Patty Loew:
This week, we feature the reporting of "In Wisconsin"'s Liz Koerner. She's been with Wisconsin Public Television since 1979 when she was in college. This week, Liz joins us to explain a conservation concept that seems a bit odd because it involves the destruction of trees.

Liz Koerner:
It does. Actually, this is one of my favorite pieces and you told me about this back in the winter of 2005. It's a restoration effort at Crooked Creek Preserve and I'm always interested in environmental reporting, but even better, it features a pair of oxen named Dot and Dash in Walworth County.

Liz Koerner:
The whine of a chainsaw is not a sound you would expect to hear in a woodland owned by the Nature Conservancy, an organization known for preserving wilderness. They're cutting down pine trees because they aren't native to southeastern Wisconsin. Their goal is to restore the land to what's called an oak opening.

Man:
Ok. Good.

Liz Koerner:
The restoration is on the Nature Conservancy’s Crooked Creek preserve. Scott Thompson is the director of conservation for eastern Wisconsin. He says these remnant plant communities are very rare.

Scott Thompson:
It's what's termed as a globally endangered plant community, in fact, it's one of the most globally endangered plant communities there is.

Liz Koerner:
Oak openings once covered 5.5 million acres in the upper Midwest.   Today only about 500 acres remain. One reason they disappeared is government programs. These programs encourage planting pine trees to provide wood products and control erosion. The problem is that over times the pines grew taller than the native oaks and covered them with shade. Logging off pines here is a challenge. The hills are very steep. Once the soil is exposed it erodes into the river below.

Scott Thompson:
It's a critical issue here because we're dealing with the Mukwanago River and that's the cleanest river in southern Wisconsin and the most biologically diverse, small river system in the entire state of Wisconsin.

Liz Koerner:
Thompson said that he was concerned that commercial logging machines would tear up the soil so he  turned to a team of experts.

Dave Schrupp:
Because we're doing the work, we aren't gouging up the ground or tearing things up.

Liz Koerner:
Dave Schrupp raised this pair of burly boys. He named them Dot and Dash. Schrupp explains that oxen are the only work animals suited to these steep hills.

Dave Schrupp:
I know they had some horse loggers come out and look at this job and when they saw the steepness of the slopes over to our right, they weren't interested.

Liz Koerner:
Oxen are suited to working on this project in some other important ways.

Dave Schrupp:
For the most part they're really easy going. They're real good with little kids and they're bothered by very little, the chainsaws, the trucks, whatever is going on. It's not that they're oblivious to it, they're just with me so they feel very comfortable. They trust that I'm not going to get them into any trouble.            

Liz Koerner:
Volunteers seem comfortable with the oxen, too. The shifts on these workdays fill up quickly. But Schrupp says even though his boys weigh in at 4500 pounds, they're light on the land.

Dave Schrupp:
If you come back in the spring, the only thing you'll find are more spots that are more fertile than others that will mark the fact that we've been here. You probably won't even find a track.

Liz Koerner:
And in time, the hills will return to wild flowers, prairie grasses and majestic old oaks.

Liz Koerner:
Since 2005, the Nature Conservancy has continued its restoration efforts on the Crooked Creek preserve, but that was the only time they hired oxen.

Patty Loew:
Great report. I understand that Dot and Dash have a new logging gig?

Liz Koerner:
Dave said he couldn't afford to feed them so he sold them to a logger in Stevens Point a couple of years ago. This spring he adopted another ox calf named Howard. Dave says he needs help hauling logs out of the woods to heat his home.