Cat Island - Green Bay Waterfront

Using Sound to Connect People to Green Bay

On: August 14, 2024

In: American white pelicans, Atmos room, Bay Beach Amusement Park, Bill Sallak, Cat Island, Chris Houghton, Dead Horse Bay, Emily Tyner, fox river, Green Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, Green Bay sounds, Jacob Hoffman, Longtail Point Lighthouse, navigation beacon in green bay, Phoenix, Resch Institute for Music, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Wisconsin Sea Grant, Zippin Pippin

American white pelicans at their nesting colony on Cat Island in Green Bay. Image credit: Marie Zhuikov, Wisconsin Sea Grant

On a sunny morning in mid-June, the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s research vessel, Phoenix, headed out onto the bay. Aboard were Sea Grant researchers Emily Tyner and Bill Sallak and a small mound of recording equipment. The boat was piloted by Chris Houghton, assistant professor and fish ecologist, who was assisted by first mate, undergraduate student Jacob Hoffman.

Emily Tyner aboard the Phoenix, UW-Green Bay’s research boat. Image credit: Marie Zhuikov, Wisconsin Sea Grant

The bay outing’s purpose was to collect the natural noises of the estuary, particularly bird sounds. It was only supposed to last for three hours but like in the theme song for the “Gilligan’s Island” television show, a mishap was involved.

Tyner and Sallak’s project is associated with the development of a national estuarine research reserve on the bay. The National Estuarine Research Reserve System is a network of 30 coastal sites that protect and study estuaries. In the Great Lakes, estuaries are areas where rivers empty into the lakes. The mission of the reserves is to practice and promote estuary stewardship via innovative research and education projects through a system of protected areas. It’s a partnership program between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and coastal states.

Tyner, director of freshwater strategy at UW-Green Bay, is the state lead on the designation of a new National Estuarine Research Reserve for the Bay of Green Bay. It will be the third reserve on the Great Lakes after Old Woman Creek in Ohio on Lake Erie and the Lake Superior Reserve in Superior, Wisconsin. Sallak is an associate professor of music and was sound recorder for the trip.

Their target was the Cat Island Chain, restored barrier islands in the bay that have created new habitat for migrating and nesting shorebirds. Then, if time allowed, they would visit several other sites.

Bill Sallak with sound recording equipment. Image credit: Marie Zhuikov, Wisconsin Sea Grant

Sallak described how the idea for this project evolved. “Part of our original conception was more of a hard science, bioacoustics angle. But then, we went out on a boat trip and we went, ‘That sounds cool, that sounds cool. All these things sound really fantastic.’ And so, we decided to lean more towards a more humanistic angle, which is also going to work better if we get to the point where there’s a visitor’s center, because we can take these recordings and put them into a room with a surround sound speaker set up, and you can hear the bay in different locations, different seasons.”

In their proposal, Tyner and Sallak stressed the importance of bringing the sounds of the Green Bay estuary to the community. Tyner elaborated, “Right there is a restaurant that’s one of the only places on the lower bay where you can go and have a beer and have a burger and be sitting out on the water. And there’s almost no other places to kind of enjoy the bay. There’s the amusement park, but then there’s no pier or boardwalk for access. There’s no swimmable beaches. Some of that’s for water quality reasons. To get onto the bay, you need to have a boat, an expensive boat, probably. Maybe you can do a bit of kayaking from shore, but a trail system, we don’t really have that.

“For a long time, communities had closed themselves off from around the bay because of smells and harmful algal blooms and industrial uses. But now Green Bay and other communities are reopening and turning their front doors back. Especially with the Fox River cleanup, which was a $1.5 billion effort. And so, with that kind of trying to encourage the city and communities to turn their front doors this way, we also want to reconnect people. This is one step in getting us there,” Tyner said.

Chris Houghton. Image credit: Marie Zhukov, Wisconsin Sea Grant

In sort of a happy accident, UW-Green Bay recently received funding for a new sound auditorium. Plans are for it to be completed this fall, and this Green Bay audio project will be the first to be featured.

Sallak explained. “Now the audio production program at the Resch Institute for Music is going to have probably the best facilities in higher education in the state. We were able to find about 1,600 square feet in the studio arts building and some underused space in the Wiedner Center. We’re putting in four new recording studios, one of which is an Atmos room. So, it’s equipped with a 14-speaker surround sound setup.”

He said it will be the same surround sound audio system that’s used in movie theaters. They’ll have the capacity to make surround sound recordings and present them in an acoustically refined space. When the Atmos room is finished, the Green Bay sounds project will be the first presentation featured in it. The sound files will also be available on a webpage.

