Wisconsin 2023 - Day 6

June 9, 2023 (Friday)

This was our last full day in Wisconsin, and we decided to spend it exploring Horicon Marsh National Wildlife Refuge. We'd visited briefly on our trip north from Milwaukee, and again for a couple of hours last night, but this would be our day to really check it out. 

We started at first light on the auto tour loop.  It had been quite busy the evening before, but we had it to ourselves this morning. 

The first part of the tour loop passes through large fields and marshes, with scattered trees. Most of the birds were seen at a distance. We got good looks at a Willow Flycatcher that was actually sitting in some willows. 

Willow Flycatcher

We also had a flyover of one of the many White Pelicans using the marsh for the summer. It always seems odd to see pelicans far from any ocean or coastline, but White Pelicans spread out across the United States Midwest and up into Canada to breed on freshwater lakes and marshes. 

American White Pelican

We parked and spent a couple of hours on the Egret Trail and its floating boardwalk section. In addition to the many Black Terns that we'd seen the previous evening, we picked up a number of other species. 

Barn Swallow

Eastern Kingbird

Red-winged Blackbird

Back at the parking area this Yellow Warbler male was perched in the sun. 

Yellow Warbler

As we continued on the tour road, we came across this Common Snapping Turtle laying her eggs alongside the road. We come across this many times. The turtles like to come up from lakes, marshes, streams etc. to slightly higher ground to lay their eggs. That often seems to put them on roadway shoulders. 

Common Snapping Turtle laying eggs

After completing the auto tour loop, we drove over to the NWR Headquarters building.  We went inside briefly but it was a pretty simple set-up and the volunteer working the counter was involved in deep conversation with one of the staff, so we didn't hang around for long. 

We repeated the Discovery Trail that we'd walked several evenings ago, and saw pretty much the same birds. 

We continued driving around the large marshy area, only some of which is within the boundaries of the National Wildlife Refuge. Darned if we didn't come across an even larger Visitor Center, this one called The Horicon Marsh Education and Visitors Center, and run by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. 

We went inside the large visitor center, but they were having school field trips and it was kind of a madhouse. The staff was busy with kids so we looked around a bit on our own. There were some nice displays, including this display of owls and raptors found on the marsh.

The marsh has a long history of human habitation, with nomadic hunters arriving around 12,000 years ago. Fossil remains of Wooly Mammoths have been found in the area, and this huge metal sculpture of a Woolly Mammoth and nearby hunter was next to the parking lot. The mammoth is made up of thousands of short sections so steel rebar. 

It was sunny and getting warm, so we called it an afternoon and returned to our cottage to read and relax.

The next morning we had a relaxed drive back to Milwaukee, where we turned in the rental car and made our 10:30 flight to Chicago, and then our flight to San Antonio which arrived at about 5:00 p.m.  We returned to the airport hotel, recovered our car and drove on home. It was nice not to be getting back in at midnight and having to stay the extra night. 

Teri has picked up a couple of magnets along the way. Wisconsin definitely plays up their license plate logo "America's Dairyland".  

Overall we didn't find Wisconsin to be as interesting as Michigan in terms of natural areas or bird life, but the interesting factory tours made up for it. Overall, a nice place to spend a week. 

Wisconsin 2023 - Day 5

June 8, 2023 (Thursday)

We switched things around a little today, doing our factory tour first thing. We were heading off to visit Union Star Cheese, where a fresh batch of cheese is made each morning. Teri had called and they recommended arriving around 7:00 to see the completion of the process. 

We arrived at 7:00, walked inside, and found ourselves in a hot, steamy room!  They start the cheesemaking process at 4:00 a.m. each day, so had already completed much of it. When we arrived the 10,500 pounds of milk had already been pasteurized, rennet and bacteria added, and the solution heated to 106 degrees for almost an hour. Most of the whey had been drained off and the curds had been solidified into dozens of slabs of soft cheese. 

When we arrived they had just started feeding the slabs into a machine that was chopping them into about 1" cubes. 

