Meet the Overlooked MVP of Our Ecosystem: Moss!

 By Everix Machan, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Writing Intern

Moss is an absolutely underrated part of our ecosystem! Mosses are ancient, evolving from aquatic plants nearly 450 million years ago. For 300 million years after that, they have been diversifying and growing in all kinds of environments (Zhang et al., 2025). 

"Hummock" by Nicholas_T

Moss forms hummocks, which look like little hills on the ground in forests and wetlands. Along with promoting biodiversity and growth of many types of native plants, these hummocks also provide dry resting, roosting, and nesting areas for birds during high tides in marshes (Coastal Conservation League, 2023). Many endangered birds use these areas a lot! Moss can soften the effects of flooding in general, and in drier areas, it can keep the soil fertile, because it’s more drought-resistant than grass, too. In those drier areas, sometimes moss can even resist forest fires (Keane et al., 2025)!

In cold-climate places, moss helps to keep permafrost from melting (Turetsky et al., 2025). This is really important because when permafrost melts, the ground that was held together by ice becomes unstable, sea levels rise, and ancient bacteria people can’t fight anymore are released. Also, permafrost holds about 2.5 times more carbon than in the atmosphere of Earth, so when it melts, it contributes a lot to global warming! Plants can’t keep up with the amount of carbon released by permafrost, so moss is an essential protector for our environment (National Snow and Ice Data Center, 2025). 

While lots of people overlook moss as an environmental side character, it actually can be a hero against pollution! In areas where there’s a lot of mining, weathering processes can release heavy metals into the local environment. This often leads to less plant growth, biodiversity loss, and general damage to the ecosystem. It also contaminates water in the area, which makes it very difficult to restore balance. However, in these areas, moss can still grow and adapt to the pollution even when plants can’t! There, it helps improve the soil by maintaining water and nutrients, fighting the effects of metal pollution (Huang et al., 2025). 

"A Mossy Tree Trunk" by Gilbert 

Recently, scientists have been using mosses to study how viruses and infections affect plant life (Zhang et al., 2025). Plants can get sick, just like animals, and because mosses have a simple structure and shorter life cycle, they’re a great candidate for seeing how infections affect plants in the most basic ways. Right now, we don’t have a great understanding of what plant genes cause immunities to certain infections, but studying moss is a promising way to learn more. Someday, these studies on moss could help us understand our own agriculture and farming a lot better – because of moss, we could get better at cultivating crops and feeding our communities!

If you’re especially passionate about this friendly environmental friend, you can consider growing moss in your own garden or changing out your grass lawn for a moss one. It doesn’t need any mowing and grows well in shady areas! 

Otherwise, Beaver Creek hosted a Moss Hike this past weekend. Keep an eye on our program calendar for upcoming phenology hikes!

Bigger Mirror... Better Views - Hobbs Observatory Update!

By: Mike Brown, CVAS Volunteer and Local Astronomer

The large reflector telescope in the west dome at Hobbs Observatory features a 24-inch-diameter, 4-inch-thick quartz mirror. A mirror of this size gathers nearly 5,000 times more light than the unaided human eye, allowing us to see faint galaxies, glowing nebulae, and intricate lunar detail. Simply put, the bigger the mirror, the brighter and more detailed the view.
 Check out our website for more information!

A reflector telescope uses a mirror instead of a lens to collect light. Its concave surface has been precisely ground and polished to within millionths of an inch in the shape of a parabola. The front surface of the mirror is coated with an extremely thin layer of aluminum,  just 1/300th the thickness of a human hair,  which makes it reflective. The polished quartz itself is very stable, but the delicate aluminum coating slowly loses reflectivity over time. As that happens, image brightness and contrast decline. To restore peak performance, the old coating must occasionally be chemically stripped and a fresh layer of aluminum applied.

