FCNA Spring Newsletter

The Eagle Heights Woods area has long attracted people such as school children looking at the beautiful spring wildflowers, University researchers studying woodland communities and succession, Madison residents enjoying carriage rides, and Native Americans visiting a sacred area.

Eagle Heights Woods is a 34-acre oak woodland at the west edge of the Campus Natural Areas between the Village of Shorewood Hills and the Eagle Heights Apartments. The Woods is on a bluff that rises 150 feet above Lake Mendota, providing spectacular views in the winter. This Woods, which has never been logged, has a relatively diverse plant understory community including many wildflowers.

History of Human Use
Native Americans used this area for a long period of time. About 1000 years ago three effigy mounds were made at the top of the bluff (Daniel Einstein, pers. com., 2002). These mounds survived settlement, unlike hundreds of other mounds around Madison’s lakes. Later, Ho-Chunk Indians believed that a spirit horse lived on the top of the bluff. They visited this sacred site “to gain the inspiration and power of the spirit horse” (Brock, 1995).

After settlement, people continued to visit the area. George Raymer, who bought Eagle Heights Woods and adjoining areas in 1887, built the several carriage drives and generously opened them to the public. Several years later the "Raymer Drives" were incorporated into the new Madison Park and Pleasure Drive Association holdings. The wooded footpaths are all that remain of these early carriage drives.

In 1911 the University purchased the Raymer land, only to trade the Woods to Edward Young in 1939 for Picnic Point. Young cleared an area at the top of the bluff, but died before his planned house was built. Tom Brittingham, Jr., bought the 28.2 acre wooded tract from Young’s widow, Alice, in 1951 and gave it to the University in order to ensure that it remained a natural area.
Today the Woods is used to enjoy nature and to study natural processes and communities.

Plant Communities
Although the woodland community varies with moisture, the dominant trees are oaks, mainly red oak on the lake side and white oak on the drier upland. Eagle Heights Woods is best known for the spring wildflowers which carpet the woods in May and early June. Many of these are spring ephemerals which come up early and bloom before the oaks get leaves. Ephemerals rapidly reproduce and die down, disappearing relatively early in the summer. Some of the wildflowers include shooting star, trillium, bloodroot, and wild geranium (Joshua Selman, 1998, “Vascular Plant Inventory of Eagle Heights Woods . . . ”).

Since most of the Woods has never been logged or farmed, it is one of the better quality woodlands on the campus. Nevertheless, it suffers from the invasion of alien species like garlic mustard, buckthorn, and honeysuckle, which threaten its natural diversity.

Source:
Brock, Thomas D. 1995. “Eagle Heights.” Historic Madison, Vol. XII, pp. 37-44.