The first of five stops on the boat tour was off the gull colony at Cat Island. Amid raucous gull calls, Sallak set up the recording equipment on the boat. He tagged the sound file with the date, time and location. After capturing several minutes of sound, he turned off the equipment as the Phoenix made its way to the pelican colony at the other end of Cat Island. The pelicans were very quiet, so there wasn’t much to record, but dozens of the prehistoric birds flying overhead made for some inspiring photos.

Pelicans wheel in the sky over Cat Island. Image credit: Marie Zhukov, Wisconsin Sea Grant

Their third stop was Longtail Point Lighthouse, a crumbling structure on a long sandy point. After Sallak recorded the sounds for several minutes, the unexpected happened.

“We’re beached,” Houghton said as the bottom of the boat came to rest on the sandy bottom.

“Uh oh,” Tyner said.

“Shouldn’t be a problem.” Houghton laughed, “Famous last words.”

Sallak chimed in, “We’re not going to run out of granola bars? Figure out who we have to eat first?”

Long Tail Point Lighthouse. Image credit: Marie Zhukov, Wisconsin Sea Grant

Houghton and Hoffman jumped over the side of the boat and tried to free it from the bottom. After some finagling, they were able to push it into deeper water.

The Zippin Pippin rollercoaster, Bay Beach Amusement Park. Image credit: Marie Zhukov, Wisconsin Sea Grant

Audio captured, the team moved onto the next stop, which had the ominous name of Dead Horse Bay. As they recorded, a bald eagle sat in a tree, watching as songbirds chirped and twittered. A plane flew overhead, and someone fired up a chain saw on shore. Sallak said he would keep those human sounds in the show. “We’re not apart from everything that’s going on. I’m more interested in collecting what’s literally here than trying to erase.”

Their fifth and final stop was full of human sounds offshore of Bay Beach Amusement Park. One of the most noticeable features there is the Zippin Pippin — a rollercoaster. The team watched as the coaster cars made their slow way up to the top of the ride and then plummeted, eliciting screams from the riders. Sallak said he has plans to go into the courtyard in the middle of the ride and get a recording for this project later.

With audio captured, the team motored back to the marina. They agreed there’s nothing like spending a morning on the water, even if it involved getting beached.

To hear a podcast episode of this story, complete with sounds, visit this Wisconsin Water News page.

A navigation beacon in Green Bay. Image credit: Marie Zhuikov, Wisconsin Sea Grant

The post Using Sound to Connect People to Green Bay first appeared on Wisconsin Sea Grant.

Original Article

News Releases | Wisconsin Sea Grant

https://www.seagrant.wisc.edu/news/using-sound-to-connect-people-to-green-bay/

Marie Zhuikov

Researchers investigate the impact of water birds on Green Bay

On: September 16, 2021

In: Amy Wolf, Cat Island, Cofrin Center for Biodiversity, cormorants, Lower Green Bay, pelicans, piscivorous birds, Robert Bob Howe, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

Amercian white pelicans take flight off Cat Island in lower Green Bay. Image credit: Amy Wolf, University of Wisconsin Green-Bay

When Amy Wolf and Bob Howe with the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay bring new research partners or students out to the restored Cat Island chain in lower Green Bay on Lake Michigan, their reactions are memorable.

“To see people’s expressions when they enter the midst of thousands of loud, often smelly and sometimes defecating birds is pretty amazing and gratifying,” said Wolf, biology professor with the Department of Natural and Applied Sciences.

This avian abundance is relatively new, made possible by habitat restoration projects in the bay coupled with pollution remediation and control. For instance, the number of American white pelicans nesting has increased from about 250 in 2005 (State of the Bay report), to more than 3,000 now.

Wolf and Howe are coordinating a small army of students and government agency researchers to count and observe the behavior of birds that eat fish (piscivorous birds) in the lower Green Bay area around Cat Island, an area that Howe likens to the “Serengeti of Lake Michigan” due to the sheer abundance of wildlife. With two years of funding through Wisconsin Sea Grant, they are working to gain basic information about populations of pelicans, cormorants, terns, egrets, herons and gulls in the lower bay, including information about what the birds eat and where they spend their time.

Double-crested cormorants and American white pelicans on Cat Island. Image credit: Amy Wolf, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

Howe, professor and director of the Cofrin Center for Biodiversity, explained, “We want to know what impact these large numbers of fish-eating birds have on the lower Green Bay ecosystem in general, and specifically on the fishery, which is so important for public recreation and commercial harvesting.”

