In December, a lot of stewardship work took place at the east section of Draper Twin Lake Park. The Twin Lakes beavers engineered an improvement to their habitat and Oakland Township’s stewardship crew took on a major effort to restore habitat for all the other plants and animals – including us humans!

My friend Aaron Carroll and I arrived in mid-December to find that we human visitors benefited from all that work as well. With decades of invasive species cleared by invasive shrub mowing, the natural landscape of Draper East rolled out in front of us. Vistas suddenly appeared that for decades were hidden behind thickets of invasive shrubs and vines. And though we didn’t know it when we arrived that morning, the prairie to the north was about to be refreshed with prescribed fire that very afternoon. Come see what we found!

Here’s a map to help you get oriented. (Hint:Look for letters in green print for this blog.)

Beaver “Stewardship” Meant Improving Their Habitat with a Lovely Curved Dam!

You may remember that I reported last June about a possible solution that Dr. Ben VanderWeide and the stewardship team found for a beaver dam that was raising the water level to damaging heights for neighbors around Twin Lake. Well, the “beaver baffle” installed then still seems to be helping keep the lake level down for the neighbors. (We’ll see what happens after a big snow melt!) And it seems that the Twin Lake beavers (Castor canadensis) are comfortable enough with the new water depth to stick around and do some new architectural work that shouldn’t affect humans at all.

They saw no good reason not to make a few “improvements” in the stream that flows out of the marsh beyond the first dam. They evidently felt the marsh between the sections of the park could be enhanced by a little deeper water. They must have heard or sensed in their sensitive tails the ripple of water in the stream called the McClure Drain that runs out of the eastern Twin Lake, flowing southeast through the marshy area in the center of the park. I imagine these clever rodents, never ones to ignore the sound of running water, swam down to have a look and thought, “Aha! We should build a dam here, too!” 

This time they built a beautifully curving dam as you’ll see in the photos below. Remarkably elegant shape! And this one, luckily, won’t affect anyone’s property!

A muskrat had already built a push-up feeding platform in the marshy area beyond the dam, but I doubt it will object to the beaver’s architecture or the deepening water. Wikipedia reports that muskrats have been known to share lodges with beavers in the winter. [Hint: Look in the upper center of the photo.]

Birds Forage for Wild Food on a Winter Morning

Once we found the new beaver dam site, Aaron and I headed off around Draper Marsh. We hadn’t gone far when we noticed birds competing to eat something important in the crook of a broken aspen trunk that had fallen toward the water. I didn’t get a photo of the bright red Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) that first caught my eye at the birch. I did manage to get some of the others; the competition to peck at the break in the trunk was fast and furious! Aaron and I had no idea what they found so delicious, but I’m guessing it was a stash of insect pupae, eggs or larvae ensconced beneath the surface of the lichen. Protein and fat are precious commodities to birds on a winter morning!

A short distance further down the trail, Aaron spotted two little birds looking at each other as if we’d interrupted a conversation. Their striped breasts led me to ID them as female House Finches; Aaron felt confident that they were a more unusual species - Pine Siskins (Spinus pinus)! Naturalist and bird-bander Allen Chartier confirmed that Aaron was right. These gregarious little birds are seen year ’round at the “tip of the mitten” or in the Upper Peninsula; here in southeast Michigan, they are more common in the winter. They’re erratic migrators, though, so it’s tough to predict where they’ll show up.

Siskins can tolerate really cold weather! According to Cornell University’s Ornithology website, allaboutbirds.org, in temperatures as low as -94°F, they ramp up their metabolism to as much as five times their normal rate for several hours! “They also put on half again as much winter fat as their Common Redpoll and American Goldfinch relatives.” Now that’s a bird well-prepared for winter!

A bright-eyed Downy Woodpecker (Picoides pubescens) searched along a limb for frozen caterpillars or insect eggs. Insects and other invertebrates use lichen for food, shelter and camouflage during the summer, so no wonder birds forage under loose bark and inside lichen during the winter. The search for nutrition never stops for our avian neighbors!

Hearing the hoarse, rattling call of the Sandhill Crane (Antigone canadensis), Aaron turned his lens to the sky and got a photo of three late migrators overhead, their feet elegantly pointed like ballerinas. The warm weather must have seduced them to stay a bit longer than usual.

On our way along the prairie, Aaron caught sight of a winter visitor who breeds each summer on the Arctic tundra, a Tree Sparrow (Spizelloides arborea). These winter migrators with their two-toned beaks blended in so beautifully among the button-like seed heads of Wild Bergamot/Bee Balm (Monarda fistulosa), that we both didn’t realize that we’d seen three of them until Aaron processed his fine photo! 

Even though it turned out that we saw all these birds in the morning before a prescribed burn, they still had the rest of the park and the nearby fields in which to forage safely. Ben never plans a prescribed burn for an entire park at once. And the whole reason these migrators are here is that they can count on plentiful native wildflower seed during their sojourn each year in the comparative warmth of a Michigan winter. The ongoing stewardship work will keep those seeds coming! So let’s see the transformation humans made to restore the native habitat that supports these winged neighbors.

Beavers Weren’t the Only Creatures Transforming Habitat that December Day!

Beavers, of course, use local wood to build their dams and lodges. But the biggest amount of wood removed at Draper East this season was done by humans using a track loader with a forestry mulching head. And the result is wonderful! All over the park, the contractor’s mighty machine eliminated huge thickets of non-native shrubs that had blanketed the land and provided little or no nutrition for wildlife. 

