Goslings make the leap from a nesting box at Oakwood Nature Preserve.
WONDERS OUTSIDE MY WINDOW URBAN PRESERVE PUTS NATURE’S BEAUTY WITHIN ARM’S REACH ROBERT GREENLER
34
wnrmag.com
Right outside the window of my apartment I can see a bowl-shaped depression — a glacial kettle — that contains a vernal pond surrounded by a mixed hardwood forest, home to a wide variety of plants and animals. This habitat is the nature preserve at Oakwood Village University Woods, a retirement community on the west side of Madison. I moved here in 2002 and am continually impressed with the wide diversity of life in this 9-acre refuge, surrounded by city streets and buildings. The Oakwood Nature Preserve is a wonderful place. Beyond wanting to preserve it, we have the urge to enhance it, to make it better and to make others aware of the wonders it harbors. We have to keep answering the question: What do we do to make it a better place? Not everyone agrees on the answer. For example, some of us are excited by our occasional sightings of coyotes, but others are not so sure coyotes are
a good thing. Haven’t we heard stories they might attack an unattended small dog? Don’t people call them varmints? Who needs coyotes? There are gardeners who claim to hate rabbits, because rabbits eat the things in the garden that are intended for the gardener’s table. And I’ve talked with people who have a dislike for squirrels, because squirrels eat the bird-feeder seeds intended for the birds. And skunks? Well, we all know about skunks. I know of two instances where our local red-tailed hawks were caught — red-handed, so to speak — catching and
Monarchs and other pollinators benefit from the preserve’s many wildflowers.
