The Wild Madeline Project, Northland College
/COMING SOON — WILD MADELINE: THE REVIVAL
By Erik R Olson, Associate Professor of Natural Resources, Northland College, 2022
Camera-trap photo of coyote on Madeline Island
Just like some of the best movies, research projects often have sequels — especially when attempting to understand how things change over time. Unlike most movie sequels, those to scientific studies often provide new and valuable information … as opposed to a rehash of a well-worn story line. Thanks to a gracious donation from the Madeline Island Wilderness Preserve, the Wild Madeline Project of Northland College will be revived in 2022. The goal of the Project is to assess the wildlife community of Madeline and to examine the long-term dynamics of wildlife populations within the larger Apostle Island archipelago.
Using camera traps we will collect photos of the island’s wildlife. Over time these thousands of photos get turned into data and those data get turned into knowledge. Our previous work on the Wild Madeline Project has already contributed to a baseline understanding of wildlife in the Apostle Islands, with results being used in at least three scientific publications, two graduate student theses, and many undergraduate student experiences and research projects.
Our prior monitoring in 2016–2018 documented a number of species on Madeline Island, including black bear, white-tailed deer, coyote, red fox, raccoon, mink, southern flying squirrel, short-tailed weasel, American red squirrel, redbacked vole, meadow vole, whitefooted mouse, deer mouse, and masked shrew. Some of these species found on Madeline Island are absent from the rest of the archipelago. Madeline Island is unique among the Apostle Islands in having a year-round human population, a road network, and being the largest island of the archipelago. Thanks to these new funds from MIWP, we will be able to see how the uniqueness of Madeline shapes its wildlife community and how it has changed since 2018.
We hope our efforts will also be educational, as we aim to work with the Madeline Island Wilderness Preserve to share information about the Island’s wildlife with the broader public. You may see us out and about this year, especially this spring as we install camera traps and collect site data. If you do, feel free to say hello. We will be sharing project updates and interesting wildlife stories in future issues of this newsletter and via the MIWP website: www.miwp.org. If our excitement and progress thus far are any measure of future success, we expect this sequel to be better than the original.
