Every year, the Department of Natural Resources acknowledges the importance of volunteers in caring for Wisconsin’s natural areas by naming a steward of the year.
Heidi Hankley received the honor this year. For the last decade, she’s tended to a 145-acre site in southwest Wisconsin called York Prairie State Natural Area.
Driving us across the Driftless terrain in her little Prius, Hankley says her love of nature was nurtured during childhood summers spent in nearby Sauk County.
“I grew up in Madison, but my folks had a little place outside of Spring Green. Honestly, we would just go out and be running all over that place. I’m very grateful for that,” Hankley says.
After studying wildlife ecology and environmental studies and working for the DNR and the National Park Service, life, marriage and children brought Hankley back to Madison.
Before long, she and her husband started looking for a place to build. Their criteria: A place they could afford to buy along with a few spare acres.
Hankley wanted to give her two young daughters what she had relished in her childhood.
The Hankleys found a remote spot southwest of Madison, outside the small town of Blanchardville. The York Prairie Natural Area is just a few miles away.
When she decided to homeschool her kids, York Prairie was a perfect place to, as Hankley describes it, “do."
“That’s kind of how we homeschooled, was doing. So we would round up other homeschooling families that were interested. It was a really fun way to learn and worked on the prairie — mostly seed collecting, some invasive removal,” she shares.
Even after her daughters headed off to college, Hankley kept up her stewardship of York Prairie — clearing brush, pulling invasive plants and planting native ones.
"In the areas we’ve been working, we’re starting to see native savannah species just coming out on its own. So those plants have just been suppressed under this big honeysuckle layer and all we had to do is get rid of that,” Hankley explains.
Early on she met a kindred spirit — Jim McDonald. Hankley says they’ve become restoration collaborators. “[He] lives over the hill and he loves prairies and so we just started going there together,” she says.
They’ve spent endless summer hours collecting seeds from native plants to later scatter within York Prairie. Hankley says it feels like they’re connecting with an ancient ritual.
“We just have a bag and we just wandering the landscape; what’s ready, collecting over the years you get to remember like where that stand of rattlesnake master is,” she says.
Hankley says they’re guided and assisted by DNR volunteer coordinator Jared Urban.
“When we’re out, especially during the active growing season, we can call him and say, 'Hey, there’s a big sweet clover patch that’s starting to bloom,' and he then can send crews out to deal with that.” Hankley adds, "The DNR has a general plan of what they want to do and then we help carry that out."
There’s more to Hankley’s story. She’s not only committed to the state prairie project, Hankley’s gradually restoring a bit of prairie that bumps up next to her family’s home.
“Our property is just under seven acres and it’s half prairie planting and half wooded and we’re just starting to work on the woods,” she says.
Art infused with the nature that surrounds her is also central to Hankley’s life.
When she’s not whacking, burning or gathering seeds, she’s often immersed in ceramic or printmaking.
“Over the last two or three years, I’ve been doing a body of work that’s really engaged with my little seven acres — collecting plants, extracting dyes and most recently that clearing we did in our woods, I burned each individual trees species, made some ash and am working on making ceramic glazes with it,” Hankley says.
Reflecting on being named state natural areas volunteer of the year, Hankley hopes to inspire others to join in the work.
"I have background in ecology, but you don’t need that. There’s always somebody who knows what they’re doing. And if you can identify the things we don’t want to collect — Queen Anne’s lace or the brome grass — you can learn those pretty quickly and then you’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t know what this plant is but it’s a native and I’ll collect it.'” She adds, "Over the years you really can learn a lot.”
Bottom line, Hankley says restoring bits and pieces of the natural world matters.
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