Driftless Area

The ground under Savanna Section has flipped fast this summer. Weekly U.S. Drought Monitor reports for Iowa County held at zero percent abnormally dry for three straight weeks in July, the payoff of a wet stretch that finally reset the county after nearly ten months of some degree of dryness or drought stretching back to the previous October. Then, in the first week of August, 83.58 percent of the county jumped into abnormally dry classification, and it has stayed there, essentially unchanged, for three consecutive weekly reports since. Nothing has crossed into moderate drought yet, but the shift itself is the notable part: a full wet reset undone within about a week of the rain stopping. The same week last year the county sat at zero percent, so this year's dry snap has no analog from the prior season at this point in summer.What that classification does not tell us is whether anything on the ground has responded yet. The Drought Monitor is the only signal in the record here. There is no soil-moisture series for the county, no field observations logged since the shift, and a check of nearby USGS gauges returned no discharge readings for the period at all — so the honest position is that we know the classification moved and not much else.It is still worth watching, and it is worth being specific about where. Soil moisture is what governs seed-set in the tallgrass and the water moving through the smaller creeks and seeps that support aquatic insect emergence this time of year, which is why a late-summer swing can matter well before it registers as drought proper. Prairie plants with deep root systems — the kind that anchor this landscape's blazing-stars, prairie dock, and rosinweeds — are generally understood to buffer short dry spells better than shallow-rooted species, and the wetter microhabitats scattered through the savanna mosaic, seeps, sedge pockets, low swales, would be the first places to check for visible stress if it shows up. Whether any of that is underway right now is an open question, not a finding.The Driftless Area Land Conservancy works this stretch of southwestern Wisconsin, within the broader Driftless Area, and is worth knowing as one of the groups keeping an eye on how these landscapes hold up through swings like this one.

Glade Mallow (Napaea dioica) is in bloom here — two iNaturalist observations since late May, the most recent in late June, though both carry a quality grade of "needs_id" and have not yet been community-verified. It's a plant easily overlooked, its small white flowers rising above the taller coneflowers and grasses around it, but worth watching for. iNaturalist flags the species as threatened, and rightly so: it needs both male and female plants within pollinator range to reproduce, a challenge when prairie has been plowed or hydrologic conditions altered beyond recognition.Wisconsin holds some of the stronger remnant populations, and catching this species blooming here in its summer window is a quiet signal that the original savanna plant community is still rooted in this landscape. Its presence says something about what was here before.

American Bumble Bees have returned to the milkweed patches this month — a threatened species whose presence signals the pulse of a healthy pollinator community. Over thirty days, we've recorded seventy individual pollinator observations across the site, a surge that corresponds with the opening of the summer flowering sequence.Buttonbush unfurled its first flowers on July 9th, joining butterfly milkweed in a wave of nectar availability that marks the peak foraging window for native bees. Joe-pye weed is still budding but will follow within days. For many bee species, these three weeks are critical — the concentrated bloom period that sustains breeding and brood-rearing through the heat of midsummer. The ecosystem here is timed precisely to support them.

Stewart Lake carries an official designation now: impaired water that will require a cleanup plan under the Clean Water Act. The numerical breakdown is stark — nearly 70 percent of the surrounding watershed is devoted to hay and pasture or row crops, while less than one percent remains as wetland. That narrow margin matters enormously.Wisconsin's glacial lakes were shaped by a very different landscape. Centuries ago, wetlands rimmed these water bodies in dense abundance, filtering runoff and anchoring aquatic food webs before that water ever reached open lake. Systematic drainage — the tiling and dike-building of the 19th and 20th centuries — removed most of that buffer. What we see now is the ecological inheritance of that choice: runoff moves directly from agricultural land into open water, carrying nutrients that fuel algae blooms and degrade water quality.The impairment listing is not a surprise; it is the inevitable result of treating upland and aquatic systems as separate problems to be solved in isolation. Restoring this lake will require restoring connectivity — bringing back the wetlands, slowing the water, giving the land time to work.

Henslow's Sparrow (Ammodramus henslowii) held territory this June alongside Bobolinks and two declining checkerspots — Baltimore Checkerspot and Silvery Checkerspot — along with flowering prairie false indigo and wood lily. These species signal something rare: intact native prairie holding its ground in the Pecatonica watershed. The sparrow's presence is particularly striking — its population collapsed by 95% as fire-maintained grasslands were plowed under, leaving it nearly extirpated from the region.Dickcissel also recorded here. These birds depend on the open structure and native forb diversity that traditional Indigenous burning once sustained. This patch still carries that signature — evidence that long-term stewardship can slow and even reverse some losses, though the wider landscape remains fragmented and threatened by erosion. The East Branch itself still carries the burden of impairment, but the upland prairie quality here offers the river real refuge and recovery potential.

