Wednesday, May 4, 2016

NWA 4/29/16

A Northwoods Companion for April 29 – May 12, 2016 

Snipe and Woodcock Aerial Displays
            A snipe has been winnowing over our house now for the last week, often throughout the day. The sound comes typically from the male snipe who is sky dancing in hopes of proving his vigor to a starstruck female on the ground. The male climbs several hundred feet into the air, then dives at a 45° angle, spreading his outer tail feathers to capture the wind and create a haunting, tremulous sound that is best described as “winnowing.” Researchers have found that the female may also perform this courtship display, and that the male may also attack an intruder into his territory during his winnowing flight, or use his winnowing to drive off a predator. The male’s winnow flights will last all the way through the female’s incubation of the eggs and until the eggs are hatched.
            The winnow flights are most often heard at dusk, the same time as one might hear the “peent” call of the male woodcock prior to his flight display. The woodcock male’s courtship dance commences when the bird jumps off the ground and spirals up perhaps 100 feet while softly twittering, then begins a melodious chirping that lasts for ten seconds or so before he circles back down to the ground and resumes his nasal “peenting” display. Aldo Leopold wrote beautifully of this sky dance in his Sand County Almanac, concluding that these dawn and dusk sky dances are a living "refutation of the theory that the utility of a game bird is to serve as a target, or to pose gracefully on a slice of toast.”
            Both species are so cryptically colored that you are more likely to step on one than see it on the ground. And both have long bills adapted to probing in the ground for various invertebrates. They also share the same body shape: short and stubby with their eyes located on the sides of their heads, presumably to help them detect predators while they’re face-down probing for a meal.
            These flight displays are occurring right now, and will generally come to an end in mid-May. So, if you want to watch some real “dancing with the stars,” try going out at twilight near a natural clearing, meadow, or wetland – perhaps a woodcock or snipe will do a dance for you.

Badger Tracking
Sondra Katzen, the Director of Public Relations at the Chicago Zoological Society/Brookfield Zoo in Illinois, thought readers of this column might be interested in a story they just did regarding a badger that was caught and brought to the Brookfield Zoo to have a transmitter surgically implanted. Sondra attached a link to a video they posted on their social media page: https://youtu.be/8l_VnUfW2K8

Sightings
4/8: We were skiing in 8 inches of new snow, but warm weather followed, and by 4/13, we heard our first wood frogs with spring peepers soon following. On 4/15, it was 70°, and the frogs in the woodland ponds were in a frenzy. Less than one week elapsed between deep snow and chorusing frogs!
4/16: Anne and John Nesgaard in Winchester saw an American white pelican on Birch Lake in Winchester. As a note, Mary and I were in Green Bay on 4/14 and 4/15, and saw hundreds of white pelicans along the Fox River. I don’t have statistics for 2016, but in 2013, researchers counted 4,123 white pelican nests in eight nesting colonies in Wisconsin, a remarkable comeback story for a species that just began nesting again in Wisconsin in 1994.
4/16: Aspens, alders, and willows all came into flower. We also heard our first chorus frogs.
4/17: Female red-winged blackbirds arrived, over three weeks later than the males, as is common. FOY (first-of-year) white-throated sparrows also appeared in Manitowish, as did our first Wilson’s snipe. We hiked in the Porcupine Mountains today, and as we got close to the lake, we saw our first spring beauties of the year.
4/18: Silver and sugar maples came into flower, as did hazelnuts.
4/19: We were treated to four Eastern meadowlarks on Powell Marsh, as well as our FOY greater yellowlegs, rough-legged hawks, and savannah sparrows. While very common in open farm country, meadowlarks are very uncommon to see in our heavily wooded counties.

greater yellowlegs photo by Nancy Burns

4/19: We conducted our first frog count of the year, traveling to the 10 specific spots on our route in Vilas County that we have visited for over 20 years. The spring peepers were tumultuous! Our one surprise was the calling of several leopard frogs in Whitney Flowage – it’s awfully early for leopard frogs to be calling.
4/20: We heard our FOY yellow-rumped warblers, but Carne Andrews and Katie Foley, who birded with us the previous day on Powell Marsh, had been seeing yellow-rumps for several days before this.

