What type of area is this? I'm not sure how much you know about fens or low prairies.A fen is basically just an area where groundwater comes to the surface. It produces an environment where certain types
of plants are found. The rest of the area is considered a low prairie, where it's usually wet, at least for most of the year. The ground is usually moist and spongy and a lot of this area around here has been ditched also for agriculture. It's probably not as wet as it normally would be, so you can walk around pretty easily on it. I think if it would have been in its natural state it would have been quite a bit more wet and you would have had a harder time walking around a lot of
this stuff. What are you working on here? We're out here today eliminating poison parsonit. It's an exotic plant, a Eurasian exotic plant. It will invade most prairies, just about anywhere in Southern Wisconsin, even up North a little bit.We just come out and try to dig it out of the high-quality areas and try to keep it out of those. It grows in other spots all around this area, but we try to concentrate
on the highest quality areas and try to eliminate it from those areas. Why is the plant dangerous? It's a very prolific plant because it's an exotic, so it doesn't have any of its natural predators that would exist. A lot of the predators that did go after it are in parts of Europe and Asia and they're not here so it's really not inhibited by anything. It can just go ahead and produce tons of seed and they [the
native plants] are very susceptible because of that. It can take over a prairie.If we didn't come out here and do this work, most of this area right out here would look pretty yellow right now. At least in a few weeks, it would look really yellow with flowers. I can show you a bunch of plants once we get out there. It will all compete, all the native vegetation. Exotics in general are the second leading cause of plants becoming scarce, endangered, or threatened.
The first leading cause would be something like habitat destruction. Could you tell us about the Reserve? There's this area out here and another piece in the back. I think it might total probably 50 acres.There's actually just a designation within that public land that exists already. There's also land that our bureau buys and that we actually own. They're actually just an entity by themselves. This
is land that's still owned by Wildlife, but since it's designated a natural area, we come out and do all the work on it. The jurisdiction goes to the Bureau of Endangered Resources. | 
