A Northwoods Almanac for 2/17 – 3/2/17
Sightings
Bev
Engstrom in Crescent noted last week that she had as many as 28 wild turkeys scratching
under her feeders at one time. I’ve featured Bev’s photographs a number of
times in my column, and again, she’s taken some exceptional photos, this time
of her turkeys.
On
2/3, Vanessa Haese-Lehman sent me a photo of an adult female Cooper’s hawk that
has been frequenting her Rhinelander neighborhood. She wrote, “She flew by this
afternoon scattering the mourning doves . . . she didn't get a meal this time,
but feathers in the yard point to a previous successful hunt. The abrupt flight
of the doves alerted me, and I looked out the window and she just sat there for
about 30 seconds . . . very perturbed that she didn't get a meal before she flew off.”
I often struggle with
differentiating a Cooper’s hawk from a sharp-shinned hawk. But Vanessa is an
excellent birder and has worked on a number of research studies in our area, so
I trust her ID skills. Here is her take: “I checked Sibley's and it looks to be
an adult female Cooper's Hawk. The red eye and rusty barring across the
breast points to an adult and the brownish cheek contrasting with the dark
crown suggests a female. She also had a long rounded tail with a white
edge – not seen in this picture.”
Female Cooper's hawks are also
about one-third larger than the males, which helps in IDing them in flight.
Cooper’s hawks capture a
variety of prey, mainly medium-sized birds and mammals such as doves, jays,
robins, chipmunks, and other rodents. Their short, powerful, rounded wings and relatively
long tail give them superb maneuverability.
Vanessa also noted that a red-winged
blackbird has been hanging around their area for the last week or so. Red-wings
often winter as far north as southern Wisconsin, and typically don’t return to
the Northwoods until mid-March at the earliest. This one may be particularly
hardy, or courageous, or injured, or simply geographically challenged.
On
2/4, Jill Wilm captured a fine photo of a northern shrike that has been
visiting her bird feeders in Presque Isle. She noted, “They love to watch
and swoop down on the rodent tunnels in the snow beneath my bird
feeders. When I looked later in the day, there was blood on the snow
indicating a successful hunt.”
On
2/13, Bruce Bacon, a long-time bird bander in Mercer, captured a shrike twice
in his yard in one day. It turns out the shrike was the same one that Bruce
banded two years ago in his yard, and which he captured last year as well,
making it three years running that this shrike has navigated for part of the
winter specifically to Bruce’s home north of Mercer. Northern shrikes nest in
boreal and tundra regions of far northern Canada and Alaska, so to find Bruce’s
place year after year is not a simple hop-step-and jump. The closest breeding
area is the southern coastline
of Hudson Bay, which is 1,000 miles away.
Bruce noted that all his songbirds,
including blue jays, disappear instantly when the shrike appears, except for
chickadees, which appear to ignore, and to be ignored, by the shrike. Often
mistaken for gray jays, shrikes are known to take down birds larger then themselves,
including robins, jays, and doves. Why the chickadees are fearless, at least at
Bruce’s house, is a mystery to both Bruce and me.
And from the
“never-say-never” file, a crested caracara has been photographed this week in
the Upper Peninsula (Delta County) feasting on a deer carcass. Known as the
“Mexican buzzard,” crested caracaras range from northern Mexico to
Tierra del Fuego. But in the United States, they occur only along the southern
border with Mexico, primarily in Texas and Arizona and occasionally in coastal
areas of other Gulf states, and in Florida. What in the world possessed this
bird to appear in the U.P. in February is one of those wonderful mysteries
we’ll never solve.
Minocqua’s Winter Park Pines Nature
Preserve
Mary and I led a full moon snowshoe hike last week Thursday at
Minocqua’s Winter Park, and then on Sunday, 21 members of the Northwoods Land
Trust snowshoed or skied to the teahouse located on Minocqua’s Winter Park
Pines Nature Preserve. The 3,195-acre Winter Park Pines Nature Preserve is the
largest conservation easement donation ever to a Wisconsin land trust, and
protects 43 kilometers of the core of Minocqua Winter Park's outstanding public
cross-country ski and snowshoe trail system. The conservation agreement
also protects over 13 miles of natural shorelines on the Squirrel River, Yukon
Creek, Howards Creek, and other small, un-named streams and ponds.
