Unseen Madison

This gravestone stands in Forest Hill cemetery, up the hill from effigy mounds saved by the man who was buried here in 1946. In fact, he’s responsible for preserving most of Madison’s remaining mounds. To accomplish that he surveyed the mounds, lobbied (and criticized) city and university officials, appeared on WHA radio, raised money, and wrote letters, pamphlets, scholarly articles, and newspaper stories.

Bob Birmingham, an authority on the effigy mounds of Wisconsin and Madison, says “a biography of [Mr. X] is a book waiting to be written.” Some Madisonians want to name a city park after him. Who is buried here? Answers are due by next Monday (how to play photo challenge).

The woodcock is last week’s answer. Our non-photo challenge: go see the male’s peenting, twittering, chipping aerial display. The peents and chips are vocal, but not the twittering—that’s produced by the male’s first three primary feathers. In Madison, witness the sky dance (as Aldo Leopold called it) at dawn or dusk on the edge of Curtis prairie, near the UW arboretum‘s visitor parking lot.

This entry was posted on April 6, 2010 at 12:04 am and is filed under photo of the week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.