April 20, 2023 at 11:54 a.m.
The Lake Where You Live
For love of things wild
By Ted Rulseh-
My favorite involves three people in a canoe or small boat at night, approaching a pair of loons swimming with one or two downy chicks. They first mesmerize the loons with a spotlight and play a recorded loon wail call. When close by, they switch to a chick distress call.
"When the adult loons heard the distress call," Wilson writes, "they would allow the boat or canoe to approach them. Sometimes they even swam toward the boat and were easily scooped up in a musky net."
In 272 pages, Wilson vividly describes these and many other encounters with all manner of wildlife in Wisconsin, around North America, and around the world. In our state alone he trapped black bears, banded osprey chicks in their "penthouse apartments" atop tall white pines, captured and relocated problem beavers, grabbed cabin-intruder skunks by the tail (a position in which they are unable to spray) and set traps for rare and secretive martens (members of the weasel family).
Readers will come away impressed with the dedication of wildlife specialists like Wilson, but perhaps more so with the concern and care they bring to their work. Always top of mind when trapping and handling creatures is to do them no harm. If I could change one thing about this book, it might be the subtitle. Those four prosaic words don't capture the excitement, the warmth, the magic, the fascination of creatures seen through the eyes of a 30-plus-year DNR wildlife technician. There are enough anecdotes in this book - touching, humorous, enlightening, nostalgic - to fill months of evenings around campfires.
For me the most inspiring chapter is the epilogue titled "Keep the Fire Burning: A Visit with Leopold's Ghost." I'll leave it to you to find out what that means. I'll also let you discover for yourself the story behind the book's title. An undercurrent throughout Wrong Tree is the mutual respect and camaraderie that exist among wildlife biologists, technicians and researchers. Wilson names and lovingly portrays the many people he spent time with in the field, slogging through marshes, sledding across snow-covered trails, crawling into bear dens, and much more, as they go about their routines.
Aldo Leopold, in his signature work, A Sand County Almanac, wrote, "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." For people like Wilson, the work may be hard, the progress slow, and the wounds evident - but they are never alone. You can learn more about this book, illustrated by Terry Daulton, Wilson's wife, at www.wrongtreebook.com.
Ted Rulseh is a writer, author and lake advocate who lives on Birch Lake in Oneida County. His new book, "Ripple Effects," has been released by UW Press. To learn more, visit https://thelakeguy.net.
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