Trumpeter Swans having a mild December

 

Wintering Trumpeter Swans

Russ Hanson

I counted 175 Trumpeter Swans, December 15^th on open water just north of Cushing in the middle of Bass Lake along with probably 500 Canada Geese.  During the cold spell a few weeks earlier, when all the local lakes froze over and ice fishing began, a small group of swans and geese paddled the center of the lake to keep an open spot, shrinking quite small before the milder recent weather let them open up maybe half of the lake and attract up to 1000 birds at a time.

The birds have excellent feed on the nearby corn and soybean stubble, where a dry year made the beans shorter and more prone to be missed by the combine as well as the corn ears with shorter ends also passed through the combine and littering the ground with high energy food.

My own story with Trumpeter Swans begin in 1989 when my brother, Everett, who worked for the DNR out of Grantsburg, began telling us about the re-introduction of swans to Wisconsin through Crex Meadows.  He described bringing in eggs from Alaska, hatching them and raising the young in pens at Crex to protect them from predators.  Crex employees dressed up like parent swans and shepherded the small flock of cygnets around the first year. 

Swans take 3 to 4 years before they nest.  1993 was exciting for us as one of the very first Crex raised swan pairs nested on Orr Lake, just off of Hwy 87 near the Polk Burnett county border, where we could see them from our lake cottage, high on the hillside overlooking the lake.  All spring we had been serenaded by the trumpeter swan, so named because their call is so loud that as they took their dawn flight around the lake honking to chase away geese, they woke the whole neighborhood.  Things quieted down for six weeks as we noted the swans built a nest along the north shore of the lake, pulling cattails and reeds to build a mound nearly 2 feet above the lake level. 

Then one weekend in early June, Father and Mother Swans came floating by our lakeshore dock with five youngsters.  And all summer long we watched them grown and thrive. 

A young woman stopped at the cabin early June on a Saturday and asked to view the swans from our porch.  “Your brother Everett told me that you can see the swans from your home.”    We had been watching the five cygnets and parents floating around the lake for a few weeks.  “This is a wonderful place to watch the swans!” exclaimed Mary, who told us she was a college student hired for the summer to keep track of the nine nesting pairs of swans in the area – the first ever nesting since introduction.  We gave her the key and permission to do her weekly survey of the swans from our porch and we too were thrilled to see and hear the first swans nesting in Wisconsin for over a century, from the time they were hunted to Wisconsin extinction. 

Trumpeter Swans are well suited to stay in Northern Wisconsin all winter, and most do if they can find open water areas and a source of food.   Here and there even in the coldest part of winter there are streams, parts of the St Croix River and lake springs that keep areas open, and so they stay.  Early in the spring, before the ice melts, they pick a nesting ground on a pond, lake or beaver dam flowage, begin protecting the territory and in May nest with the likelihood of 4-7 youngsters growing to maturity from each pair – the reason why they have flourished. 

 For many years the swan pair stayed on Orr Lake and entertained us, having 4-6 cygnets each year,  then one spring one swan was missing.   She was found dead nearby, having swallowed a Dare-Devil snagged under the water from a fisherman.  Since then we have had other pairs on the lake and they have continued to thrive, although they do suffer from lead poisoning when they feed on the bottom of ponds where duck and goose hunters shoot and occasional fishing lure problems.

Originally all of the swans were tagged with neck bands easily readable from a distance.   With the program’s  success, an estimated 7000 WI birds in 2021, tagging has been stopped and swans are thriving.  When you see a tagged swan, like our local neighbor 86K, you can be sure it is an older one, who may be nearing the life span of 20-25 years. 

This December, living adjacent to Bass Lake, is quite wonderful, the night filled with the subdued gurgling conversations of 100s of geese and swans, reassuring themselves the family groups are nearby and enjoying a mild winter.  If you want to see them 10 am is a good time, north of Cushing on Hwy 87 about 3 miles.  Take Evergreen Avenue to get a better view.

 

 Chickens Gone Wild 

by Bert Brenizer as told to the Hanson boys in the 1950s

    “Wake up!” I heard Hattie calling to me through the fog of sleep.  It was 1923 and we were spending our first night in our brand new big farmhouse on Evergreen Avenue.   

    “What’s wrong?” 

    “Listen!  Something’s in the chicken coop scaring the chickens.” 

     Barely awake, I got out of bed wearing just my red flannel underwear, stumbled to the back porch, grabbed a match and lit the barn lantern, the familiar smell of kerosene fumes waking me up.  The lantern dimly lit the way.  The wet grass was cool on my bare feet.   