The Hobbs mirror was last recoated in 2005, so it was time for renewal. At the end of February, members of the Chippewa Valley Astronomical Society and the UW–Eau Claire Physics and Astronomy Department carefully removed the mirror, crated it, and shipped it to a recoating facility in California. The total cost for recoating, shipping, and insurance is estimated at $4,000, covered by UW–Eau Claire.

The refreshed mirror will be reinstalled and aligned in time for the start of the public observing season.

Hobbs Observatory is open to the public, free of charge, on clear Saturday evenings from May through October (except July 18 and September 12), beginning about an hour after sunset and continuing until 11:00 p.m. We invite you to visit this summer and see the universe come alive through the eyepiece.

Bluebird Monitor Training: Knowledge Can Come Out of the Blue!

 By Everix Machan, UWEC Writing Intern

On Saturday, February 21st, Beaver Creek welcomed local bird lovers for their Eastern Bluebird Monitor Training! 

Beaver Creek has offered bluebird monitoring for over ten years now, and the practice still has a huge draw. Last year, 51 bluebird boxes were logged, including 192 bluebirds born and fledged, meaning they are able to fly! This year, we hope for an even more successful year for our feathered friends, with volunteers surveying all of our routes in the county. 

At the training, volunteers received a monitoring toolkit and training on how to best track the data collected through NestWatch, a free program developed by Cornell Lab of Ornithology through Cornell University. You can download it right onto your phone! This monitoring lasts from March to August while our local birds nest and raise their young. Through our training, volunteers learned to care for nest boxes to protect bluebirds, and through NestWatch, important research is collected by civilians about tens of thousands of Eastern bluebirds a year, especially throughout the Midwest and Eastern United States. Because these bluebirds nest in tree cavities in grasslands or open woodlands, they aren’t as visible as other nests, so it is important to have as many volunteers monitoring as possible!

While we can help our bluebirds by monitoring their nests and young, a nest can “fail” in many ways, including abandonment, inability to find food, encountering predators, or bad weather displacing or destroying nests. Bluebirds are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, meaning we are not allowed to touch nests without a permit, but our nest monitor volunteers take precautions to avoid stressing out our local feathered friends or leading predators to the nests. To prevent nest failure in our county, we can put up predator guards on poles where there are nest boxes and check on the boxes before storms to ensure they will stay dry and intact. Finally, it helps to keep cats inside. Even cats who are well-fed hunt by nature, and you might not even know it if they don’t take the prey back to you!

If you’re interested in learning more about identifying bluebirds or any other feathered friends, feel free to download the Merlin Bird ID app, developed by the Cornell Lab, which can help you identify birds by their plumage and calls. Also, keep an eye out for other bluebird-related events this spring and summer, including April’s bluebird house building program and May’s bluebird watercolor paint and sip!

If you’d like to get involved with Eastern Bluebird Monitoring, but missed the training, feel free to email our wonderful AmeriCorps Avian Field Technician, Santiago Tabares Erices at santiago@beavercreekreserve.org!

Express Your Love For Our Educational Animals This Week!

 By: Everix Machan, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Writing Intern

As Valentine’s Day draws closer, it’s the perfect time to show your favorite Beaver Creek residents how much you love them! 

From now until Sunday, February 15th, Valentine boxes will be available for all of our scaly, feathered, and amphibian friends in the Wise Nature Center, so feel free to stop in and spend some time drawing pictures or writing notes to drop in the boxes outside their enclosures in Scheels Discovery Room! We know they would especially love to see young explorers take advantage of the holiday by paying them a visit!

While you’re stopping by to leave some wonderful messages, now would be a great time to learn a little bit more about our educational animals with our interpretive displays. If you come during feeding time, you might even be able to sneak a peek of a critter up close and ask a few questions! After all, the best way to show your appreciation for someone is by getting to know them!

You can come visit our animal friends from 9:00am to 4:00pm Mondays through Saturdays, and 12:00pm to 4:00pm on Sundays! They can’t wait to see the beautiful notes and drawings you’ll make for them this week! Keep an eye on our program calendar for upcoming programs with our animals.