In 2021 the Winona Bird Club wrote the City of Winona, encouraging an inventory of natural resources at Prairie Island Park and a conservation plan. The city has responded nicely by partnering with Minnesota Land Trust to create a habitat management plan for the John Latsch gift.
The Winona Bird Club celebrates with Carol Schumacher’s program “Prairie Island: Magical Migration and Notable Nesting,” Wed. Sept. 3, 7 PM, Sobieski Lodge. Carol has conducted bird studies for U.S. Fish and Wildlife on migration and American white pelicans and has done County Biological Surveys across Minnesota and in many state parks. She has birded P. I. with super-expertise for decades and considers it her “bird home.” She loves questions and suggests you look up Baltimore Oriole, Indigo Bunting and Yellow Warbler on the Merlin app to prepare for her talk.
Bird club programs are free, open to the public, and we invite you to attend and share your favorite Prairie Island story and concerns after the program. Personally, I’ll always remember my mother’s visit from Connecticut during the 1980s, when American woodcocks launched their sensational sky-dances from what is now P.I.’s dog park, adjacent prairie and the Kiwanis playground. Woodcocks thrilled us, ascending to dizzying heights at dusk. Unfortunately, they also descended back to nest sites amid trash piles and motorized vehicles.
The late Dave Palmquist, then the bird club’s president, and other citizens changed things, leading trash cleanups, working with the city to eliminate motorized traffic. The club also spearheaded the creation of a self-guided nature trail and a K-6 curriculum for P. I. The John Latsch Memorial Board, club and city set aside part of P.I. for environmental education and restored six acres of dry-sand prairie, a very rare ecosystem where 150+ prairie plants grew. The restoration entailed prescribed burns, seed-collecting and years of citizen-volunteers helping.
“The fact that so many like-souls got interested and dedicated to Prairie Island is what I hold dear,” says Kathy Palmquist, Dave’s surviving wife. “We were honored to continue John Latsch’s dream of preserving Prairie Island Park.”
Rock Leaf Water Environmental LLC will produce the current plan by the end of October. The plan will 1.) inventory the park, using Minnesota’s Native Plant Community Classification system; 2.) recommend actions to maintain or enhance important habitats; 3.) describe soils etc.; 4.). identify state and federal-listed species.
Prairie Island has hundreds of wetland acres used by state-endangered cricket frogs in exceptional abundance, state-listed gulls, terns, grebes, red-shouldered hawks and the seriously declining least bittern and black-crown night heron. Trumpeter swans nest at P.I., reminding us that conservation measures can work. Extirpated from Minnesota by the 1950s, they’ve been successfully reintroduced.
I’ll never forget Dave Palmquist beaming about state-listed Sullivant’s milkweed at P.I., or Howard Munson (now 102-years old, still birding) showing me prairie smoke blooming there decades ago. Birders see more than 20 warbler species at P.I. on a good day during migration–a sign of crucial stopover habitat necessary for birds who fly thousands of miles per year.
A National Academy of Sciences study in 2022 flagged “the agricultural Midwest as likely being a human-created barrier for autumn migrants,” due to landscape changes and, I believe, neonicotinoids. This makes protecting the Mississippi River habitat, heavily used by birds, more essential than ever.
Though white-nosed syndrome has depleted Minnesota’s bats, state-listed big brown and tri-colored and other bats forage at P.I, and roost trees may exist in P.I.’s floodplain forest, which helps mitigate climate change, sequestering carbon along with the prairie’s deep roots.
Please, join us to continue Winona’s long tradition of protecting Prairie Island.
Richie Swanson is the Winona Bird Club’s president. His latest short story, “Trading with Raises-red-dust” at Hamilton Stone Review’s website, is set at Effigy Mounds on the Mississippi. RichieSwanson.com.