   As I reached small coop, I heard all forty chickens in a panic. Was it a rat, a weasel, a mink, fox, dog or bum? All at one time or other had designs on Hattie’s chickens.     

   I was not prepared at all, in my bare feet, without a club or gun, I cautiously opened the door and held the lantern inside and peered into a scene of chickens gone wild, flying and squawking in panic.    

   I saw and smelled it at the same time, a skunk, with its black and white glistening fur right in front of me inside the door greedily licking a broken egg.  It saw me and raised its tail only two feet away, aimed right at me.  Without thinking I reached out and grabbed the upraised tail, dimly remembering the old story skunks can’t squirt if held by the tail.  The skunk snarled and twisted wildly, dangling from his tail trying to bite me, but there was no spray! “Hah!  A skunk held by the tail really can’t spray,” I thought smugly. 

     The skunk wriggled violently, snarling and biting the air threatening to wriggle loose at any time, and even without spraying stunk something fierce.  

    “Hattie!  I got a skunk by the tail.  He’s getting away!  Bring me the stove poker!” I hollered as I headed to the house.  Hattie met me on the porch with the heavy iron rod.  I set the lantern on the kitchen table to strengthen my grip.  

    “I can’t let go or he will stink me up.”  He made a violent twist right then and I barely held on.  I grabbed the poker and hauled off and cracked him right on the head.  He immediately went limp and died. 

   “Get that thing out of here!” yelled Hattie gagging from the sudden blast of skunk spray spreading over me and her brand new kitchen.          

    ”Well, I found out something the hard way, a skunk don’t spray when you hold him by the tail and he is alive.  But when he dies something changes to let the stink shootout full blast!  Hattie moved back to the old log house for two months leaving me in the new house until we both aired out.  She barely talked to me the whole time!  Over here in the entryway 30 years later you can still smell it.”

Bert Brenizer and Hattie Noyes Brenizer

 This was published in the newsletter of the Wisconsin Alliance of Cemeteries in 2023

Put Your Cemetery Online – Free and Easy

Russ Hanson Sexton, Wolf Creek Cemetery, Polk County, WI. 

This is meant to be a highly interactive document, so click on the links as you read through it.  

Google your cemetery, i.e  Pleasant Valley Cemetery Polk County WI  and see what comes up.  If you are like many small cemeteries all you will see is a Find A Grave link, possibly one from a genealogical site and maybe a Google map showing the location.  And that is all!   Google a large cemetery Evergreen Cemetery Menomonie WI and you get a very nice website with just about everything you ever dreamed.    

You think wow, that sure is nice, but we don’t have that kind of money to spend on a website and think about the $1000s of dollars and a person hired to keep it updated.  And so you say maybe someday…

Well, I am here to tell you how to do it yourself if you have some simple computer skills, or if not, you can borrow a high school kid to do it for you – and FREE  (although I recommend a McDonalds Gift card reward for the kid). 

I am the volunteer sexton for the Wolf Creek Cemetery, in NW Polk County, 10 miles north of St Croix Falls.  We are a small cemetery, 6 acres, and about 15 burials per year and maybe 15 grave purchases per year.  As we have been around since 1857 and we have thousands existing burials.  We do not have any paid staff, contracting for mowing, digging etc and doing lots of volunteer work to serve the local community’s needs.  

At a cemetery board meeting a few years ago, we decided the cemetery needed a web presence. And I said “I will see what we can do for free.” And the rest of this is the rationale and how we did it free. You should stop now and look at our Wolf Creek Cemetery site to be properly motivated. Be sure to click on the tabs at the top right to go to the various pages of information.   Note: Our site is pretty new and we are still thinking about what we might want to add to it. 

You might ask “Why should we have a web presence?”  The primary reason we think is to make it easy for folks to find out information about the cemetery without bothering us with phone calls!  Rules, costs and contacts are most often asked for burials and gravestones.  Genealogical questions are quite common. Rather than a person on the phone or in person, the information can be by email, website, and events from our calendar or posted on our social media page.  Along with the savings in time and effort, we have had more grave sales as folks find us through our online presence.

Google Map Location. If you search for your cemetery and it doesn’t show up on a Google map when you search on its name, then you should add that as a location.  I never expect to remember how to do that, or for that matter most internet stuff,  so I just do a Google search How do I add my cemetery to Google locations?  Asking questions in normal language works fine.  We have the Google Street View of our cemetery along with the map location from an internet search. 

