We’ve made a lot of progress! When you think about it, we’ve made a lot of progress environmentally in the past 40-50 years. When I was a kid, I was sick with asthma and had to stay at home a lot. I was inside all day. It drove me nuts. I had to do something, so I hammered together birdfeeders and set them up all over the yard. Then I could at least watch something wild outside from inside. In the summer, I hunted butterflies unceasingly, or at least until flower and ragweed pollen sent me home sneezing and short of breath. I joined the Audubon Society so I could get Audubon Magazine and read about far-off natural places, and also to get the mimeographed paper newsletter telling about the wild things going on locally in St. Paul. One January, our local Audubon Society leaders announced that on Christmas Day, they had seen a Bald Eagle—a Bald Eagle!—flying over the Mississippi River in St. Paul. Nobody believed them. Eagles simply didn’t exist any more in the countryside surrounding the Twin Cities, or even up north for that matter. Sure, there were a few in the mountains out West and more in Alaska, but in the Twin Cities? The Audubon Society leaders should have known better than to start rumors like that. We all knew by that time that widespread usage of DDT in the U.S. to control mosquito populations after the Korean Conflict had killed off all the hawks and eagles and other raptors. We later learned that DDT, ingested into female raptors, caused them to lay soft eggs that were crushed during incubation. So, there weren’t any more Bald Eagles in St. Paul, or anywhere else within reach of a 10-year-old kid on a bike. There was about as much chance of seeing a live eagle then, as there was of seeing a live Triceratops in the lobby of St. Paul’s Science Museum.
Then there were the Canada Geese, the giant sub-species—or whatever they called them— that were also going extinct, presumably for the same reason. One cold winter morning, my parents stuffed the four then-existing Wagner children into their green Plymouth Country Squire station wagon and headed for Rochester, Minnesota. The destination was the warm water discharge of a power plant in Rochester where, supposedly, 25-30 of these big honkers were hanging out for the winter. We got there and sure enough, there they were there, 25-30 giant Canada Geese. We stood outside the car and stared at them until we got cold, then we all piled back in the station wagon and headed back home. My parents wanted us to see these giant honkers before they went extinct. They had read somewhere that even if the DDT situation got corrected, there wouldn’t be enough of the geese left to sustain a viable population. So, the big geese were as good as extinct, even though there were still a few hanging around power plants and such. And then there were other things that weren’t extinct, but were gone from our area for good, as the old timers used to say. In all our wanderings, we NEVER even heard of anyone seeing a wild Turkey, a Sandhill Crane, or a Pelican, let alone seeing completely extirpated (locally extinct) species like Trumpeter Swans and Peregrine Falcons.
Then along came Rachel Carson who wrote Silent Spring which started a grassroots movement that resulted in federal legislation banning the use of DDT. Other grass-roots movements of conservationminded individuals sprang up, and existing organizations like the Audubon Society grew in membership and influence, and teachers started teaching about conservation. The states got involved with Aldo Leopold from UW-Madison writing A Sand County Almanac and Carrol Henderson from the MNDNR Non-Game Wildlife Fund heading up programs to help restore nongame wildlife, including Trumpeter Swans and Peregrine Falcons. Ordinary citizens got involved and teamed up with federal and state conservation workers, universities, teachers, and for-profit and not-for-profit sectors to bring back the environment and wildlife that we had lost through DDT, water pollution and air pollution. Now, you can’t drive anywhere without seeing large flocks of Canada Geese. There are probably scores of grounds keepers at city parks and golf courses that would be a lot happier today if we had been a little less successful in our Canada Goose restoration efforts.
But it doesn’t end there. I regularly see half a dozen Bald Eagles on my way to work in the morning. (Sometimes I even see them flying over the Mississippi River in St. Paul!) Spring, summer and fall, I see Trumpeter Swans, Sandhill Cranes, Wild Turkey and all manner of hawks and falcons, as I drive between customers’ locations in the East Metro and Western Wisconsin. We REALLY HAVE made a lot of progress in the last 40-50 years.
But what happened to all the amphibians that used to be around? I remember so many frogs coming out on roads between swamps up north that the roads would actually get greasy from dead frogs. Gross, I know. I thought it was gross then, too. The point is that there was an abundance of frogs then.
I also remember that there was a certain night or two each summer when all the female snapping turtles somehow knew that this was the night to crawl out of their ponds to lay their eggs. How did they all seem to know what night to come out on? I remember more painted turtles being around lakes and streams, and tiger salamanders being in just about every pond, roadside ditch or anywhere else that was wet for part of the summer. Where are they all now? Sure, there are still some of the above species around, but there are not anywhere near the numbers that were around when I was a kid. Where did they go? What happened to them? Last summer, I saw a lone tiger salamander marching across our driveway. Its skin was dry and dusty and it looked completely out of place. It looked like a member of the French Foreign Legion that tried to escape by walking across the desert and got so dried out and miserable that it decided to go back to camp again.
Something is happening to our amphibians, to the butterflies I used to hunt and to the songbirds I used to watch when I was a kid. Something is happening to them, but I’m not exactly sure what. There isn’t as clear of a smoking gun today as there was back then. There aren’t tons of DDT being sprayed over our swamps and low lying areas. There isn’t nearly raw sewage, or lightly treated industrial wastes, being drained into our rivers and estuaries. Even the air seems cleaner now than it did then. I can remember seeing a brown haze hanging over the Twin Cities when we came back from up north, and that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. But if amphibians, butterflies and songbirds are all in decline, something still isn’t right.
Something still isn’t right and I believe it’s up to our generation to focus our energy, our intelligence and our cooperative spirits on determining what the root causes of these declines are, as we did 50 years ago. Then, as grass-roots organizations, as educators and concerned citizens, as local, state and national governments, we need to address those causes and correct them, making the same incredible progress in the next 50 years that we’ve made in the past 50 years. We’ve done this before and we can do it again. The why is all around us as we see certain parts of our ecosystem slowly shriveling up and dying. The time is now. The who is you and me and every one of us. The question is when will each of us begin?
In the meantime, we’ve also made an incredible amount of progress in the past 40-50 years in restoring coldwater habitat for coldwater species like TROUT! We are coming upon the best and most productive part of our trout fishing season. So, while you are all contemplating what the little and big things you can do to address the environmental concerns that are before us now, GET OUT THERE AND FISH!
Happy Fishing! —Scott Wagner
