A
Northwoods Almanac for June 14 – 27, 2013 by john Bates
The
Once Big Block
I’ve
been working off and on for a decade on a book describing the remnants of
old-growth forests left in Wisconsin, their history, their ecology, and a
vision for old-growth restoration. I’m pushing hard to get it done, and so am
trying to visit many sites that are described as having mature to old-growth
trees somewhere within them. In the last two weeks, I have visited 19 sites,
most of which were state natural areas. Mary has gone along with me on nearly all
of these jaunts, and her ability to decipher our relatively new GPS has been
mighty helpful. It’s one thing to
compass your way into a site – it’s an altogether different thing to know where
you actually are an hour later.
We’ve
found some sites that were better than advertised, others that disappointed,
and some that were just plain confusing. But that’s the joy of exploring – you
never know exactly what you’re getting into.
Most sites we visited could be best
categorized as “mature,” meaning they had been cut in the late 1800s, but had
recovered and are now over a century old. They’ve reached a mature age, but
really aren’t truly old – a century-old pine is only part of the way on its
potential journey to 300 or 400 years of age.
True remnants of presettlement
old-growth may occupy 0.2% of the landscape at best, and that’s with a very
liberal definition of old-growth. Two sites that I’d recommend visiting, if you
have the inclination, are the Cathedral Pines near Lakewood in Oconto County
and Drummond Woods just outside of Drummond in Bayfield County. Both are a
healthy drive from here, but are readily accessible and contain some of the
very few old-growth white pines left in the state. We measured one white pine
in the Cathedral site to be 48 inches in diameter at breast height, while the
big pines at Drummond were more in the 36 inch diameter range, which is still
quite large.
The site that was most bittersweet to
visit was the Flambeau River Hardwood Forest State Natural Area, in Sawyer
County about 15 miles southeast of
Winter, which was once known as “The Big Block.” Prior to 1977, the Big Block was the state’s finest remnant of old-growth
northern mesic forest, a stand dominated by 250 to 400-year-old trees.
Designated in 1952 as a State Scientific Area, and later as a National Natural
Landmark, the original 1052-ha
(2,600 acres) Big Block was set aside as one of only a handful of large tracts
of old-growth northern hardwood forests remaining in the upper Great Lakes
region. Nearly two-thirds of the overstory was dominated by eastern hemlock,
with smaller amounts of yellow birch, sugar maple, basswood, and some
supercanopy white pine.
Windstorms
ultimately decimated the site. On July 7, 1951, a windstorm ripped completely
through the Big Block in one place, destroying a nearby heron rookery, dropping
trees, and ultimately destroying 5 million board feet, 2 million of which was
in the Big Block. Many trees were twisted “so the fibers opened up like so many
pieces of raveled rope . . . [and]
widow-makers were so thick that they practically created a canopy.” Then came the coup-de-grace: a series of extraordinary downbursts hit the
area on July 4, 1977, and felled the entire stand except for a few large trees
along the Flambeau River. Following
a path 166 miles long and up
to 17 miles wide, twenty-five separate downburst
episodes struck, leveling the Big Block along the way. Two years after the
blowdown, only 11% of the total trees in the stand remained, representing only
6% of the total basal area.
So, the site has now become important for education and research, especially
for the study of regeneration of old-growth forest following a natural
disturbance. The 36-year-old forest is now composed of sugar maple, yellow
birch, and basswood, while the hemlocks have mostly disappeared. Walking there
today, one struggles to believe it was once the finest stands of trees left in
the state, but that’s the nature of Nature. As William Cronen wrote, “There has been no timeless wilderness in
a state of perfect changelessness, no climax forest in permanent stasis.”
Goldeneye
On
June 3rd at one of the State Natural Areas near Cable, we saw a male
common goldeneye near shore. This would not be an unusual sighting a month ago
during migration, but in June, goldeneyes should be long gone into far northern
Minnesota and the boreal regions of Canada, indicating that perhaps this goldeneye
had remained to breed.
Records of breeding goldeneyes in
Wisconsin are few and far between. A few pairs breed in Wisconsin every year
and only eight confirmed records of breeding common goldeneyes were obtained
fromn 1995-2000 when observers were collecting data for the Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Wisconsin.
Goldeneyes nest in tree cavities or in
nesting boxes, and typically only on lakes surrounded by heavy forests. This
site had old-growth hemlocks and maples along its shore, so perhaps the goldeneye
had found an old snag tree with a usable cavity.
Sightings
Fawns
are typically born around Memorial Day, and on occasion a doe gives birth near
someone’s home. Pat Drought on Spider Lake near Mercer sent me a photo of a
fawn they found sleeping right at the base of their front door. If the door had
been open, I wonder if they would have found the fawn in their living room!