An email address.  The best I have found is to create an account using Google’s Gmail.   Wolfcreekcemetery@gmail.com  not only gave us free email, but opened up 15gb of free cloud file storage, allows for free website creation as well as many other quite wonderful tools –FREE.  Post your email address on a sign at the cemetery along with your rules.  I set up the Gmail account to forward emails to my own email account so I don’t have to log in and check the cemetery one. An email contact is vastly nicer than a phone call as I have time to do thoughtfully answer the question rather than try to wing it on the phone. If you don’t have one, just go to mail.google.com and sign up your cemetery. 

A Facebook Business Page.  Start on your own Facebook page and click on the little orange pages flag on the far left of the screen to get into the create a page setup. It is easy and you can be share the editor role with others so several folks can post information.  Ours is WC Facebook   We try to post something weekly to keep folks interested not only events, but obituary links, historical notes, interesting graves etc.  If you are not clear on how to do this, search YouTube videos on how do I set up a Facebook business page for beginners? It is completely FREE!

A Website.    Having gotten your email address and Facebook business page, you are likely feeling quite accomplished and are ready to create a website using Google’s absolutely free and easy hosting.   Before starting, try finding a few cemetery websites and choose a pattern from one you like – maybe Forest Home in Milwaukee.  We don’t expect ours to be quite so fancy, but we can do a very good one easily.   

A new website can begin with just a single page with the core information.  A photo of the cemetery is nice, two better. A map of our location would be nice or at least the street address.  Our contact email address and if we have a regular mail address or phone contact. Maybe a couple of the most commonly asked questions on that first page (i.e. costs). And a link to our Facebook page, and a link to our rules and regulations would be nice, although they can be on another page as we get things developed.  This is the place where if you feel lost, you find that high school kid who likes computers. 

To build the site yourself, log in on a computer using the cemetery Gmail account.  That switches you from yourself to the cemetery account. Go to   sites.google.com.  There you have various templates to create a new website, with sort of a fill in the blanks approach.    The website building is easy and high level, much like using a word processor where you insert photos, text boxes, photo carousels, the Google calendar, and more. The site is not visible to the public until you click the PUBLISH button, then as if by magic, it is live and the world can see you!

Website addresses (URLs) are free if you use the sites.google.com preface for your cemetery as we did with https://sites.google.com/view/wolf-creek-cemetery/home   However if you want something like  WolfCreekCemeteryWI.com or WolfCreekCemetery.org, then you have to go to a domain service and pay for it yearly, maybe about $13/year and take a couple of simple steps to make that work.  We wanted to be free, so didn’t buy one.  The URL works fine and if you do a Google search to find Wolf Creek Cemetery Polk Wisconsin our link pops up in the first three results with the Findagrave and Facebook for our cemetery. Having wolfcreekcemetery.org would be like frosting on the cake, but we are happy with the free link. 

Google Drive.  We have taken our internet use a step more.  We have scanned all of our cemetery records and put them on our free 15gb of Google cloud drive as pictures of the pages, cards or receipts and forms.   Google does an amazing thing with the images of our records – it automatically turns them into searchable text, even the handwritten ones (if they are at least moderately readable) and so we can search all of our cloud drive files for Mariette and up pops the image of the 1912 map where some Mariette family are buried and the name is written in the map.  That is absolutely wonderful to make old records useful.   It makes my sexton job vastly easier, especially with the genealogy queries.  And we can choose to share an old record with a single person via Gmail, or we can share a photo or a folder of photos with everyone in the world, or maybe with just our board members.  Here is a page from the Town records with a meeting minute involving the cemetery perpetual care funds 1938 Record. 

Note- to fit our records into the free 15gb, we compressed the scans.  You can buy more storage space but we were aiming to be FREE!

If you have questions, you can send them to wolfcreekcemetery@gmail.com  and they will be forwarded to Russ Hanson who believes you too should have an online presence for your cemetery.   And if you want to get even fancier, try a QR code FREE too at this link.

 

The Reverend Jerry  (Feb 18, 2011) 

My next door neighbor at the state park in central Louisiana had a fire burning and was visiting with another RV’r, their southern accents prominent and friendly, so I stepped over and introduced myself and commented about the weather.  One was doing most of the talking.        

“I’m Reverend Jerry and this here is Bill,” said the talkative man pointing to his friend, a slim weather beaten older man sitting back in a camp chair sipping a Pepsi.  “Supposed to be back in the 60s and 70s all next week.  We have been here a few weeks.  Last Friday it rained than dropped down in the 20s and iced up the trees pretty thick.  These branches, (he pointed to pine branches piled here and there) came down with the ice.  Been a cool stay, but we are headed out Friday,” he continued.  

