Shallow Peat Research Articles

Central Wisconsin Muskrat Study

Central Wisconsin is a typical example of footless drainage in the Lake States. Once with more than dry land, the country was ditched about twenty-five years ago in an ill-starred agricultural venture. The marshes were drained and duly planted to crops but the expected profits-except to the land speculators-failed to materialize. Farms were abandoned one by one, fires ate out most of the peat, and the job was called a failure. From the standpoint of the water-loving furbearers it was more than a failure; it was a disaster. With the marshes and swamps gone, the streams straightened, most of the stream bottom woods cut out, they had only the ditches to turn to. The federal government bought 100,000 acres of this wasteland in 1935 to make the Central Wisconsin Game Project, Necedah.* Two hundred miles of man-made ditch, sometimes wet and sometimes dry, was almost the only remaining habitat for muskrat, beaver, otter, and mink on this area. Project development plans include fur management. In 1936 and 1937 we studied the furbearers, using repeated surveys over the whole ditch systems as our study method. Five surveys were run, in two springs, two summers, and one autumn; fur sign was recorded in maps and notes. The survey technique, summary of findings for the major species, and a more detailed description of the area, have already been reported (Hamerstrom and Blake, 1939). The present muskrat situation on the Project is a matter of more than local application. It is directly comparable with conditions on many of the drained areas throughout the Lake States, and probably in much of the rest of the Middle West as well. The best muskrat water was in the rather shallow open ditches in the marsh country-alternating shallow peat, black (Dunning) sand, and scattered islands of white (Plainfield) sand. Here the ditches follow in a general way the old basins, occasionally cutting through low sand islands and ridges. As a result, high ditch bottoms are made up of sand, muck, and some shallow peat, offering a variety of growing conditions. Water varies from slightly acid to slightly alkaline; plants and animals with high calcium requirements, such as musk grass (Chara spp.) and clams do not occur. Even in mid-summer the coldness of the water is remarkable. The spoil banks are mainly sand and are grazed very lightly or not at all. Well-shaded ditches, and those which were deep and swift through most of the year, were practically barren of muskrats. Such ditches had very little food in the water or on the banks.

Aceretum rubri: The Red Maple Swamp Forest of Central Long Island

No red maple forest type is recognized by the Society of American Foresters in their Forest Cover Types of the United (1932). This is due to the small area of the usual stands of this type. They state, however, with respect to their type 26, Black ash-American elm-red maple, that in New England red maple often predominates and may be found in pure stand. Type 26 occurs throughout the Lake States and New England and adjacent regions. It is described as occupying moist to wet muck or shallow peat soils, in swamps, gullies and small depressions of slow drainage or in elongated areas along small sluggish streams, occasionally covering extensive swamps. It is a minor type unimportant commercially. From the forester's point of view, the red maple swamp type here under consideration is nothing more than a variant. From an academic standpoint and for more intensive plant socioldgical studies it is well to recognize it as a distinct association, especially since the codominants of type 26 are absent from these stands.