Michael P. King

On hot days, the cows at Rosy-Lane Holsteins in Watertown, Wisconsin, are given cool showers while they’re being milked. It’s a strategy for promoting cow comfort that Jennifer Van Os (above) has learned by visiting milk producers around the state since joining the Department of Dairy Science as an assistant professor last spring. “It’s very nice to work with a farm where the things we’re looking at were their idea,” she says. “It’s not some zany idea that we came up with in the university and now we’re trying to get people to adopt it.”

Steven Krauth, curator of the Wisconsin Insect Research Collection, holds a ghost walker ground beetle, one of the larger specimens in the Young Coleoptera Collection. (The ghost walker ground beetle is native to Sumatra, so no, you didn’t see one in your room in Barnard.) Photo: Andy Manis.

The Young Coleoptera Collection brings the UW bunches of beetles.

You know who really bugs the UW? Daniel Young bugs the UW. And he’s been bugging the UW for years, largely with his own bugs.

Young is a professor of entomology, and he’s also the director of the university’s Wisconsin Insect Research Collection (WIRC). Over the course of seventeen decades, the collection has brought together nearly 3 million curated insect specimens — and nearly 5 million more un-curated specimens and project samples. But Young is also an avid bug collector himself. For the past several years, he’s been donating his own collection to the university: the Daniel Young Coleoptera Collection.

Coleoptera are beetles, the largest order of animals on the globe. (But they don’t include “true bugs” — those are in the order Hemiptera. So Young may bug the UW, but he doesn’t truly bug it.)

“There are more than 300,000 species of beetles,” Young says. “By comparison, there are only about 4,000 species of mammals, and yet that’s what most people think of when they think of animals.”

Young began collecting insects when he was an undergraduate at Michigan State University. “I’d always been interested in them,” he says. “I grew up in Michigan, and I did a lot of fishing — a lot of fly-fishing. That got me interested in taxonomy, in learning what various insects are.”

While still an undergraduate, he worked one summer for a graduate student, who gave him the challenge of organizing a collection of beetle specimens. From there, he just kept collecting. Over the course of his four-decade career, he’s accumulated more than 200,000 specimens of his own. He began donating them to UW–Madison in part to provide an added dimension of worldwide diversity to the WIRC.

“If you’re a Sherlock Holmes-type who likes investigating, insects are perfect,” Young says. “That whole world of the Victorian era, where new species and new genera were being discovered — it’s still available in beetles.”

The Young Coleoptera Collection, as well as the rest of the Wisconsin Insect Research Collection, is housed in two locations: with the Department of Entomology in Russell Laboratories and an annex on the third floor of the Stock Pavilion.

From left: Elizabeth Binversie, Anuj Modi, Taylor, Ted Halbach, Kathryn Ruh, Sarah Witt, and photographer Bryce Richter. Pity poor Modi. Photo: Jeff Miller.

Brown Swiss are divas.

They’re lovely cows, but as dairy breeds go, they’re high-maintenance and kind of temperamental.

“Brown Swiss do what they want, when they want,” says Sarah Witt x’17, a member of the Badger Dairy Club who helped On Wisconsin stage its cover shoot for this issue. And we needed a lot of help.

Although the UW is the flagship university of America’s Dairyland, we haven’t covered milk studies in a feature-length article in many years, so we wanted to give cows their due. We held a cattle call to select the best cover girl, which led us to UW Wonderment Taylor, the 1,500-pound, three-year-old beauty you see here.

But choosing the right cow is the easy part. Getting her photo? Now, that’s hard.

Ted Halbach, who teaches dairy cattle evaluation, was there to assist. Whenever UW cattle make a public appearance — which they were doing a bit of this week; it was World Dairy Expo — Halbach’s the guy to see. He can get our mooing models ready for a runway show or photo shoot. And he assembled the entourage that prepped and managed Taylor.

First Witt and a few fellow students — Kathryn Ruh x’14, Elizabeth Binversie x’15, and Anuj Modi x’17 — had to get Taylor primped and polished. They washed her, brushed her coat, combed out her tail, and brightened up her hooves. Normally this last task is done with a product called Black Magic — or with shoe polish or even spray paint if Black Magic isn’t available. On our day, the team had none of the above, so instead they shined up her tootsies with spray oil. Then they brought Taylor — a very skeptical Taylor — into the Stock Pavilion, where we’d set up a makeshift photo studio.

Ruh and Binversie coaxed her into position, while Witt convinced her to look in the right direction by hooting like a howler monkey. As for Modi, he was on bucket duty. Don’t ask.

And Taylor? We eventually got her picture, but she made it clear that she didn’t like clicking cameras. She liked popping flashes even less. She threw a tantrum, threatened to kick over a few thousand dollars’ worth of lights, and generally huffed and sulked.

Diva.