the population will
explode, they’ll kind of eat themselves out of house and home, and then
they’ll come down to a level and reach a steady state.”


No method has been discovered to get rid of zebra mussels, but there are
ways to control some invaders.


Herbicides can be used to kill Eurasian Watermilfoil, and some property
owners chip in to buy aquatic insects to kill the plants.


Les Schramm did that on his local lake:


“As the larvae hatches it burrows into the stem of the Eurasian
Watermilfoil and sort of eats out the center vascular part, and it falls over
and dies.”


People fighting aquatic invasive species say it’s like fighting weeds in a
garden — the work never stops and it can be expensive.


Ted Ritter of Vilas County says it costs thousands of dollars to treat a
lake once. So, often people do nothing.


Ritter says that can hurt the environment. He says it can also threaten the
economy, in areas like northern Wisconsin that rely on tourism.


Ritter says the invaders can reduce the appeal of a lake. He mentions a
plant called “curly leaf pondweed.” When it dies in the middle of
summer, it creates algae blooms that look like slimy green pillows:


“When people arrive at resorts and they look out and they see that very
unappealing lake they say ‘I’m not staying here,’ and they go somewhere
else. When realtors bring prospective buyers out to look at a property,
people get out of their car and they go right to the lake and they say ‘oh
my, I’m not even interested in looking at the house. This lake is
horrible.'”


Because it’s so difficult to control invasive species, Ritter and others
fighting the invaders focus on prevention.


Local volunteers and workers from the Wisconsin Department of Natural
Resources spend hours at boat landings. They urge people to clean their
boats, trailers, and fishing gear thoroughly when going from lake to lake,
that can keep unwanted plants and creatures from traveling along.


For the GLRC, I’m Ann-Elise Henzl.

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Conflicts Between People and Wildlife

  • People sometimes move to the outer suburbs to be a little closer to nature. But when nature turns out to be a squirrel storing nuts in your attic or a raccoon looking for a free meal in your garbage can, there's conflict. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Throughout the Midwest, it’s becoming more and more common
to see wild animals living in the city and the suburbs. The number of coyotes, deer and Canada geese is growing. And suburbs keep sprawling… but the animals there stay put, and adapt to the new surroundings. That can cause conflicts between the animals… and people. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Ann-Elise Henzl reports:

Transcript

Throughout the Midwest, it’s becoming more and more common
to see wild animals living in the city and the suburbs. The number of
coyotes, deer and Canada geese is growing. And suburbs keep sprawling…
but the animals there stay put, and adapt to the new surroundings. That
can cause conflicts between the animals… and people. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Ann-Elise Henzl reports:


It can get busy at wildlife rehabilitation centers. At this center, five thousand animals are treated and released each year. There’s a big variety, ranging from raccoons to sandhill cranes.


(Sound of birds chirping)


In spring and early summer, it’s very crowded in the nursery.


“We’ve got a young grackle in here, and he’s really on about the one-hour feeding stage learning the transition between us feeding him and feeding himself…”


Scott Diehl is the manager of the wildlife rehabilitation center at the Wisconsin humane society in Milwaukee. Dozens of young animals are being nursed back to health here in incubators and cages.


“Here’s little teenage gray squirrels in here playing around and goofing off and their play activity actually teaches them how to – it helps build their muscles, and teaches them how to climb…”


Many of the babies are here because their parents were run over by cars. That’s what happened to a female mallard who’s being examined by a wildlife rehabilitator, in the “triage” room.


“He’s just outstretching the wings, he’s feeling over the bones to see if he feels fractures and I can see from here that the left wing that he is examining looks like it has fractured metacarpals, so that’s the outer wing, kind of analogous to our fingers, we’ve got actually a little blood showing there. And so Mike is just going to flush that wound out with a little saline now he’s going to examine things, and quite frankly it doesn’t look like she’s using her legs well either.”


It turns out the duck has numerous broken bones and other serious health problems, so she’s euthanized. Mallards are often hit by cars in cities. That’s because they nest in grassy areas, then walk their babies to the water. That can mean crossing a number of streets.


Ricky Lein is the urban wildlife specialist for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
He says people and animals are always getting into some kind of conflict in urban areas.


“Recently I had a person come in who owned twenty acres in a suburban area and talked about how they enjoyed the coyotes as long as they stayed on their territory but the coyote had made the decision to come into their backyard and eat a family cat, and I tried in a very polite way to point out that was the coyote’s territory.”


Lein says urban sprawl also causes problems by creating places that attract some wild animals
like white-tailed deer. They like areas where the woods meet wide-open lawns. That describes many suburban neighborhoods.


As a result, there are now more deer across the Midwest then ever before,
and the population of Canada geese is exploding in the same area. Lein says the geese have found their version of “heaven.”


“A lot of urban parks, condo complexes, whatnot, where you have a pond or storm water run-off pond and they keep five to ten acres of grass mowed around it, and they’ve eliminated hunting… that is heaven to a Canada goose.”


But some communities are considering killing urban geese in order to reduce the population.
Other cities have hired sharpshooters to kill urban deer. So the Humane Society of the United States has created a program called “Wild Neighbors.” Maggie Brasted is the organization’s director for urban wildlife conflicts.


