Sacred Earth

Plus: EHD in Washington County, a Leopold puppet show, and 1,250 acres saved

Forrest Koslowski
August 20, 2026

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Mornin’ to the Northwoods Land Trust, which just turned 25 and marked it with a two-minute film about the country it has spent those years protecting. This is the Wiscampsin Weekly, the email that gets you in the know on the Wisconsin outdoors in 5 minutes or less. New reader? Subscribe here.

This week’s weekly:

🦌 EHD turns up in Washington County deer

🎭 Puppet play rewrites Leopold's saddest essay

🌲 1,250 Vilas County acres saved from subdivision

🌾 STORY OF THE WEEK: Sacred Earth

🦌 EHD turns up in Washington County deer LINK

Two wild deer found dead near Richfield and West Bend tested positive for epizootic hemorrhagic disease, or EHD. Landowners had been calling in a cluster of dead deer, a lot of them in or near water.
Midges spread it, the same no-see-ums that chase you off the dock at dusk. The virus doesn't touch people, so handling a deer or eating the venison is fine.
The DNR says these outbreaks burn out fast and rarely dent the herd long term, usually ending with the first hard frost. Spot a sick or dead deer near water? Report it online or at 608-267-0866. They can't come haul it off, though.

🎭 Puppet play rewrites Leopold's saddest essay LINK

Appleton artist Julia Blair read Leopold's "Marshland Elegy," decided the ending was too much of a bummer, and rewrote it as a puppet show. "The Lonely Marsh" debuted this summer.
She hit marshes around the state recording crane calls, wrote the music herself, and built puppets out of cattails she pulled from the muck. The farmer character isn't a villain, just a guy who doesn't get the marsh yet. Aren't we all.
Wisconsin has lost half its wetlands since the 1800s, but sandhills went from two dozen pairs in Leopold's day to around 90,000 in the upper Midwest. Next showing is 11 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 23 in Plymouth.

🌲 1,250 Vilas County acres saved from subdivision LINK

A promise Michael Uihlein made his parents decades ago finally came through Thursday. The Natural Resources Board approved a nearly $1 million conservation easement on 1,250 acres in Vilas County, two square miles of the upnort forest that usually ends up subdivided.
A $600,000 federal Forest Legacy grant and the last $305,000 sitting in Knowles-Nelson covered the tab. The family still owns it, it stays on the tax rolls, and it stays open for hunting, fishing, hiking and skiing.
No motorized traffic allowed. Almost three miles of bike trail near Emil Lake hook into the Aginokak Trail, and the property feeds watersheds for both Lake Superior and the Wisconsin River. Closing is set for October.

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🌾 STORY OF THE WEEK: Sacred Earth LINK

You've been to Devil's Lake. Probably swam in it. The Ho-Chunk name for that water is Tewakącąk, which comes out to something like the lake where the spirits live.

Somewhere in the 1800s those spirits turned into a devil. Best anybody can tell it was two things at once: French voyageurs spooked by the echo coming off the bluffs, and Christian settlers who heard "spirit" and reached for the nearest word they had. Melanie Tallmadge Sainz, a citizen of the Ho-Chunk Nation, doesn't think it was that innocent.

"What better way to sever the ties to a group of people on whom they forced removal and genocide," she said.

These days, a few miles off between the Baraboo Bluffs and the Wisconsin River, sit 7,500 acres the Ho-Chunk call Mąą Wakącąk (sacred Earth).

You probably know it as the old Badger Army Ammunition Plant.

Here's the part that sticks with us. That ground has been taken three separate times. The Ho-Chunk were forced off after the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Euro-American farmers worked it for the next century, until FDR dropped $65 million on a munitions plant and moved them off too. Fourteen hundred buildings went up out there, cooking powder for World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Then the Army shut it down in 1997, and the folks who'd spent their whole working lives in those buildings lost it as well.

Tallmadge Sainz carries all of that at once. Both her parents worked at the plant. And Ho-Chunk veterans, she says, are held in very high esteem. "There's a certain reverence that goes along with that position of being a warrior."

Nobody could agree on what to do with the place for years. Then-Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin shook loose the money and the time to do it, and everybody sat down and worked out what they actually agreed on before a single acre got handed out.

The DNR took 3,300 acres. The Dairy Forage Research Center took 2,100. And the Ho-Chunk Nation got about 1,500 back, on the same ground they'd been driven off of.

Tallmadge Sainz’s opinion on the word landowner?

"The Earth is our mother. How can you own your mother?" she said. "We prefer to call ourselves land stewards."

The plant left a mess behind and cleaning it up is slow going. A few hundred acres are prairie again.

The DNR side is open and free to walk, and late August is about when that prairie hits its stride. There's an Explore the Badger Lands app if you want the history as you go, and a museum on site.

"There are so many walls being built today," Tallmadge Sainz said. "We need more bridges."

Go see it, and get out 'der.

WISCAMPSIN WEEKLY POLL

Last Week's Trivia Check

We asked about the secret behind the Snowy Tree Cricket's chirp. A huge 62% of you knew how to use nature's built-in thermometer! As one reader fondly recalled in the comments: "One of the coolest things you learn as a kid!"

The Correct Answer: The current air temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.

The Takeaway: Thanks to "Dolbear’s Law," crickets are living thermometers. Because they are cold-blooded, their chemical reactions speed up in the heat and slow down in the cool. Count the chirps of a Snowy Tree Cricket in 14 seconds, add 40, and you'll get the surprisingly accurate outdoor temperature in Fahrenheit!

This Week's Trivia

If you’ve got trail cameras set up around Wisconsin right now, you're watching for one of late August's coolest transformations: bucks losing their velvet. Within a span of just 24 to 48 hours, a buck can go from a full, fuzzy velvet rack to completely hard, polished bone.

While many folks believe bucks furiously rub trees just to scrape it off, what is the actual biological trigger that causes a buck's velvet to rapidly die and shed?

Give it a gut check and click a response below:

A review from the trail… Zero boos this week. And to the three-cheese crowd, we hear ya.

Well, how'd we do this week?

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