WPA out of control at Lake Shetek

So once the WPA finished constructing every park building they could think of, they decided that what this lake REALLY needed was for all the islands to be connected with stone causeways. So they did that. The one to Loon Island has been developed as a nature walk full of informative signs. From the first one we learn that there never were any loons around Loon Island, just cormorants, which the settlers misidentified and then proceeded to wipe out. So the upshot is, now there are neither loons nor cormorants on this lake, but there sure are a lot of stone causeways. This meandering lake is part of a huge glacial moraine so there were a lot of stones lying around to use as building material. 


The entry to that island looks like an enchanted forest, doesn't it? Which is how it must have looked to the early settlers, since all the land surrounding the lake was open prairie with only the islands forested. The settlers marveled at the big trees and then immediately chopped them all down

But according to the signage on the island, the forests have regenerated two or three times since then. First the original elms and ash and hackberry grew back, but when Dutch Elm Disease came for the elms the hackberries mysteriously died too (out of sympathy? Apparently nobody really knows). At which point the patient basswood and oak finally came into their own. Apparently the stolid, unflashy basswood has a forestry super power - it grows equally well in full sun or in shade. So when everything else dies out, there is always a crop of basswood coming up under the canopy, ready for their day in the sun. (You can tell from the signage that these islands are a forestry PhD's dream.)