What's at stake - the Lives in the Woods at Watten Ponds
Minnesota once had a forest called the Big Woods. It ran in a band about forty miles wide from Mankato to Monticello — more than two thousand square miles of elm, sugar maple, basswood and oak.
About two percent of it is left in stands large enough to still be called forest. Less than a quarter of what remains is protected. The Minnesota DNR says hundreds of acres a year still go to subdivisions, roads and golf courses.
There is a piece of it here in Shorewood, and a developer wants to clear it.
What's in there
Every photograph in the video was taken in these woods. Here is some of what lives there:
Bur oak, a hundred and eighty years old. Barred owl. Eastern screech owl. Pileated woodpecker. Wood duck. Green heron. Wild turkey. White-tailed deer. Painted turtle. Snapping turtle. Gray tree frog. Chorus frog. American toad. Queen bumblebee. Trout lily. Ghost pipe.
Large areas of woods like this are anchors - it's the home and grocery store for animals that visit the rest of the city. You're borrowing your owls and bumblebees from here.
Some of them can't leave
Ghost pipe has no chlorophyll at all. It cannot feed itself. It lives off a fungus that lives on the roots of old trees. Dig one up and you cut it off from the only food source it has. It cannot be transplanted. It cannot be grown in a nursery. No landscaping plan brings it back.
Trout lily is slower still. Its seeds travel about as far as an ant can carry them. In one long-running study, seedlings had not flowered after eighteen years.
These are not things you replace. When the understory becomes sod, they are gone, and they stay gone.
Some of them do leave — and that is the part that reaches your street
A green heron nesting on that wetland in June is in Mexico or Central America by January. A wood duck hen and a dozen ducklings do not spend their lives on one pond.
Which means the animals in those woods are not only that woods' animals. They are the ones your neighbors see three blocks away. The snapping turtle crossing a road in June came out of water like that. The owl you hear at night hunts a territory far larger than any one lot.
If they cannot live there, they do not get here.
That is the part that is easy to miss. A woods is not a display case. It is a source. What happens inside it shows up — or stops showing up — in yards all over this city.
What you can do
The City Council decides what happens next, and they read their email.
There is a template on that page if you would rather not start from a blank screen. It takes about two minutes.
And if you want to know when something is actually about to be decided, sign up for the list on the same page. That is how most people find out in time to do anything about it.
Sources: Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, “Last Stands of the Big Woods,” Minnesota Conservation Volunteer. Trout lily establishment data from Iowa State University’s Understory project. Ghost pipe depends on fungi in the family Russulaceae associated with mature tree roots.
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