After exchanging the usual weather comparisons of Cushing and Louisiana, I asked him about being a minister.  

“I’m a revivalist, a preacher who goes on the road holding revival meetings across the country.  Since December, my wife and two sons, and I, have been pretty much just out on Saturdays and Sundays, but we start full time this coming weekend.  We are booked full for months in advance across the south doing revival meetings.” 

The Reverend Jerry was short, well rounded, a vigorous looking man with graying hair, mid 50ish, a very open and friendly man with a well modulated voice and a familiar southern accent.  “You sound just like President Clinton,” I told him.   

“Funny you would say that.  I grew up in Hope Arkansas, same place as President Clinton—but he left before I was there, although I have met him.  Other than his personal failing with that woman, I think he was a pretty good president, for helping people.  We revival preachers are used to sinners; we all sin; sinners are the people want to reach.  You know, if we were powerful or rich, we might get temptations we couldn’t handle either.  You remember Matthew says in chapter 9, verse 13 ‘For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.’”

He had a large older motorized RV with a 5-year old Chevy minvan setup to tow behind.  “I’ve been here for a few weeks.  This park has the lake area closed; they charge half price, only $8 per night.  The bathrooms are brand new with 6 separate rooms, shower, toilet and lots of room and privacy, pretty nice for a state park—a good place for home base for awhile” he added.    

 “My great grandpa and family got converted about 1900 at a big revival tent meeting.  Do you do that kind of services?” I asked, wondering what a revivalist’s life was like and wanting to draw him out, without getting a sermon.  

“Yes, once in a while during the summer we might go to a church where they have a tent rented and set up, but mostly we are invited to churches to hold a day to a week’s worth of services, preaching the gospel of salvation.  We provide the music, the preaching and the church makes an effort to get people to come.  We have a few baseball stadiums lined up, some hotel meeting rooms, big and small.  We are scheduled out full time way into the summer, with more calls coming all the time.  Right now is our break time”

“I preach about getting to heaven and staying out of hell and don’t get mired in the controversies that split churches.  I stay out of any politics.  I think Christians spend too much time worrying things that really don’t matter and not enough time loving their neighbors.   I try to get people saved and delivered to a local church for safekeeping.  If you think of the Billy Graham crusades, and you shrink it down a whole lot, you got my kind of work.  We’ve been on the road 25 years now.  Don’t know how much longer God wants me at it.”

“I play the piano, now it is an electronic one, and sing along with my wife and two sons.  My boys (25 and 28) both have Downs Syndrome and have always lived with us.  They sing with us and are part of the service.”

“We go in where we are invited.  We get a share of the collection with a guarantee of enough to cover our costs.  By living in an RV and trying to be careful with our money, we get by.  In my business, you have to trust in God that He will look out for you.  If He doesn’t, then we would know it is time to quit!”

“When we had our first boy 28 years ago, the doctor thought we should sign away our rights and let him be brought up in an institution so he wouldn’t wreck our lives.  He and the nurse insisted that was the best thing to do.  They pushed me hard.  I got angry and slapped him and told him to wrap up the baby and we left and went home right away.  He has been a blessing to us,” he said.   (I didn’t get this statement exactly as he said it, but as he told it you could tell it was a regular part of a sermon, said with a controlled, practiced, emphasized voice that gave you a feeling he would be a dynamic speaker).   

“When my wife got pregnant the second time, the doctor did an amniocentesis that said this boy would be normal.  When he was born, the doctor told me he was normal.  I took a first look at him, in my arms before the cord was cut, told the doctor ‘this boy has Downs too.’  They did the test and sure enough, he had it too.”

“The boys do fine with us.  They spend a lot of time watching their favorite DVDs and that is fine.  They pretty much can take care of themselves and help out some.  They are adults in size, but really just children.   They need us to guide them.  We believe that everything that happens is part of God’s plan for us, so we just enjoy them and do the best we can for them.”

The next day, we talked some more.  “Did you hear me yell an hour ago?  No?  Well, I was so excited I let out a holler.  We got a deal to buy a bigger RV.  The new one will have four bump-outs (versus one on the old one), separate bedrooms, and lots more space.  It has a 500 Cummings diesel and 8 back wheels, two sets of duals.  It will make things much more comfortable with extra room and more private space for each of us.     We don’t have another home, just live in the RV year around.   You know, those big rigs can cost up around $500-750 thousand.  Got a good deal and it’s in good shape.  It will make a difference for the boys to have more private room.”