yellow-rumped warbler



4/22: We saw our first leatherwood shrubs in flower at Van Vliet State Natural Area.

leatherwood flowers

4/23: A barred owl serenaded us at one point as we hiked around Clark Lake in the Sylvania Recreation Area. Sharon Lintereur in Lake Tomahawk has a barred owl nesting in a nest box she and her husband put up 10 years ago. She noticed the owl incubating eggs in late March, so with an average 30-day incubation, the owlets should be hatching by the end of April.
4/24: We found our first trailing arbutus in flower near Frog Lake.

trailing arbutus flowers

Birdathon – Northern Highlands Team
            This May, a few bird-loving friends and I are joining forces with the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Bird Conservation Initiative, Wisconsin Society for Ornithology, and Madison Audubon Society to raise support for bird conservation. 
We are doing this through the fifth annual Great Wisconsin Birdathon which aims to raise at least $70,000 for our state’s breeding, migrating, and wintering birds. 
Our Birdathon team, the The Northern Highlands Team, will spend part of a 24-hour period on May 22 observing as many bird species as possible. Our goal is to see 110 bird species and raise $3,000.  Funds we raise will support nine statewide programs that meet the year-round needs of Wisconsin’s birds.  You can view project descriptions at the Birdathon website. Help us help our birds by pledging or donating to the Northern Highlands Team at www.wibirdathon.org!

Bark Stripping Gray Squirrels
Mark Pfleiger in Harshaw wrote to ask if I’ve “noticed the population explosion of gray squirrels and the damage that they are doing to the hard maple trees? There are areas around here where many of trees have their bark chewed off.”
This winter, a friend in Manitowish Waters had also showed me dozens of small sugar maples that were stripped of bark. Apparently no one knows why they do it, but I have two thoughts – one, the cambium layer just beneath the bark is rich in nutrients and may be simply part of their diet. Two, they may be stripping the bark for nest building materials. Whatever the explanation, this behavior certainly isn’t good for the trees, though often the smaller maples are growing so close together that their thinning may help the overall stand. 

Ice Cover – 2015-16 Shortest Length in 40 Years
From Woody Hagge: “The ice on Foster Lake [in Hazelhurst] went off on Friday, April 15, after 109 days of ice cover. While the ice-out date is only one day earlier than the 40-year average ice-out date (16 April), the total days of ice cover is the briefest in my 40 years of record keeping. The previous shortest ice cover was 110 days during the winters of 98-99 and 99-00.”  

Climate Change Stats
March 2016 was by far the planet's warmest March since record keeping began in 1880, according to NOAA's National Center for Environmental Information. March 2016 came in a full 1.22°C (2.20°F) warmer than the 20th-century average for March, as well as 0.32°C (0.58°F) above the previous record for March, set in 2015. This is a huge margin for breaking a monthly global temperature record, as they are typically broken by just a few hundredths of a degree. The margin was just a shade larger than NOAA's previous record for any month of 1.21°C (2.18°F) above average, set in February 2016.
The past six months (as measured by departure from average in both the NOAA and NASA databases) all set records for their respective months as the warmest since 1880. NOAA’s global surface temperature for the year so far (January-March 2016) is 0.29°C (0.52°F) warmer than the previous record, set in 2015.

Celestial Events
            Planets in May: After dusk, look for Jupiter bright in the southwest, Mars in the south, and Saturn in the southeast.
            May 4 marks the midpoint between spring equinox and summer solstice, and provides us with 14 hours and 30 minutes of sunlight. Also look for Saturn near the waning gibbous moon.
            The peak Eta Aquarid meteor shower occurs in the predawn hours of May 5 and May 6. They average 20 meteors per hour, and given that the new moon occurs the day before, the sky will be a dark canvas. Although the Eta Aquarid meteors will streak all over the sky, they appear to radiate from a Y-shaped group of stars in the eastern sky in the constellation Aquarius.

May

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke.

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