Mowing Invasive Shrubs and Vines Exposes New Vistas at the Marsh

The kettle wetland at Draper East is a “floating mat marsh,” made of tightly entangled plants and their roots mixed with peat and unanchored to the soil beneath the water. Birds often nest on such floating mats since the water around and beneath them protects them like a moat. In 2020, I saw a pair of Sandhill Cranes (see below) peacefully foraging on the floating marsh. Years earlier Ben saw a pair nesting there. [Please note: A floating marsh will NOT hold a human; we’d sink right through it!]

But seeing wildlife on the marsh had become increasingly difficult over the years as non-native shrubs and vines had formed what Ben calls a “bathtub ring” around its shore. On the left below is my cluttered view from the east side of the marsh in November of 2016. I took the photo on the right after forestry mowing provided an expanded, open view of the marsh! An exciting first for me!

I’m looking forward to being able to see more wildlife on the marsh and more native plant species encircling the marsh in the next few years.

Invasive shrub mowing always looks a bit rough at first; the ground is strewn with chunks of broken wood which eventually break down in the soil. Next summer, resprouting invasive shrubs will be carefully treated to create space for native plants. The stewardship staff has already seeded these newly mown areas with native grasses, sedges and Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) to give it some quick color and get it on the road to a healthier habitat. If we’re lucky, in the next few years, perhaps some native plants, formerly shaded or crowded out by invasive shrubs, will emerge once again on their own. And from now on, we can all enjoy largely unobstructed views of the rolling landscape and the floating marsh.

Prescribed Fire to Refresh the Prairie

The native wildflowers and grasses of the Draper Prairie needed some fire. The area was farmed until about 2010, then planted to native prairie wildflowers and grasses in the fall of 2015. Burns had been scheduled for the area many times, but never completed because of weather. Several years of thatch had built up year by year, which chokes out smaller wildflowers and prevents seedlings from finding open places to put down roots. The dry stems also sequester nutrients the plants need. So this was the season to burn the Draper prairie, continuing the restoration of this former farm field.

Ben hired a professional crew for this large area with neighbors nearby, who of course were notified earlier by mail and in-person on the day of the fire. Ben always tries to choose days and times when the wind will take the smoke straight up as much as possible, dispersing it to prevent bothering nearby people or their animals. As usual, the fire is planned to burn inward from fire breaks created around the perimeter. The contractor positions crew members with backpack water tanks and other equipment around the area. And then fire crew members begin to drip a low flame from their canisters. 

The flames turn the thatch into fertilizer by releasing some of the nutrients stored in them back into the soil. Eventually the fire converges at the center of the prairie and dies as the fuel is consumed. Crew members then extinguish any embers or smoldering wood with their water tanks.

Fire keeps the prairie healthy just as it did when set afire by lightning for thousands of years. It will be a treat to see the colorful flowers seeded in over several years come back in greater numbers and with more vigor. Here’s a slideshow featuring some of the lovely native wildflowers and grasses that have flourished at the Draper Prairie because of prescribed fire and seeding. 

As you’ll see below, our township Stewardship Specialist Grant Vander Laan and volunteers sowed more wildflower seed the day after the prescribed burn. In this case, seeding is simply giving the prairie a boost by adding more species that weren’t in the original mix, or that didn’t establish. The mix they scattered is native seed gathered in our parks by volunteers last fall.

December is an excellent time to plant native seeds. Rain, frost and snow push the seeds down into the soil and the winter cold gets them prepared to crack open and germinate in the spring. Since this seed was enriching a previously sown prairie, it could be spread by hand just in certain areas. When seeding a new prairie planting, planting is typically done by hand in a grid pattern or by tractor. Volunteers are crucial to successful stewardship work in our parks. A big thank you to Grant, Debbie, Aaron, George and Ethan!

The Survival Skills that Native Plants Can Teach Us

It’s easy to despair in this era of extreme climate crisis. You know the litany: disastrous flooding, melting glaciers, monster forest fires that burn for months, and more blizzards, hurricanes, tsunamis and tornadoes than a meteorologist can shake a pointer at! 

But working as a stewardship volunteer and learning about native habitat restoration helps me cope. Native plants have an amazing set of survival skills. Their roots grow deep for up to three years before they bloom; they’re prepared then for surviving droughts, floods, winter cold and summer heat.

Most of them are adapted to fire, like Hoary Puccoon (Lithospermum canescens) which emerged after a prescribed burn along the Paint Creek Trail. It hadn’t been seen in decades! 

Native seeds wait patiently without sun or rain beneath thickets of invasive plants for long years and then come up in profusion like the Golden Alexanders (Zizia aurea) that appeared after invasive shrub mowing near the Wet Prairie on the Paint Creek Trail.

I’m impressed with the persistence of native Poke Milkweed (Asclepias exultata) in the shady little garden outside our back door which was skeletonized by feeding insects for two years in a row and then rose to bloom gloriously the third year. It fed those chewing insects, hunkered down in its roots, and emerged again to nourish a native Bumblebee (maybe Bombus impatiens). 

So take heart. We’ll keep looking for ways to help nature around us recover and support the stewardship professionals and crew who are doing the heavy lifting. Perhaps we can learn to be as adaptable as Hoary Puccoon, as patient as Golden Alexander and as resilient as Poke Milkweed. We owe it to the future. Chin up and on we go! Thanks for being part of it all.