Listen to Lake Effect later this morning and meet more Door County residents working to protect its environment.
If you turn your thoughts to Door County, you might conjure up shops, cottages, cherry pie and beautiful stretches of water. But one group is trying to preserve pieces of the county’s scenic beauty for generations to come. WUWM Environmental Reporter Susan Bence visits an ecological gem that the Door County Land Trust hopes to conserve.
I follow Dan Burke’s little car as it twists and turns to our destination, the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal Property.
We walk from a small parking area onto sink-your-toes-into warm white sand below.
A father and son come our way, fishing poles in hand.
Burke says this Lake Michigan beach and the lush woods behind us belong to Sturgeon Bay Utilities. Plans to build a coal-fueled power plant here never materialized. Instead the spot has become an unofficial park.
“It’s developed quite a love within the community here and it’s used quite a lot and as you can see it’s just a beautiful, beautiful site,” Burke says.
Burke leads the Door County Land Trust. Its goal is to make sure special spaces like this aren’t swallowed up and developed.
“The last ten years there’s been a really concerted effort to identify the best places in Door County,” Burke says.
“So what are the best places,” I ask.
“Door County has more rare and endangered plants and animals than anywhere else in the state of Wisconsin. But then just the scenic character of Door County is another component. Kind of blending those together and see what you come up with,” Burke says.
Burke says this spot meets those criteria. We’re standing on a ridge of sand that swells out of the beach.
“There’s 23 ancient shorelines here. It sort of marks the lake levels over the past few thousands of years after the glaciers have retreated. And there’s actually new ridges that are forming. This is a dynamic living system. This new ridge right along the lake here has formed in the last 10 years,” Burke says.
Burke wants to show off a bit of the densely wooded land behind the sandy beach. He introduces me to a deep green, itty bitty Christmas tree shaped ferns called lycopodium.
“There’s parts of this property where it’s just covered with the lycopodium. It’s really a neat plant,” Burke says.
Burke says this wooded spot attracts flocks of birds as they travel along Lake Michigan.
“It’s got such a large intact forest canopy, when they have to settle down and feed and forage, they tend to drop into large wooded areas, so you can always here the song birds singing when you walk into the woods here,” Burke says.
Seven years ago, Burke and the Land Trust began talking with Sturgeon Bay Utilities about permanently preserving the parcel. He says the process has been slow and laborious.
Once Burke won over the owner to his way of thinking, the utility had to decide how much land it could afford to give up and how much it should keep in case the community needed a new well or a waste treatment facility. That question took several years of engineering studies and surveys, to figure out.
“They need a total of 10 acres. So here they own 380 acres of which they really only need 10 to cover the utilities needs in the foreseeable future,” Burke says.
Whoever hopes to take stewardship of the remaining land will have to come up with $2 million to purchase it. Burke has applied for and received both federal and state funds for the project.
“So between those two grant sources we’re estimating, even though it’s not a done deal yet, that we have about $300,000 to raise in the community,” Burke says.
One thing that’s helped his cause is the pitcher’s thistle. We return to the edge of the beach where he directs my attention to the plant, poking its thorny head out of the sand. The thistle is federally threatened.
“We have very fragile habitats with lots of rare and endangered plants and animals and there’s a lot of invasive plants that are coming on. How do you deal with those? How do you get ride of those? How do you enhance the habitat quality of the site and then the public use. Where do you want the trails,” Burke says.
Burke says it’s going to take more money and partnerships such as with the Door County Parks Department, to properly protect and manage this gem.
He says so far, the Land Trust has permanently preserved one percent of Door County’s most beautiful areas.
Last night Sturgeon Bay’s city council approved the sale of the ship canal property.
Dan Burke says the Door County Land Trust will move full speed ahead to raise the necessary money to create the preserve.
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