In recent days, a report titled “Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful” was released in response to one of President Biden’s first Executive Orders. The Masked Biologist pulls this report apart and shares some highlights in this week’s Wildlife Matters. Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful is a brief but important document. It is a preliminary report to the National Climate Task Force from the US Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, and the Council on

A florist cuts lush, green stems to the proper bouquet length in a well-lit work area. Nearby, her coworker snips sharp thorns off of a rose about to go into an arrangement. At the same time, Josh Jameson takes yet another phone call, chatting easily with a customer. Jameson manages Flowers from the Heart on 5 th , situated on 5 th Avenue in the center of Antigo’s downtown. Last year, the flower shop opened downtown and then moved to this new, bigger space next door just three weeks ago. “I

History can be a challenging undertaking. To uncover evidence, a historian must be part journalist and part detective. But when historical recollections devolve into myth the historian must become a revisionist and upset local legends to tell a story accurately. Such is the case of Willie Dickinson and Old Man Mudge in Florence. During his lifetime, Nelson P. Hulst was known as “America’s Greatest Iron Hunter.” Born in New York in 1842, in 1870 he accepted a position as chemist for the Milwaukee

On Tuesday, Joe Rivas walked up the creaky, wooden ramp to the hayloft of a decades-old, white-painted barn near Phillips. Inside, hundreds of harvested cannabis plants hung on lines to dry. The image was something like an upside-down Christmas tree farm. Each is a variety of hemp, rich in the therapeutic substance cannabidiol, or CBD. They have little or no THC. That is, you can’t get high on anything grown here. Steps away, inside the century-old farmhouse, Joe’s partner, Marisa Budej, tended

Cold War maneuvering between the United States and the Soviet Union and the cloak and dagger intrigue of American spycraft is about as far removed from the serenity of the Northwoods as one can get. Nevertheless, during the early days of the Cold War, a CIA program known as MK-Ultra placed one Northwoods native into the middle of the worst of the conspiracies. Frank Olson was born in 1910 to Olaf and Anna Olson in the town of Hurley. He was an exceptional student and graduated from Hurley High

A common resident of the Northwoods, the porcupine is often the source of much frustration and consternation for forest managers and homeowners. The Masked Biologist wants to help you get to know the porcupine and maybe share some tips or tricks to reduce porcupine damage in this week’s Wildlife Matters. On a recent family outing, we noticed that wildlife is on the move taking advantage of what’s shaped up to be an early spring. We also noticed that one animal that seemed to be bad at safely

Most of us give little thought to the trash we produce, except perhaps when it is time to take the garbage bucket to the curb for the weekly collection. Northwoods residents are fortunate to have an efficient system of trash collection and recycling. Nevertheless, weekly trash pickup is a recent luxury, and in the past things were quite different. The accumulation of garbage has been a problem since human civilization began, and almost every society dealt with it by creating a communal dump

Oneida County 4-H is a hands-on learning program that teaches youth between the ages of five and 19 about everything from science and agriculture to leadership and civic engagement. During the week of Earth Day, Oneida County’s 4-H extension program offered a host of related activities for kids in the Northwoods. And their programming is continuing straight into summer. Listen to the full interview with coordinator Anne Williams to learn more about how 4-H started in the Northwoods, and what

Laura Boll, her husband, and their two young children thought the Northwoods would provide them a brief refuge. They came to stay at their vacation home between Land O’Lakes and Phelps as the pandemic started last March. “We came up here the week that happened, thinking, maybe we’ll be here for a couple weeks to a couple months,” Boll told WXPR in September. The family lived in a Chicago suburb but opted to try to wait out the worst of COVID-19 at their second home on Kildare Lake. “We were in a

Every year the town of Crandon celebrates Kentuck Days. This local holiday honors lumber camp workers from Kentucky who settled in the area at the turn of the century. But Crandon was not founded by anyone from Kentucky. Rather, Crandon was founded by Samuel Shaw, who traces his heritage back to Scotland. Samuel Shaw was born in 1842 near the village of Kirkpatrick just outside of Dumfries in the lowlands of Scotland. Samuel’s mother, Mary Bennet, immigrated to the United States when he was an