Every two weeks during the spring and summer, Howe, Wolf, UW-Green Bay research specialist Erin Giese, and a team of undergraduate and graduate students surveyed all the piscivorous birds from southern Door County down to the DePere Dam on the Fox River, and then up the lakeshore to Oconto, Wisconsin. Graduate students Jacob Woulf and Brandon Byrne flew drones down the Cat Island causeway to count the thousands of birds there. Additionally, the students conducted firsthand observations of what the birds eat, where they catch fish and what other bird species they associate with.

In concert with the bird surveys, Howe said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is conducting fish surveys in the lower bay.

“We’re learning about what kinds of fish these birds are taking and where they’re taking them,” he said. “We’re really excited about this information so far.”

They are also tracking double-crested cormorants with two types of technologies: one uses the cellular phone network and the other uses radio telemetry. For the cellular tracking, the birds are fitted with a lightweight harness that contains a solar-powered transmitter. The device provides information about a bird’s position every hour, even if it leaves Green Bay.

Birds with the radio transmitters are tracked through special towers stationed around Green Bay and in a growing network across eastern North America. They plan to track pelicans next year.

Preliminary findings

The researchers are only beginning to crunch numbers from their first season of data, but Howe and Wolf already have preliminary findings to share.

In terms of tracking, they’ve found that some of the cormorants move much farther than they anticipated. Wolf said, “They hang around Cat Island, they feed around Cat Island, but they definitely range widely; one bird flew 75 kilometers south to Lake Butte Des Morts and returned to Green Bay during the same day. Another went over 110 kilometers north toward Gills Rock, where it stayed for days before returning to lower Green Bay.”

Their feeding observers have noted that the cormorants and pelicans are foraging with each other. Howe suspects their social nature might be why they are the dominant piscivorous species in the Green Bay system. “Social foraging behavior might give them a leg up on exploiting the fish in the lower bay.”

Howe said their counting surveys have provided a good estimate of how many piscivorous birds are in lower Green Bay. By mid-summer 2021, well over 4,000 pelicans and 2,000 cormorants were present.

“We know that a pelican can eat up to three pounds of fish per day. A cormorant can eat about a pound of fish per day. You start doing the math and realize that these birds take tens of thousands of pounds of fish every week. They’re significantly shifting the biomass from one place to another,” Howe said.

Pelicans congregate near recreational fishing boats in Green Bay. Image credit: Bob Howe, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

They’ve also noted that pelicans, and cormorants to a lesser extent, have developed a relationship with recreational fishermen. The birds hang around the boats and feed on fish that the fisherman don’t want and throw overboard.

“The pelicans have learned there’s free food there,” Howe said. “We didn’t anticipate this relationship and it’s very obvious from the data that we’re seeing.”

They expect their research will be helpful for agencies working on management decisions about the abundance of piscivorous birds, including gulls.

Additional partner agencies aiding the project include the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bird Studies Canada, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services Program, Brown County Port Authority and Mississippi State University. The research team has also received cooperation and support from landowners and marinas along the shores of lower Green Bay.

The bird banding crew on Cat Island. The person in the center is holding a cormorant. Image credit: Bob Howe, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

The post Researchers investigate the impact of water birds on Green Bay first appeared on Wisconsin Sea Grant.

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Marie Zhuikov

Friends, fellows, undergrads, a champion and a duo of change agents: an afternoon of celebration

On: February 24, 2021

In: Bud Harris, Cat Island, Dean Haen, Hallet Harris, Knauss Fellows, Vicky Harris, Wisconsin Sea Grant Actionable Science Award, Wisconsin Sea Grant Great Lakes Champion Award

On Monday of this week, Wisconsin Sea Grant and the University of Wisconsin Water Resources Institute (WRI) conducted a fellows convocation and award event that conferred recognition on 20 master’s, Ph.D. or postdoctoral fellows; six undergraduate students who participated in the 2020 Sea Grant Community Engaged Internship Program, one of whom was also the winner of the Weston Scholarship; two federally elected officials; the first-ever Wisconsin Sea Grant Great Lakes Champion Award winner; and two people who have made a big difference in Green Bay estuary and took home the Wisconsin Sea Grant Actionable Science Award.

“It’s not news that COVID-19 has disrupted every part of our lives. Our biennial fellows convocation is just one of innumerable events that could not be held in person, but we were not prepared to let a pandemic stand in the way of honoring student accomplishments, and the contributions of U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Congressman Mike Gallagher who see the value of investing in, conserving and celebrating our amazing Great Lakes and other Wisconsin water assets,” said Jim Hurley, director of both Sea Grant and WRI.

Hurley acted as emcee of the virtual event that drew more than 70 participants from cities across the Badger State, as well as from spots such as Guam, Washington, D.C., and St. Petersburg, Florida.

