Green Fire Ecology

07/05/2026

We took a family 4th of July ride last night to watch the sunset and visit my wife's favorite tree. Bathed in the deep, sun-baked ochre of a July dusk, the tree looked particularly sovereign. We wanted to just sit in its presence for a moment and pay a quiet sort of homage to it.

​While we all celebrated America's 250th birthday yesterday, this tree stood silently in its field, just as it has for centuries.

​It’s staggering to think about the sheer scale of time rooted right here. When the Declaration of Independence was signed, this tree was already a fully grown giant. And long before that, when Europeans first stepped onto this continent, it was a young tree stretching its leaves toward the sun.

​It watched the world unravel around it. It stood witness as the deep, ancient forest that once sheltered it was systematically cleared away, its neighbors felled and their stumps grubbed from the earth to make room for the plow. Left isolated in the open, it became what is known as a Wolf Tree. Early foresters looked at these wide-branching giants as predators, like wolves, wrongly believing they were merely resource hogs taking up valuable sunlight and space that belonged to straight, harvestable timber. Yet it survived anyway, spreading its massive canopy to embrace the open sky and becoming a lone sanctuary for livestock, farmers, and wildlife in a forever changed landscape.

​There is a silent sorrow in the way we treat these lands; that old instinct to tame and conquer is still deeply rooted in us. We still look at native plants, wild places, and untamed spaces and dismiss them as weeds or wastelands because they refuse to be manicured or profitable, or simply because they defy our understanding.

​But there is a beautiful promise in this survivor, too. Just like the Wolf Tree, which knows only to keep growing and weathering the world around it regardless of who notices, there are those of us who quietly keep doing the same. We plant the native seeds, we protect the wild edges, and we hold our ground. Perhaps someday soon, more people will look out into the fields and forests and finally see the quiet, necessary beauty in what we do.

07/03/2026

25 acres of native prairie reconstruction, successfully seeded just ahead of the rain this week.

These two projects were made possible through valuable partnerships with 4 separate landowners, Sheboygan County Planning & Conservation and the .S. Fish and Wildlife Service and their USFWS Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program.

It was a challenging week to be in the field with heat indexes exceeding 105°F, but timing is everything in land management. Exceptional work by on the seed drilling to ensure we hit our window perfectly.

Now, we wait and let the rain and nature do the rest.

06/10/2026

Whether they are secretly inquiring about your intent or boldly trying to distract you, the forest's eyes are always aware of our presence.

04/23/2025

Round-lobed Hepatitca (Hepatitca americana) unfurled its delicately elegant flowers this morning, quietly announcing that Spring has arrived in this woodland understory.

03/25/2025

Here is a little before and after of this section of woody invasive control on a Lake Michigan bluff site from this morning.

Unfortunately, it didn't have to be this bad because almost everything you don't see anymore were resprouts from untreated stumps from a previous landscaping contractor. They turned each stem into 25-40 more, and left all the slash piled up off the ground, that the resprouts grew up through.

This woody debris is great habitat for native birds, mammals, and herptiles.... Unfortunately you can see what many species of woody invasive plants do to the native plant populations....bare soil conditions under the buckthorn and honeysuckle means very little food in the form of insects for all the neotropical migrators that are showing up in waves now.

11/11/2024

Now is a great to be tackling woody invasive species. Most things that are still hanging onto their green leaves this late into Fall are invasives.

This site has a dense understory of Bush honeysuckle and some Buckthorn and Autumn olive sprinkled in. We had already removed a wall of these to get to this spot where the pictures were taken.

04/18/2023

"Measure Twice, Cut Once" - An axiom that encourages careful first steps in order to avoid extra work later on. This certainly applies to a lot of the work we do!

Black Locust trees have an extension suckering response to being cut down or sustaining damage. This is one species you definitely want to kill well before getting the chainsaw out!

Cutting Black Locusts first is a surefire way to turn each single stem into dozens or more (which all grow back with stout thorns to protect the tender shoots from browsing animals).

Watch below to see how to prevent this extra work in your future.

Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) is a deciduous tree species native to the southeastern United States, ranging from Pennsylvania and Ohio in the north to ...

03/09/2023

Teddy Roosevelt once said, "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."

I'm proud to stand alongside this group of dedicated and passionate conservationists, and to be a small part of that hard work worth doing.

Larry Doebert received the Lifetime Achievement Award this evening at the Sheboygan County Conservation Associations awards banquet and we were awarded the Water Conservationists Of The Year award.
There was a room full of hard working conservationists who all want to work together to make our area of the state the best it can be for hunting, fishing and all other outdoors activities. It was a great evening and we are honored to be recognized for everything we do in our chapter.

01/22/2023

January 21st, and not even a hint of frost in the ground.

We easily hand-dug and popped out this Bur oak we planted in this spot as an acorn. The city is extending a bike path along the river here, on an easement across our property. We moved it to another parcel we own on the same river.

He fits in well with the other Bur Oaks, Swamp whites, Hemlock, and White Cedar, adjacent to this small remnant Sedge Meadow community I've been restoring.

12/30/2022

45°F on December 29th, t-shirt weather and a perfect day to plant native seed mixes. This is an Oak savanna and wet meadow restoration site that I've been site-prepping all season. Put down a mesic shortgrass, wet meadow, and emergent wetland mix, totaling about 1.4 acres.