Stream to Stream: A Reflection on Restoration
Silas Patten, Crew Leader 2023-2024
From September, 2023 to November, 2024 I worked three seasons with WisCorps as a Crew Leader. I had such a good time and really enjoyed all of the beautiful places in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan my crews and I got to visit! Some highlight locations are Isle Royale National, Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, and Whittlesey Creek National Wildlife Refuge. One thing all of these locations have in common is that they are all near Lake Superior, or in it!
During my time with WisCorps I fell in love with that biggest of big lakes and always find myself thinking back to the many days I spent on her shores. It truly is a captivating location. It was in that area that I learned a lot about conservation projects and specifically habitat restoration.
During my two fall seasons I had the privilege to work just outside of Ashland, WI at Whittlesey Creek National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is located about 5 miles West of Ashland and takes its name from the creek of the same name which itself is named after the founder of Ashland, Asaph Whittlesley. The refuge was created in 1999 to protect and support coastal wetland and stream habitat. It also supports a population of native coaster brook trout. The area is absolutely beautiful and with it being just minutes away from the coast of Gichigami (Ojibwe name for the lake) the weather is very much impacted by the famous “lake effect.” Overall, an amazing place to work.
My crews were assigned to remove as much buckthorn as possible from a heavily infested field on the refuge historically used for agriculture. The goal of the restoration project was to return the field to a native oakland savannah habitat. It was really cool to spend a week in fall 2023 cutting thousands of buckthorn and then return to the same site one year later in fall 2024 and see how the area had improved!
The areas we cleared were still clear and we found many tree samplings beginning to shoot up and take advantage of all the new sunlight they have access to! We got right back to cutting buckthorn and after another week an even larger section of the field was cleared. I wonder now as another year has passed what that special place looks like now, and how it will look in five, ten, twenty years from now? Will the buckthorn have recharged and retaliated, or will future WisCorps crews go back in and lop and handsaw that invasive plant back? I hope it’s the latter.
WisCorps gave me a unique opportunity to see my actions have a very obvious and direct positive impact on a small space of public land, and it was so incredibly satisfying. Decades from now that 25 acre field will most likely be a paradise for recreation and hunting alike, and a place for me to go and reminisce. The experience gave me a life-long passion for restoration and the protection of our public lands, and it is because of WisCorps that I am where I am today.
For the past year I have been an individual placement for American Conservation Experience and have had many opportunities to work on restoration projects. Most recently I worked with Bureau of Land Management staff and Montana Conservation Corps crew members to build many water control structures in a stream very similar to Whittlesey Creek in the foothills of the Wyoming Range of the Rocky Mountains. By implementing these control structures the water will pool and increase riparian habitat to help support many species.
I am so grateful to have spent time as a Crew Leader with WisCorps, and truly, without that experience and how positive and inspiring it was, I do not know where I would be today.
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