Category: Experts Guide

Quoted: “The months of August, September and October are a period in which there’s a really rapid transition in the avifauna of Wisconsin,” said Stanley Temple, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus who specializes in birds and wildlife conservation. “Some birds that spent the summer with us are leaving for the winter. Some birds that bred further north during the summer are passing through on their way to wintering grounds further south.”

Quoted: “It’s a puzzling, probably multi-faceted problem, and getting a handle on it is tough, but it’s not just chimney swifts that are declining,” said Anna Pidgeon, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor in forest and wildlife ecology.

“Birds that depend on insects solely for their food for the whole annual cycle are declining as a group. Swifts are not maybe a flagship, but an important one,” Pidgeon said. “They’re pretty conspicuous, and they’re conspicuous in their decline as well.”

Quoted: In such cases, people have a hard time gauging what the majority believes because often the minority tends to be very visible and loud, said Dominique Brossard, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies public perception on controversial science, who was not involved in the study.

“We actually use cues around us to make sense of what’s going on,” said Brossard, so if someone lives in a neighborhood that is fairly conservative, they will tend to think more people are conservative than they are.

“They’re very common around homes and backyards because of all the hummingbird feeders that are put out and all the flowering plants that are in people’s yards,” said David Drake, University of Wisconsin Madison professor and Extension wildlife specialist. “They’re just super cool birds.”

Quoted: “They’re very common around homes and backyards because of all the hummingbird feeders that are put out and all the flowering plants that are in people’s yards,” said David Drake, University of Wisconsin Madison professor and Extension wildlife specialist. “They’re just super cool birds.”

Quoted: “College has just gotten more expensive over the years and to pay for college out of pocket is pretty uncommon these days and so it’s not just the tuition, it’s the cost of living,” Nick Hillman, professor at the department of education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said.

“There’s never going to be like a checklist,” says Dr. Lisa Barroilhet, a gynecologic oncologist and the interim chair of obstetrics and gynecology for the UW. “Even before there were particular concerns about the legal ramifications, these situations are always incredibly individualized and nuanced.”

Quoted: Temperatures in Wisconsin won’t match the extreme highs of states farther south, but Steve Vavrus, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute’s Center for Climatic Research, said the consequences will likely be worse.

“The places that have the greatest mortality during heat waves are not the hottest places,” he said. “It’s not Arizona and Louisiana that have the most heat-related deaths. It’s places that are not accustomed to it, that don’t have the infrastructure.”

William Tracy, a professor of agronomy at UW-Madison, has been working with sweet corn since 1984. He said that sweetness is no accident.

“Modern sweet corns don’t lose their sugar so quickly,” he said. “We researched how to accomplish that and offered our solutions to the seed industry, who incorporated it into their breeding program and catalog.”

Quoted: For people who don’t qualify for such visas, “if they have a desire to remain here in the United States indefinitely, asylum’s going to be their best option,” said Erin Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

“But the process – it’s a heavy one for everyone involved.”

Quoted: “Making the world better for monarchs is going to bring a lot of other species along for the ride,” said Karen Oberhauser, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.

Oberhauser was a part of the IUCN team that added monarchs to its “Red List,” which highlights how organisms are threatened and what actions can prevent their extinction.

Quoted: Stephen Kantrowitz, a professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said there was a brief period not long ago in which political leaders had a general agreement about race in American history. They believed the country had a history of racial injustice, that this was a bad thing and that the country had a collective responsibility to do something about it.

Kantrowitz said those who disagreed with the consensus generally used coded language — or “dog whistles” — to articulate their resistance. Otherwise, he said, they knew they risked being dubbed racists and therefore outside the consensus.

“What we’ve seen in the last decade,” the professor said, “is the collapse of what remained of that consensus and the rise of an overt language of white racial resentment … as a respectable (or anyway matter-of-fact) political position.”

After getting a trial run during the pandemic, Isaacson said there is broad support in Wisconsin schools to continue free meals for all.

That’s not a surprise, said UW-Madison historian Andrew Ruis.

“Significant emergencies like the Great Depression (and) the COVID-19 pandemic often change people’s views about what is possible from a social or political standpoint,” Ruis said. “I think there’s a real chance that universal school meals will be realized on a broader scale than they currently are.”

Quoted: “We already have this the system where childcare is getting more and more expensive, harder and harder to get into childcare, more and more poverty, structural poverty that’s racialized,” Dr. Tiffany Green said. “Then we have abortion on top of that where the people that need them most can’t get access to the services they need and they’re more likely, for a lot of reasons, to be black, brown and or indigenous.”

Quoted: “‘Decertifying’ (or any variant, such as ‘voiding’) a presidential election after the fact is simply not a thing,” UW-Madison political science professor Ken Mayer said …

“The complete absence of any decertification mechanism in either the constitution or federal statutory law is a fundamental point,” UW-Madison law school associate professor Robert Yablon said. “That legal silence is glaring given that other aspects of the presidential election process are set out in detail, including in Article II Section 1, the 12th Amendment, and the Electoral Count Act.”

Quoted: “Overall, Americans are vaccinating their children. Overall, we have really good vaccination rates. And then there’s minority pockets of communities where they do it less, for different reasons,” said Dr. Dominique Brossard, a professor at UW-Madison who chairs the Department of Life Sciences Communication. Brossard’s area of expertise is in risk communication.