On
May 31, Mary and I observed a rough-legged hawk on Powell Marsh, a quite late
date for a roughleg to be still this far south. There are only two records of roughlegs
nesting in Wisconsin, one from 1872 and the other from 1945, so this bird
almost certainly was just lollygagging his way north.
Silver
maples are heavy with seeds and will soon be dropping them along wetland edges
and receding floodplains.
Johannah and Brent Holleran on Upper Gresham
Lake shared the following stories: “On May 6, that warm 80-degree day, I
dragged a chair out of the garage and sat on my deck beside a 4-foot pile of
ice/snow and a frozen lake. I was quietly reading when I believe what was a
redpoll flew down and lit on the seat of the chair I was sitting on. I started
to softly talk to the bird, no, I'm not loosing my mind, when it hopped up on
my thigh. This whole process was about 45 seconds. What a thrill! What a gift!
“[Then] around the 12th, I put out
our bird feeder that looks like a miniature 1950 truck and put grape jelly in
the bed, and within 2 hours I had 2 male Baltimore orioles and a couple of
females feeding. They have come everyday since then. I have to put the jelly in
twice a day and have been through 2 large jars. I wish I had a picture to show
you of a male sitting on the tailgate of the truck pecking away.”
A
“Quiet” Day on Powell Marsh
Mary
and I hiked out on Powell Marsh last weekend, and we had what we would describe
as a “quiet” day. Of course, all things are relative. A quiet day on Powell
still yielded the following: sora rail and Virginia rail, sandhill cranes,
trumpeter swans, common loon, ring-necked ducks, bobolinks, common yellowthroat
warblers, yellow warblers, tree swallows, geese with goslings, sedge wrens,
marsh wrens, Savannah sparrows, song sparrows - among others.
A
male common yellowthroat seemed to be singing from the willow shrubs every 50
yards or so. I recommend learning its simple “witchety, witchety, witchety” song, given how common they are in
the shrubs along waterways (see my daughter Callie’s rendering of this
thought).
In
Flower
Two somewhat uncommon flowers of note:
Calla lily (Calla palustris) is
blooming in the muddy shallows of wetlands, while nannyberry (Viburnum lentago) is flowering along the
riparian edges of lakes and rivers.
We’re biased a bit toward callas
because it comes from the Greek “kalos” which means “beautiful.” And since we
named our youngest daughter Callie, we’ve always looked at this flower with
additional pleasure.
Celestial Events
On
6/20, look after sunset for Mercury just 2 degrees south of Venus in the
west-northwest.
Summer
solstice occurs on 6/21, marking the longest day of the year – 15 hours and 45
minutes, or nearly two-thirds of the entire day. The sun will now rise one
minute later for the first time since December 27th. It hardly seems
like it could the solstice – didn’t the ice just go off last month?
The full moon
occurs on 6/23. Called the Strawberry or Rose moon by various northern tribes,
this is our southernmost and lowest full moon of the year, the closest full
moon of the year (221,823 miles away), and the year’s largest and brightest
full moon.
Hardly
Any Mosquitoes So Far
Did
I get your attention? The current army of mosquitoes is on the tip of
everyone’s tongue these days, as well as in everyone’s eyes, ears, shirts, etc.
We’ve been luxuriating in a decade-long drought that everyone complained
mightily about, but was just the ticket for reducing mosquito populations. Now
we’re having a wet year, and suddenly we’re back to normal, which used to mean
running for it wherever you were at dusk, and just general suffering during the
day.
Just
for the record, once a female mosquito gets her blood meal, she lays around 200
eggs (depending on which of the 54 species she belongs to), which hatch into
larvae in two days, then metamorphose into pupae after 12 days or so, and then
after two days in the pupal stage, hatch into young mosquitoes. And then they
can lay a batch of eggs again three or four days later. Literally millions
hatch out every day in counties like Vilas and Oneida, which justifiably pride
themselves on how much water they have.
Since summer floodwater mosquitoes can
travel as far as 20 miles from their breeding locations, you can be
hermetically sealed in your home, have bathed your property in various
cancer-causing insecticides, and still have the little beasties clothing your
screens (by the way, I believe the screen window to be one of the greatest
inventions of humankind).
Years
ago, Mary and I had perfected a sprint we did at dusk from our car to our
house, and we’ve just recently had to dust off that aerobic activity – all
exercise is good, we tell ourselves.
Mosquitoes
are marvelous hunters, capable of smelling your skin odor or sensing your heat
or tracking your exhalations of carbon dioxide from quite a distance, so
there’s no total escape.
Just
remember it’s the Northwoods, and not the Northlawns. Mosquitoes go with the
territory, and since we can’t overcome them (nor would we want to, ecologically
speaking), we have to just stay calm, slap softly as needed, and enjoy life in
a place still wild enough to support loons, otters, walleyes, 150+ species of
breeding birds, and, yes, mosquitoes.
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