“This is the third time we have held a fellows convocation. It was the first time needed to conduct it in a virtual setting. Of course, we wish it could have been in person, but the enthusiasm and well wishes made up for that loss of in-person conviviality. I’m pleased that so many people from near and far could join to celebrate water scholarship and positive impacts in our coastal communities,” he said.

For many years, Sen. Baldwin and Rep. Gallagher have used their positions in Congress to support the mission of Sea Grant and they each joined the event to collect a Friend of Wisconsin Sea Grant Award.

Dean Haen was named Wisconsin Sea Grant Great Lakes Champion for 2021, a new award that will be given every two years going forward to an individual, business, organization or program that demonstrates a long-term commitment to the care and concern for the Great Lakes.

2021 Wisconsin Sea Grant Great Lakes Champion Award Winner Dean Haen. Photo: Brown County Port

Haen is the director of the Brown County Port and Resource Recovery Department. He was lauded for economic and ecological contributions. More than 200 ships annually visit the port, hauling more than 2 million tons of cargo, generating jobs and economic impact.

Haen has also been integral to the restoration of the Cat Island Chain in Green Bay, which is bringing back 1,200 acres that provide shoreline protection and habitat for endangered reptiles and birds. The chain also acts as a storage facility for material dredged from the shipping lanes, beneficially using material that would otherwise require costly disposal.

The Wisconsin Sea Grant Actionable Science Award was presented to a couple who are not only a team in marriage but also in their devotion to cleanup of the Lower Fox River and Green Bay. Vicky and Hallet J. “Bud” Harris have spent decades in various environmental research and outreach roles and serve as volunteers for state and local conservation groups. Vicky Harris was a longtime Sea Grant water quality and habitat restoration specialist working in the program’s Green Bay Office. Bud Harris is a retired professor of natural and applied sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Bud and Vicky Harris, winners of the 2021 Wisconsin Sea Grant Actionable Science Award. Contributed photo.

As the for the impressive roster of students who received recognition, they fill many roles in many places, including:

-Three Dean John A. Knauss Fellows who each have a master’s degree and have, or will devote a year of service in Washington, D.C., in either the executive or legislative branch on ocean, coastal or Great Lakes topics.

– Eight fellows who have a master’s degree, are working toward a Ph.D. or have recently completed a Ph.D. and are placed, or will soon be placed, with partner state agencies and completing important work such as setting health standards for human exposure to PFAS, determining groundwater levels in central Wisconsin and protecting coastal property and infrastructure. It’s a mutually beneficial agreement that sees the agency gaining cutting-edge knowledge from these young scholars and the young people benefitting from mentors within agencies—the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program, department of administration, department of natural resources or department of health services.

– Four fellows who have a master’s degree, are working toward a Ph.D. or have recently completed a Ph.D. and are placed at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to assess toxicological threats to people and the environment.

– Two students who are engaged in ongoing research, and efforts leading to publications to further share science with a wider community. One fellow is working at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point Northern Aquaculture Demonstration Facility and the other is based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, analyzing PFAS in state waters.

-A 2020-21 NOAA Coastal Management Fellow stationed in Guam where she and partners are updating a plan for the Seashore Reserve. Another student is winding down her fellowship with the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program and a third is working to understand and mitigate community flooding with the Association of State Floodplain Managers, a national organization based in Madison.

Celeste Gunderson is a junior working toward degrees in geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the 2021 recipient of the Carl J. Weston Scholarship, made possible by the generous gift of Dr. and Mrs. Carl B. Weston in honor of their son. The scholarship goes to undergraduate student pursuing freshwater studies as part of a Wisconsin Sea Grant project.

Gunderson was also part of a summer community engaged internship program in 2020 that saw another six undergraduates working on issues as diverse as science communication, wild rice conservation flooding and aquatic invasive species. The program is designed to provide diverse students with hands-on experience under the mentorship of a career professional.

The post Friends, fellows, undergrads, a champion and a duo of change agents: an afternoon of celebration first appeared on Wisconsin Sea Grant.

Original Article

News Releases – Wisconsin Sea Grant

https://www.seagrant.wisc.edu/news/friends-fellows-undergrads-a-champion-and-a-duo-of-change-agents-an-afternoon-of-celebration/

Moira Harrington

Friends, fellows, undergrads, a champion and a duo of change agents: an afternoon of celebration

On: February 24, 2021

In: Bud Harris, Cat Island, Dean Haen, Hallet Harris, Knauss Fellows, summer undergraduate interns, Vicky Harris, Wisconsin Sea Grant Actionable Science Award, Wisconsin Sea Grant Great Lakes Champion Award

Hurley acted as emcee of the virtual event that drew more than 70 participants from cities across the Badger State, as well as from spots such as Guam, Washington, D.C., and St. Petersburg, Florida.