This process continued down the length of a long stainless steel trough.  The cubes were stirred continuously while cutting continued. 

Did I mention that the room was hot and humid?  These guys were really putting in the work!

Once all of the slabs had been chopped up, copious amounts of salt were broadcast onto the cubes as the entire batch was continuously mixed. This is not a low-sodium product!

Mixing continued as the salt causes the last of the whey to release and drain off. 

The end result was a little over 1000 pounds of (very) fresh cheese curds. Their motto is "So fresh they squeak", which is the truth!

We were given samples of the still warm cheese curds to try.  They do actually give a little "squeak" when you bite into them.  They seemed really salty and I wonder if that dissipates some with time. They not only sell curds in the store, but they deliver them to grocery and convenience stores and restaurants every morning. One morning each week they make string cheese. 

While some of the curds are sold fresh, much is processed into different types of cheese by adding in other ingredients, molding it into blocks, and in some cases aging it for up to two years. 

The refrigerated aging room.  

Some of this cheese has been here for almost 2 years.

Plenty of varieties for purchase.

It had been another really interesting tour, this time with a little snack at the end!

From Union Star we headed less than 30 minutes north to the Mosquito Hill Nature Preserve. This is a 441 acre preserve operated by the county. It borders the Wolf River and contains a stand of bottomland hardwood forest. 

In the Visitor Center parking lot there was a beautiful pollinator garden with a metal sculpture depicting their namesake. 

It was warm and sunny and luckily we didn't run across many of these guys, and none this large!

We enjoyed a nice walk through the forest and out in some clearings. We saw a few of their breeding birds in the forest, and dragonflies and butterflies in the open fields. 

Baltimore Oriole

Clubtail type Dragonfly

Interesting fly

House Wren singing

Little Wood-Satyr

Red-spotted Admiral

Rose-breasted Grosbeak

I had been unseasonably warm the past couple of days (the story of our life...) and things were getting pretty quiet, so we headed back toward our cottage, got lunch, and relaxed outside for the rest of the afternoon. 

That evening we headed over to the Horicon Marsh NWR for a quick trip around the auto loop road. We planned to come back the next morning but wanted to get a preview. 

There is a floating boardwalk section and we headed out onto it. We saw quite a few Black Terns which are birds we don't get to see very often. Most terns are saltwater birds, but not these. They were zooming around, occasionally dropping to the water's surface to (hopefully) pick off a small fish. 

Black Tern with fish

There were also Tree Swallows catching insects over the water. It was a good place to end the day. 

Tree Swallow

Next: Horicon Marsh and the steel Mammoth

Wisconsin 2023 - Day 4

June 7, 2023 (Wednesday)

Today was moving day so we packed up early and headed south.  We wanted to return to the main Visitor Center area of the George W. Mead State Wildlife Area, as we'd arrived pretty late during our first visit. 

We made good time and arrived before they even had the main gate open, but we'd learned that they had a satellite parking lot outside of the gate with a pedestrian entrance onto their trail system. 

The trail passed first through a forested area and then went around a series of ponds and marshy areas.

Common Yellowthroat

Dickcissel

There was a viewing blind at the end of a boardwalk spur, and as we approached we were greeted by a Northern Flicker on the blind itself. 

We had a nice view of the large pond and meadows as we circled the pond and looked back toward the Visitor Center. 

There were Trumpeter Swans nesting in the various ponds, and we saw one with two babies, called cygnets. 

After a pleasant few hours at the Wildlife Area we got back into our car and heading for the next factory tour on Teri's list.  Knigge Farm, located in Omro, Wisconsin was the first dairy farm in North America to install a robotic milking system. 

We'd called ahead, and were met by Pete, the owner of the farm. He was very friendly and enthusiastic about showing us the operation.  

The main barn was a long building, divided lengthwise by a wide concrete corridor.  Half of the cattle were on each side, and their feed was dropped along the edge of the corridor. Pete explained that the feed is "silage", which is the entire corn plant, chopped up and sealed under plastic sheathing while still green and moist. It ferments in place and retains a higher level of nutrients than a similar dry hay. 