“I already have a post office box in Montana, the state we claim for residency, and am going to license it there.  Montana doesn’t have state income taxes and has some other advantages for transients like us.  You gotta watch your money when you don’t have much of it!”

“Sometimes we would like to have a home and roots; but with this kind of life, we travel all across the country and having the RV works fine for now.  We stay in state parks sometimes and other times in church parking lots or other places where we can get water and electricity.  Someday we will settle down, but for now our calling is as traveling revivalists.” 

I wanted to talk more to him, but they left sooner than expected to hold several days of services a few hundred miles away.  Some folks have much more interesting lives than those of us who go to the office or milk the cows every day.  However, my other neighbor, Bill, who had been quiet the while the Reverend Jerry talked sat down with me another afternoon and reminisced a little.  I guessed him to be a spry mid 80s.  He was a Louisianan, raised, and worked all his life in a nearby small town.    

“Back in the 30s to 50s, I remember some summers when a few local churches, usually the fundamentalist ones like mine, Freewill Baptist, would get together and invite a revivalist in for meetings.  The most interesting were the tent meetings.  I’m old enough to remember a few of them. Ain’t the same nowadays as in the old days!”  

“They’d setup a big tent that would hold a hundred or more people somewhere near a church or park, mostly on a bayou. Wooden planks for pews and a stage with a pulpit.  Always in the dog days of August; hot, humid and buggy.  The tent gave shade and rain protection.  The walls were open to let air through and to give mosquitoes a clear shot at sinners, but could be dropped if it cooled down or stormed.  When the Baptists ran the show, it was always by a lake or river for dunk’n baptisms on the last meeting.”

“The goal was to get different folks to come and get saved and join the church, but most of ‘em were regular church folks out for rejuvenation; you remember when you took your old black and white TV into the repair shop where they gave it a jolt of electricity to bring back the fading picture another year?”  

“Each evening people gathered, the farmers coming in about 7 pm, others earlier.  There was good music; a local choir and the family of the revivalist.  He had to sing; his wife had to sing and any children had to join them.  The elders supervised moving the piano and pump organ from the church to the tent for the week.  The local choir and the congregation sang the old favorites; “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Til We Meet,” “Bringing in the Sheaves,” “Onward Christian Soldiers.”  

“A good preacher got your emotions worked up; first he got you scared of eternal hellfire, burning and pain, and then described how wonderful heaven would be. You know, I remember the descriptions of hell, but I couldn’t ever picture heaven very good.  I sort of  figured it must be a place where our best times on earth would be happening all the time—even better, and we wouldn’t feel guilty about having a good time!”

“You know, I hear the Muslims promise seven virgins for those martyred for their faith.  That is pretty concrete what heaven is like for them.  Me, I got me one virgin and trained her and lived with her for 57 years now.   Seems to me havin to do it 7 times ain’t no great reward,” he added with a grin.  

“We already-saved folks tried not to feel prideful when we saw our more sinful neighbors show up for the meetings.  There was food, lots of music and singing, and if the preacher was good, a real lively sermon each night for the week.  If you was smart, you sat in the third row from the back on the inside aisle so the mosquitoes got fed on the edge people.  Made it easy to have a coughing spell and duck out with the men going to the bushes for a nature call, cigarette and maybe a nip of moon.”  

“You ducked back in, hoping your seat was available for the alter call.  The preacher would have wound up and would be winding down, begging you to come forward and get saved.  The choir sang something like “just as I am without one plea…” Elders went round the sinners and whispered encouragement to go forward and get saved.   Usually, a few regulars started it off, those who felt like it didn’t stick last time, or had gotten so emotionally worked up they had to go to the front whatever the reason.  Then a few drunks, already loaded, crying their way forward when the preacher said ‘Remember you saintly old mother and praying at her knee; she wants you to come forward.. do it for her.’  You might get a few regular people come too—that’s the kind that you wanted most.  They all went to the front and knelt and repeated a prayer.”

“I wonder if the Reverend Jerry does that kind of revival meeting?” I asked after he finished. “ Did you get saved at a revival meeting?”  

“I got saved when I was so little that I crawled to the altar in church.  I got saved and toilet trained all at the same time!” laughed Bill.  “I liked the tent meetings; they did rejuvenated me each summer.  They were great entertainment; a week-long summer picnic where we took a break from farm work; had fresh made ice cream and pie every night and watched folks come together, and if we were lucky, listened to great preacher who could run your emotions up and down like a squirrel climbing a ‘simmon tree.  I'm gonna find out where Reverend Jerry is headed next.”