PFAS in Waters of Wisconsin; How Legal Reforms Can Protect Our Culinary Heritage in the Face of Climate Change; Winged Sentinels–How Birds are Adapting to Climate Change

My major professor at UW-Madison, plant virologist Robert W. Fulton, was an avid trout angler who tied flies and stalked streams in western Dane County and in the hollers of the Driftless in pursuit of the wiley salmonid.  I asked him once about how he got permission from landowners to access such small creeks, and I was astonished when he replied he didn’t need permission: the navigable waters of Wisconsin include any stream that is able to float a log or a canoe at some point during a year.  This was an astoundingly broad definition of a public resource, especially to a canoeist from Illinois, where the public waterways are strictly delineated and narrow in scope.  “Whatever floats your boat”  takes on a breathtaking nautical meaning in Wisconsin.  It was my first taste of how folks (and the law) look at public waterways differently in Wisconsin than in some other places.

Some time later I was introduced to the Public Trust Doctrine of the Waters of Wisconsin and was again impressed with the distribution of rights of the public relative to the rights of the owner of land bordering on a navigable waterway.  I have the impression (I may be wrong) that there’s no such thing as a private beach along the Wisconsin portions of the Great Lakes, provided you are walking on that part of the shore that is within the normal high water level.  Thus the doctrine makes for the possibility of days-long treks on the sandy and the hardscrabble shores of Lakes Superior and Michigan.

The third prong in this trident of freshwater stewardship was learning of the origins of the Hamm’s Beer ad. To a Flatlander like me, Hamm’s was strictly a Minnesota beer, like Grain Belt and Schmidt. So I was nonplussed to learn that Ernie Garven, the Minnesotan who in 1952 wrote the words & tune of the Hamm’s beer song, had tapped into inspiration while on vacation in Wisconsin.  “The land of sky-blue waters” captures three of the most vibrant and cherished ideas of both states that border the St. Croix:  water, land and sky.

And so it is that this week’s presentation invokes a phrase that to my ear strings and sings some of the most evocative words in the badger state:  “The Waters of Wisconsin.”

 
Description:  The evidence that wildlife are responding to modern climate change is now overwhelming. There is strong scientific consensus that environmental tipping points are being crossed, and many species are adapting (or failing to adapt) to novel climatic conditions. Birds serve as the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” when it comes to climate change. For this presentation, I will cover how birds are responding to a rapidly changing climate as well as extreme events. From changes in behavior to range-wide shifts, birds are the winged sentinels of modern climate change.  
 
Bio:  Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Dr. Zuckerberg arrived a bit late to the wonderful world of ecology. He was, however, lucky enough to start studying birds as an undergraduate at Connecticut College, and went on to receive his Masters from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Ph.D. from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry where her focused on studying range shifts in bird distributions as a consequence of climate change. He then spent three great years as a postdoc and research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dr. Zuckerberg joined the faculty at UW-Madison in 2011 and has built a lab focused on studying how modern climate change impacts birds and mammals. He remains a strong advocate for the role of the public in collecting data on wildlife and feels that citizen science has opened entirely new fields in ecological research.
 
Link:  https://zuckerberg.russell.wisc.edu/