“One of our goals is to help people find solutions so that they can coexist with these wild neighbors, with the wildlife around them, ’cause you know sometimes there are real problems. There are real concerns. It’s not that every time someone is upset about wild animals around them that they should just be told, “Oh just live with it,” there are real issues so we want to be able to offer them real practical solutions other than killing the animals.”


Brasted says there’s a complex relationship between humans and wild animals in urban areas.


“It’s not real simple to just say that you know they were here first or they shouldn’t be here. Or why are they around people? They’re adapting to what we do, they’re adapting to the changes we make. They’re taking advantage of whatever habitat niche that they find.”


Brasted says the wild animals that live in the city and suburbs are there to stay. So people will either have to find ways to live with them or to control their population.


For the GLRC, I’m Ann-Elise Henzl.

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New Coal-Burning Power Plants on Great Lakes Shores?

  • Some environmentalists and residents who live on Lake Michigan fear that an expansion of a coal-burning power plant will have a negative impact on the lake. (Photo by Richard B. Mieremet, courtesy of the NOAA)

Environmentalists are concerned about two new coal-burning power plants to be built on the shores of one of the Great Lakes. Among their concerns are increased air pollution and that the view of the lakeshore will be ruined. The power company says it needs the plants to meet the increasing demand for electricity. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Ann-Elise Henzl
reports:

Transcript

Environmentalists are concerned about two new coal-burning
power plants to be built on the shores of one of the Great Lakes.
Among their concerns are increased air pollution and that the view
of the lakeshore will be ruined. The power company says it needs
the plants to meet the increasing demand for electricity. The Great
Lakes Radio Consortium’s Ann-Elise Henzl reports:


Wisconsin Electric power company has more than one million customers in Wisconsin and Michigan’s upper penninsula. The company says soon, it won’t be able to provide power for all of them with its current plants, and the transmission lines that allow Wisconsin Electric to buy power from other states are over taxed. So the company wants to expand a coal-fired power plant twenty miles south of Milwaukee. That would add two coal-burning units and double the plant’s size and output. Paul Shorter is the manager for site coordination.


“From the infrastructure standpoint, if the state wants to grow and attract business, I think that’s one reason. The other reason is to meet that growing demand of about two percent a year, which is related to telephones, TV’s, VCR’s, computers. We’re always asking for more, and companies are producing it, and they have to be supported by energy.”


On a windy spring morning, Shorter is standing on the roof of the existing plant. As waves crash on the Lake Michigan shoreline, Shorter looks north, pointing out the site for the expansion.


“Now this whole area over here is going to be excavated, for placement of the new facilities, there’s going to be about five million cubic yards of dirt that we’re going to move around on the property. Part of it is to cut down that bluff, to get everything down to the level of this current facility.”


Shorter sees power and progress. But a nearby resident, Ann Brodek, sees something else.


“As you look at the plant now, as it sits on the shore, to me, it looks kind of like a looming, prehistoric monster on the edge of the shore. It just is dirty and huge and on a shoreline of a beautiful lake. This is not where that should be.”


Brodek lives just ten miles south of the plant, near the shore of Lake Michigan. She’s among area residents and environmentalists who’ve been fighting the plant. Ever since Wisconsin Electric started trying to get state approval. Bruce Nilles is a senior Midwest representative for the Sierra Club. He says the expansion would destroy a half-mile of shoreline, that’s home to birds and wildlife. And he says the Great Lakes region doesn’t need more coal-burning plants.


“The proposal is using technology that we created, basically, back in the nineteenth century: grinding up the coal and burning it. We know that releases mercury into the environment in very large amounts. All the new studies are showing that we already have far too much mercury in our environment. And once it’s in the environment, it doesn’t go away. Every lake, river, and stream in the state of Wisconsin has a fish consumption advisory, including Lake Michigan, because there’s too much mercury in the fish.”


Wisconsin Electric defends its plan to build coal-burning units. The company says the units would use new, cleaner technology, and meet the requirements of the Clean Air Act. It also says improvements at the existing plant would cut pollution in half. Wisconsin regulators agreed with the company and approved the plan. Opponents sued. They say the state failed to require a complete application for the plant. They also say regulators didn’t look at alternatives, like a natural gas-fired plant. Last fall, a circuit judge agreed with the opponents of the plant. The regulators and Wisconsin Electric appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which is where the case is now. The court could give the go-ahead for the plant expansion, or it could throw out all or part of the proposal.


Meanwhile, opponents like resident Ann Brodek are glad their argument is still alive.


“I would think that every bordering state, including Canada, would be speaking out against this thing. This is going to affect everybody, and we’re not going to give up and there’ll be suits. There’ll be lawsuits. We’ll do everything we can.”


The state Supreme Court is expected to annouce its decision by this summer. Wisconsin Electric hopes an answer comes by then. It wants to have the new coal-fired units operating by the summer of 2009, and it’ll take about four years to build them.


For the GLRC, I’m Ann-Elise Henzl.

Related Links