Sunset Lake environmental station got start as Scout camp LET'S SAY YOU were a Boy Scout or Girl Scout who camped at Sunset Lake several decades ago. And let's say you went back there last Saturday when the Central Wisconsin Environmental Station (CWES) held an open house in celebration of its 25th anniversary. You noticed changes, and not just that the white and red pines had grown taller. Instead of tents, some rather flimsy sleeping cabins and a very plain mess hall, you saw attractive buildings, some made of logs. And the purpose of the place has changed. The goal is now environmental education, under the leadership of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. But it's not just for university students. Grade school and high school students from throughout the state take part in programs at the Environmental Center. Adults use it, too. If you were a Scout who camped at Sunset you knew CWES by a different name. To you, it was Camp Chickagami. Chickagami (originally spelled Chick-ah-gah-mi) opened in 1921, when 20 acres on Sunset was leased from Mark Nelson of nearby Benson's Corners. A history of local Scouting written in 1984 by the late Dick Toser said the first campers included Adolph Maslowski, Allan Leahy, Gordon Copps, Lloyd Crosby, Jack Martin, Arnold Anderson and Don, Edward and Herman Vetter of Stevens Point. The camp was dedicated July 14, 1921, with President John F. Sims of the Stevens Point Normal School the speaker. The Normal School became UW-Stevens Point, so the link between the camp and the university goes back a long way. In 1928, Nelson sold the land to trustees, who were to use it for civic purposes. Then in 1948 the property was turned over to new trustees representing Portage and Wood County Scouting districts. Land gifts by donors such as Clinton Copps and Hiram Anderson enlarged the camp. Anderson, an attorney, also played a key role when control of the property was transferred from the Scouts to the university. Included in the property is Arrowhead Hill, across the lake from the main camp. The grassy hill, reflected in the water, was in the shape of an arrowhead, which tied in nicely with the Order of the Arrow, a Scouting fraternity. But the hill has grown up into trees and the arrowhead is no longer mirrored in the lake. At first Chickagami was used sporadically, Toser wrote, but then regularly. Summer camping by Scouts ended in 1975. Samoset Council had another and bigger camp, Tesomas, at Rhinelander, and didn't think it needed two camps. At this point the Scout camp became the Environmental Station. But to grown-ups who camped there as kids, it's still Chickagami. And Sunset Lake is still, as Malcolm Rosholt described it in his history of Portage County, "one of the most beautiful in central Wisconsin." Rosholt wrote that early plat maps showed no name for the lake, and it was first identified as "Sunset" about the time Camp Chickagami was established. The lake covers 63 acres and, at 55 feet, is one of the deepest in the county. Portage County has a park and a popular swimming beach on the lake. * * * AS OF 1999, biologists had identified 204,700 plant and animal species native to the United States. Included were 768 bird species, 416 mammals (nearly half of them rodents) and 777 freshwater fish. Also, nearly 100,000 insects, 34,000 mushrooms and their relatives, and 7,500 mollusks. Many more are believed to be as yet undiscovered, and the final total may be three times higher than the 1999 count. * * * THE DEER HUNTER may think of himself as a sportsman, and as a provider of food. Ben Moyer would like him to think of himself as filling "the honorable niche of hunter-predator." "We have too long failed to see hunting in any context beyond recreation," said Moyer. "Hunting deer must increasingly be acknowledged as the service to society, the land and the quarry which it truly is." What he's saying is that an over-abundance of deer is a threat to forests, native vegetation, other wildlife and to the deer themselves, and their numbers need to be controlled. Moyer is feature editor of Pennsylvania Sportsman magazine, and he wrote this in Outdoor America magazine, published by the Izaak Walton League. Pennsylvania's experience with deer parallels Wisconsin's in many respects. Its deer were almost wiped out by market hunting and "the rampant rape of forests." But when woods and brush came back, the deer population exploded, and at one time some parts of northern Pennsylvania had more than 60 deer per square mile, compared with estimates of about eight per square mile in pre-settlement days. Since then, wrote Moyer, "sportsmen have used their considerable influence in wildlife policy" to keep deer numbers high. The result has been severe damage to the landscape, to the point that only plants shunned by whitetails remain in many areas. There's been a decline in forest birds, and deer cause heavy damage to crops. Recognizing that doe numbers have to be controlled, Pennsylvania has had antlerless seasons for years. But, said Moyer, pressure applied by sportsmen insures that not enough does are harvested. "Animal rights advocates said they are prepared to sacrifice the health of forests and other wildlife to protect deer from hunting and harvest," he wrote. And sportsmen, by limiting the antlerless deer kill, are accomplishing the same thing, said Moyer. The panther, the wolf and Indians used to control deer populations, he declared, and now it's up to the hunter to fill that niche. But it'll take a change in attitude. Hunters, Moyer said, have come to look for a guaranteed kill in return for buying a license, so they want to keep deer numbers abnormally high. "We must think of hunting not as a convenient sport where success is expected," he said, "but as an opportunity to participate in the cyclic drama of scarce and abundant game that has led hunters across the hills and along the streams of North America for millennia. ... We need not ask the woods to spill over with whitetail to give us more antlers for the mantel." * * * IT'S WELL KNOWN that wolves travel long distances. Bears do, too. Early in the spring of 1995 a bear in Iowa County, in southwestern Wisconsin, was fitted with a radio collar while hibernating in a limestone cave. It had already been radio-collared in 1994, but the battery was weak. In mid-April 1995 the bear headed north and its radio signal was last heard on May 15 in southern Monroe County. On Sept. 9, 1995, a hunter shot the bear near Bowler in western Shawano County. The distance it had traveled from Iowa County to Shawano County was about 160 air miles. A southward migration followed by a northward spring movement is typical of many bears monitored by Mike Gappa, the DNR's primary bear researcher. * * * ANCIENT OUTDOOR HISTORY: "All of the seven planted trout lakes in Portage County should produce well" when the fishing season opens at midnight tomorrow, said Warden Herb Schneider. The lakes are Collins, Sunset, Adams, Thomas, Fountain, Spring and Springville Pond. (Stevens Point Journal, April 29, 1959)