The
Winter Park Pines Nature Preserve was established in 2011 with the granting of
a perpetual conservation easement by Ken and Carolyn Aldridge to the Northwoods
Land Trust. If you’re not familiar with conservation easements, they are a
voluntary legal agreement between a landowner and a land trust which restricts
future development of the property to protect its natural characteristics. The
land remains in perpetuity in private hands, and the owners continue to pay its
property taxes, a win-win for property rights proponents, town and county
services supported by taxes, the passionate property owners who want to see
their property kept intact forever, and for the land itself and the community
of species it supports.
Carolyn Peduzzi (Aldridge)
noted that on weekends she sometimes has up to 250 people stop in at her lovely
little tea house to sit next to a fire and drink some warm tea or hot chocolate.
Remarkably, and as a testament to how exceptional the ski trails are at Winter
Park, a surprising number of the visitors are from out-of-town and even foreign
countries, in particular Russia and Slovenia. If anyone ever wants to see for
themselves the potential economic value to our communities of a winter sports
facility that provides cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, tubing, ice-skating,
and skijoring, just stop at Winter Park on a weekend.
Orion
Despite the brilliance of the full moon
during our snowshoe hike last week, we could still easily see the constellation
Orion. No other winter constellation visible to we northerners contains more
brilliant stars than Orion. Rigel, the seventh brightest star in the heavens
and Orion’s forward foot, is 40,000 times brighter than our sun and nearly
twice as hot – 19,000 degrees F at its surface. It’s 773 light years away, so
the light you see tonight emanated in the year 1244.
The
red supergiant Betelgeuse in the shoulder of Orion’s raised arm is so enormous
that if it was our sun, the Earth would be inside it, as would Mars. At around 500 light years away, its light
tonight was thrown into space in the early 1500s. If Betelgeuse were side by
side with our sun, you’d find it 10,000 times brighter than the sun. But the
surface temperature of Betelgeuse is only about 6,000 degrees F, in contrast to
the sun’s 10,000 degrees F. It’s “low” temperature gives it a distinctive
orange-red color.
The
three equally bright stars in Orion’s belt – Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka –
are Arabic translations of Greek names. Many star names start with “Al” which
is the Arabic prefix for the word “the.” So, Alnitak means “the belt.”
Arctic Sea Ice Hits Record Low
According
to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), sea ice extent in the Arctic hit
record lows for the months of November, December and January. The new figures for January showed sea ice extent
averaged 5.17 million square miles for the month, which was the lowest January
extent in the 38-year satellite record. This is 100,000 square miles, or about
the size of the state of Oregon, below the previous lowest January extent in
January 2016.
To put
it in a longer-term perspective, sea ice extent during January was 487,000
square miles below the January 1981 to 2010 long-term average. This means the
Arctic was missing an area of sea ice about the size of South Africa. Keep in
mind that this is still the middle of winter. Why so much melting? The Arctic is
warming at twice the rate of the rest of the globe, causing changes to cascade
throughout the eight Arctic nations and beyond.
Ice Road from Bayfield to Madeline Island
More
locally, this year's mild winter has meant another record low year for ice
cover on Lake Superior. For the second year in a row, the Madeline Island
ferries will have to run all winter long – the first time that's ever happened.
Prior to 1999, the region's four ferries never ran all the way through the
winter. But in four out of the last 18 winters, the ice hasn't thickened enough
to support an ice road. In two other years, the road was only open about a
week. The ice cover on all of
Lake Superior as of 2/13 was just 6.4%. Ice cover on Lake Superior has declined by nearly 80
percent since 1973, when federal researchers began keeping ice records.
In a review of ice records for Bayfield that
have been kept since the 1850s, the average length of the ice season in the
1800s was closer to 120 days. By the end of the study in 2007, the average
length of the season was about 75 days. So, a third of the ice season has gone
away.
Celestial
Events
Feb. 20 marks the
anniversary of John Glenn’s first orbital flight of earth in 1962. Look on 2/20
and 2/21 before dawn for Saturn near the waning crescent moon. We hit 11 hours
of sunlight on 2/27. On 3/1, look after sunset for Mars 4° north of the waxing
moon.
Quote for the Week
“Although
many of us think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, we are feeling
creatures that think.” – My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor
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