As the cattle fed it was obvious that some of the silage was pushed out too far for them to reach. I asked Pete if they had to shovel it back toward the cattle now and then, but he pointed to what looked like a giant Roomba vacuum cleaner that he said made a pass down each side every couple of hours and swept the food back to the edge where the cattle could reach it. Not too much manual labor here. Smart!

Once we'd seen the main part of the barn, Pete took us to the robotic milking booth on one side of the barn. There is a booth on each side. 

Here's where it got really interesting.  Each cow wears a collar with a transponder identifying her. Not only that but it monitors a number of things like body temperature, abdominal sounds, amount of movement, etc. that allows the farmer to know generally if they are healthy, when they are ready to breed, and some other things. 

When a cow feels that she is ready to milk, she walks herself into the stall where her collar is read. Sometimes there is a line of cows waiting.  

When the collar is read the computer does several things. First it checks that the cow hasn't come back too quickly since its last milking. The cows receive sweet feed while they are being milked, so some will try to come back over and over just to get the treat. In that case the computer simply opens the front gate and off they go with no treat!

If the cow is ready to be milked, the computer projects how much milk that cow should give based on past performance and time since their last milking. With the cow in position (and receiving their treat) the robot first washes the udder.  This is done with a combination of warm water and soft brushes which go over the udder in two separate cycles with the brushes rinsed in between. 

Once things are all clean a laser guided apparatus locates each teat and attaches a suction device to it. The cattle are bred to be uniform in size and build, and with "high udders" which helps to keep them clean and facilitates the robot making the attachment. 

With the machine attached the robot measure the amount of milk coming from each quarter of the udder. It is even capable of remembering if a cow has a damaged or non-functioning teat, and doesn't attach the machine in that quadrant. Likewise it can sense if there is an infection and not only doesn't attach, but passes the information on to the farmer. 

50.8 pounds of milk and still going!!

The real-time display shows the identity of the cow, how long she has been in the booth, how much sweet feed she has received, projected amount of milk, total amount of milk given, etc. As each quadrant dries up the suction attachment drops off, until all four quadrants are finished. The final step is to spray the udder with disinfectant and open the gate to send the cow on her way. 

This is a 24 hour a day operation, with the cows typically entering the milking booth three times each day. Outside of the booth is a back-scratching brush that the cows can walk under that is also used to apply fly repellant if necessary.  

Once we'd seen a couple of cows complete the milking operation, we then headed over to the calf barn where things are also pretty automated. The youngest calves are fed colostrum, which the milking booth diverts to the special container knowing that the cow being milked has just given birth.  The older calves are fed a special formula that is dispensed based on the ID of the calf (yes, they already have their collars), and how long it's been since they last ate. We got to see a calf stick its head into the feeder, only to be denied food because it had just been there! Sneaky...

One thing we learned it that the calves will suck your finger if you let them. I got a slobber finger just to test it out!

Slobber Finger

Pete also told us that they don't keep any bulls, and all breeding is done by artificial insemination. They keep a liquid nitrogen filled flask on the property with the bull semen, and a vet tech comes by daily to check on cows and breed the ones that are ready. 

Liquid Nitrogen Flask

While the barn and milking operations themselves are pretty compact, dairy farms take up most of the land in this area. This is because of the large amounts of feed that have to be grown to support the dairy farms. We drove past miles and miles of this. 

After the fascinating tour we bid Pete farewell and headed to Randolph, Wisconsin where the Sunrise Cottage on Beaver Dam Lake awaited. 

This property was owned by a couple with several AirBnb properties, and was more professionally presented than the first. They had a welcome notebook with lots of information about the surrounding area, the cottage itself, and other properties that they owned. We had some time in the evening to sit near the lake and read, which was very pleasant. 

Next - Making some fresh cheese and Mosquito Hill