Strapping his canoe back into his truck bed, Brian Biermier remembers Spur Lake in the 70s when wild rice grew thick on the Oneida County lake.
“It was solid rice, shore to shore, you could not see the water,” said Biermier. “There was some opening day, there would be 80 to 100 boats out there. There was also two buyers here at the landing. They bought the rice right out of the boat. You could get 80 to 100 pounds in a day.”
Spur Lake hasn’t been like that in decades.
After a couple years of restoration work, this year saw wild rice plants growing once again, but sparsely and not yet harvestable.
Biermier returned to the lake this fall, not to harvest, but to spread some of the wild rice seed he harvested on other waterbodies. He sold the seeds to the Wisconsin Waterfowl Association who in turn sold it to the Mole Lake Sokaogon Chippewa Community for reseeding Spur Lake.
“I enjoy helping, but I'm worried about the future for the rice, because it's having a difficult time getting started again,” said Biermier.
The Sokaogon Chippewa Community and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources along with other groups have put a lot of effort into Spur Lake.
They’ve reduced the beaver population and replaced culverts to get water levels down to the shallow depths wild rice prefers.
They’ve experimented with removing other plants like lily pads so there’s less competition for the wild rice.
Those efforts have led to promising results, with wild rice growing on the lake again.
Now that it’s growing, it faces a new challenge: waterfowl.
“We're seeding rice. We're germinating rice, but it is not self-sustaining yet, so the plants don't produce seeds because they're getting eaten before they get to that point. That's our next major hurdle,” said Carly Lapin, a Wisconsin DNR Regional Ecologist.
Spur Lake is not the only wild rice restoration effort to deal with this issue.
At the St. Louis Estuary that runs between Duluth and Superior, the group working to restore wild rice there has been dealing with geese that were hindering efforts, according to reporting by WPR.
The DNR has documented swans on Spur Lake.
With them being a protected species, they’re somewhat limited in how to handle them.
This summer, they put up floating netted walls in some sections to prevent the waterfowl from physically getting to the wild rice. Lapin hopes they can get more fencing up this winter.
After some discussion from the group gathered a Spur Lake for the seeding, they also decided to try a different tactic with spreading wild rice seed this year.
“In the past, we're spreading it evenly among six acres, so 50 pounds per acre. This year, to try and get those denser beds established, we did 200 pounds per acre for two acres, and then scattered the rest of it in kind of a strategic, more shallow place where we think it's harder for the swans to get to it,” said Lapin.
The idea is if they can create a thick enough bed of wild rice, the swans or other waterfowl will only pick at the edges.
Nine people in five canoes helped spread the more than 400 pounds of seed in late October by throwing handfuls of it into the air and letting it fall and eventually sink into the bottom of the lake.
They’ll be back in the spring and throughout next summer to check on how the is wild rice growing with hopes for more progress.
Nathan Podany is a hydrologist with the Mole Lake Sokaogon Chippewa Community. He’s been involved in the project and one of the people helping spread the seed.
He says Spur Lake was once a prolific lake for the tribe which is one of the reasons why so much effort is going into restoring it, and why there’s hope it could be successful again.
“Being given this opportunity and trying to make what we can out of it is really important. Just hearing some of the anecdotal stories, not only from people that live around the lake, but some of the elders in the tribe, and saying this is kind of what it used to be when it was successful, makes us feel stronger about our opportunity and how successful we can potentially be,” said Podany.
