ANTIGO — Three winning photos were announced earlier this week in a youth photography contest with the theme “Conservation in Langlade County” held by Langlade County’s Land Records and Regulations Department and 4-H.
Siblings Maverick and Harper Fiedler, along with Rachel Janke, all submitted winning conservation-related photos to the contest, which was open to all youth 4-H members.
The three were recognized by Langlade County Conservationist Chris Arrowood at Monday’s County Board meeting, where they each were presented with a $100 check donated by Arrowood’s Wildside, Arrowood’s business.
Perhaps more meaningfully, the photos will be featured on the cover of the 2025-2034 Langlade County Land and Water Resource Management Plan.
“We’re pretty proud of what they came up with there — those are really some good photos,” Arrowood said. “In the past, when we’ve attached photos for a cover page of the resource management plan, it’s always been staff, or photos that staff were aware of, or maybe somebody from the community shared a picture with us, so we were the ones entirely taking the photos or choosing what went in there.
We thought it might be pretty cool to open that up and see what other people came up with rather than just what we think conservation is if we opened that up to the community. We thought it would be a good way to involve the kids and 4-H. They impressed us.”
Maverick submitted a photo of a deer peering up at him through tall grass and cattails next to the Lake Park entrance to the Springbrook Trail.
“When we were walking, we just found it and we just started taking pictures,” he said.
His sister took a shot depicting a stunning landscape of fall foliage in the forefront of a peculiar, cloud-filled sky somehow half blue, half gray, and streaked with a rainbow.
The siblings’ mother Nadine Fiedler, who often takes photos herself, said her children seem to be adopting her hobby.
“We go around and we take pictures all the time because they enter them in the fair,” Nadine said. “Photography is like a side hobby for me, so they’re just kind of following suit with their phones.”
Janke took her photo, which showed a road that cut through a dark fall forest of golden trees, from the passenger seat of her mom’s car on the way home from school.
“I didn’t think I was going to win,” Janke said. “I was a little surprised.”
Arrowood said that this year’s 10-year plan, which will be viewed by citizen and technical advisory committees before being presented to the county board and state officials later this year, is substantially different than plans from previous periods.
“It’s not a standard update,” he said. “Most counties wrote these plans initially in the early 2000s and it’s really just been updating the old plan, an ‘If it’s not broke, don’t fix it’ type of mentality. Instead, what I wanted to do with this plan is completely tear it down and rebuild it from scratch. It’s very interesting to come up with new methods for developing our deliverables on our work plan and trying to make something that works better with DNR and Department of Agriculture goals and objectives and also puts our community flavor on it a little bit better than it had been in the past.”
Although the county won’t make another Land and Water Resource Management Plan until 2034, Arrowood said he still hopes to involve the community in his department’s work again in the near future.
“The plans are 10-year plans, but opportunities and photo contests, opportunities to involve the community, however they would want to be engaged, we’re absolutely going to continue to provide those as best we can, and we’re very pleased with the results of the photo contest. You never know when you leave it up to kids what they’re going to submit, but these were really some high-quality photos and good conservation topics. We definitely would be willing and interested in doing something again in the future.”
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