Common milkweed is in full leaf near Brigham right now, the broad flat leaves catching the long light of early summer. The plants stand waist-high in open areas, clusters of them in disturbed ground along roadsides and field edges, their pink-purple flower heads just beginning to form. This is the moment monarchs have been moving toward since they left their overwintering sites in central Mexico.Monarchs are arriving here as part of the second generation working northward through the season. The adults that reach southern Wisconsin in early summer are not the same individuals that left Mexico. That first generation hatched in Texas and the Gulf states, developed, and pushed the range northward. The butterflies reaching Brigham now are the offspring of that generation, and they are here specifically because common milkweed is here. The female lands on a leaf, drums the surface briefly with her forelegs, and detects the chemical signature of the plant. If it registers correctly, she curves her abdomen and deposits a single egg on the underside of the leaf, pale green and ridged, about the size of a pinhead. She will lay hundreds of eggs over her lifetime, but never in clusters. One egg per leaf, often one per plant, spread across a patch.The reason for this is the plant itself. Common milkweed produces cardenolides, compounds that disrupt the heart function of most animals that eat it. The monarch caterpillar has proteins in its cell membranes that are shaped differently from those of other insects, so the toxin passes through without binding. The caterpillar sequesters the cardenolides in its own tissue, and that chemical defense carries through metamorphosis into the adult butterfly. A blue jay that catches and eats a monarch will vomit within minutes. After one or two such experiences, most jays avoid the orange-and-black pattern entirely. The egg on the underside of a milkweed leaf is already committed to this system before it hatches.The milkweed supports more than monarchs. Red milkweed beetles are present on these plants right now, their bright red wing covers making them easy to spot against the green leaves. They feed on the plant and sequester the same cardenolides by the same mechanism, a separate lineage that arrived at the same solution. Two-spotted bumble bees work the flower heads when they open, collecting both pollen and nectar. The flowers have a complex structure that traps visiting insects momentarily, coating their legs with pollen masses called pollinia before releasing them. The bees carry these pollinia to the next plant. Common milkweed depends almost entirely on bees of sufficient size to trigger that mechanism, and bumble bees are among the most reliable visitors.The monarch egg will hatch in three to five days, depending on temperature. The caterpillar that emerges feeds only on milkweed, moving through five growth stages over roughly two weeks. It pupates on or near the plant, forming the green chrysalis with its row of gold dots, and emerges as an adult after about ten days. The adults from this generation will feed on nectar from whatever flowers are available, including wild quinine and the invasive oxeye daisy and red clover that are blooming across open ground near Brigham right now. They will mate, lay eggs, and die before the season turns. It is their offspring, the generation that hatches in late summer, that will make the migration south.If you're near any open ground or a field edge, look for the milkweed. The leaves are broad, slightly waxy, and if you pinch one it bleeds white latex immediately. Turn a few leaves over and look at the undersides near the midrib. The eggs are small enough to miss if you're moving, but they are there. Somewhere nearby, a monarch is working the patch, pausing on each plant long enough to assess it, then moving on or stopping to lay. The wings open and close slowly in the heat.

The morning air holds the last coolness before another long summer day near Brigham. Dew clings to the broad leaves of scarlet beebalm as they unfurl in patches along the woodland edge. The plants have spent weeks building their foundation of serrated leaves, each one positioned to catch the filtered light that reaches the forest floor. Now, in these longest days, the first flower buds begin to swell at the tips of square stems.Scarlet beebalm belongs to the mint family, and everything about its construction announces this relationship. The stems rise in rigid angles, the leaves grow in perfect pairs across from each other, and the flowers will cluster in dense heads that seem designed for landing. Each bloom opens as a tubular red trumpet, its petals curved back to expose the nectar deep inside. The color signals specifically to creatures that can see red clearly: hummingbirds and some butterflies, but especially the longer-tongued bees that can reach the nectar hidden at the base of each flower.The golden northern bumble bee arrives as the first flowers open. This threatened species depends on plants like beebalm that offer concentrated nectar sources during the peak breeding season. The bee's fuzzy body, nearly an inch long, carries electrostatic charge that pulls pollen from the flower's exposed stamens as it probes for nectar. Its tongue can extend nearly half the length of its body, reaching the nectar that shorter-tongued insects cannot access. The bee works methodically, visiting dozens of flowers in a morning, each visit transferring pollen between plants and ensuring the next generation of beebalm seeds.This exchange happens at a moment when both species face their highest energy demands. The bumble bee colony has reached its summer peak, with workers supporting hundreds of developing larvae back in the underground nest. Each foraging trip must yield maximum calories to feed the growing colony and produce the new queens that will survive winter. The beebalm, meanwhile, has invested months of growth into this flowering moment. The plant concentrates its resources into nectar production, trading sugar for the pollination services that will allow it to set seed before the growing season ends. Other native plants like wild bergamot and the threatened hill's thistle will follow in succession, but right now, scarlet beebalm provides one of the richest nectar sources in the woodland edge community.Listen for the low hum that moves between the flower clusters. The sound carries a different quality than the higher buzz of smaller bees, deeper and more deliberate. If you're standing near a patch of blooming plants, you might hear the brief pause as a bumble bee settles onto a flower head, then the resumed buzzing as it moves to the next cluster. The morning light catches the pollen dust that coats the bee's body, golden against the deep red of the flowers that bend slightly under its weight.