A Northwoods Almanac 6/22 – 7/5/18
Pine Pollen
Pine pollen was abundant last week,
to say the very least. At one point, Callie and I had to go inside because
there was so much pollen in the air that we were worried we were breathing more
pollen than oxygen!
Pollen production is a short-lived
phenomenon, perhaps a week or so, and now the male pollen cones have all fallen
onto the ground, a littering of literally millions of these tiny cones.
Meanwhile, many lakes have been
briefly skimmed over with yellow pollen. Sarah Krembs sent me a photo of a loon
pair and their chicks on Powell Marsh, and noted that all the "noise"
in the photo wasn’t really noise, but rather pollen on the water!
 |
| pine pollen on Powell Marsh, photo by Sarah Krembs |
Sightings –Pileateds, Eagle Wars,
Swallowtails, Dragonflies, Cuckoos, House Wrens, Kingfisher Burrows, Big Poplar
Sphinx Moths, Flooding
David Schmoller in
Minocqua sent a marvelous photo of an adult pileated woodpecker feeding
nestlings in a white pine cavity. He wrote that it was in “a dead white pine
that almost everyone told me to cut down but I had a hunch something would make
use of it. Dead trees are beautiful apartments, full of living food coming
right out of the walls! . . . There are three nestlings. The
parents built the nest 2 years ago but the eggs failed. They went to an aspen
on the other side of the house last year. This year they returned to the old
nest and refurbished it. The books say that they rarely re-use a
nest. Yesterday the male chased off a grey squirrel who ran up the tree to
get at the birds, carpenter ant cache, or something. The male came out of
nowhere and jabbed it in the back several times, and it ran off. The squirrel
was eyeing up the nest for an hour, making a lot of squawk.”
 |
| photo by David Schmoller |
Jim Wahner in Mercer sent me this
note on 6/16: “Just watched one of our Martha Lake adult eagles knock an
immature eagle out of the air. Very impressive! The immature landed on our pier
[and] hunkered down for two or three minutes shrieking the whole time, then
took off. This time the eagle nailed it on the head in mid-air and hung on for
a second or two. The immature now seems to have escaped, but the eagle is still
patrolling our shoreline.” Adult eagles are still feeding their chicks, so
I wonder if this immature eagle was in some way harassing the nest.
Wil Conway emailed several beautiful
photos of a Canadian tiger swallowtail butterfly, noting it was “not an
uncommon butterfly in the north country, but it has been a few years since we
have had ANY butterflies in our yard. However, this year we have quite a few
butterflies along with lightning bugs, hundreds of dragon flies (some pretty
ones to boot), and thousands of mosquitoes as always. I just call these
yellow tigers.” We, too, have noticed good numbers of the “yellow tigers.”
 |
| photo by Wil Conway |
Dragonflies also appear to have
hatched in very large numbers. The species we have been seeing most, and which
is easy to identify, is the chalk-fronted corporal.
Sarah
Krembs sent me photos of a pair of black-billed cuckoos nesting on Powell
Marsh. These highly secretive birds are notoriously difficult to even find,
much less to photograph. She later sent a photo of a house wren trying to bring
a stick into its bird house that clearly was too large to fit. Sarah commented,
“This house wren exemplifies what happens when you let guys
do interior designing: ‘Let's just haul the largest stuff we can get through
the door to fill up the space. That'll be good.’”
 |
| photo by Sarah Krembs |
She’s right, in general, about my
gender, but I did have to point out that male and female house wrens are
identical in appearance, so it may just as likely have been the female!
On June 10, Mary and I paddled the
Bear River from Hwy. 182 to Murray’s Landing on the Turtle Flambeau Flowage to
count birds for the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin as part of the
“River Raptors” crew. The wind was cranking along, but fortunately mostly
behind us. Still, it made it hard to hear birds singing. One of the highlights
was finding an obvious belted kingfisher nest burrow in a nearly vertical sand
bank. We are pretty certain the burrow had been active because an inhabited burrow shows two furrows
made by the shuffling feet of birds as they enter and leave the nest. The
completed nest typically extends 3 to 7 feet into the bank and terminates in an
unlined chamber. A pair may make multiple burrows in a single bank, but they
occupy only one during a given season.
Two people
sent us recent photos of a beautiful moth they had seen, and both moths turned
out to be big poplar sphinx moths. The caterpillars of these large moths
especially like to eat leaves from trees in the poplar family (aspens in our
area), thus the name.
 |
| photo by Denise Fauntleroy |
Finally,
the flooding that hit northern Wisconsin and the U.P. last weekend was the
second such “100-year flood” in the last three years. Our area averages around
32 inches of rain a year, so to receive 12 inches or more in just a day or two,
is too much to take for even areas like ours that are well-wooded and maintain
most floodplains. In the last six years, Wisconsin has seen five 100-year floods and one
1,000-year flood.
Update
on Loon Breeding Prospects
Walter
Piper in his 6/10 blog post (https://loonproject.org/2018/06/10/a-late-year-but-a-promising-one/) noted that, “Breeding prospects for
loons in northern Wisconsin seemed dim only three weeks ago. Not only had a
frigid April delayed the start of nesting, but Simulium annulus [a species
of black fly] was doing its best to keep loons from warming the
eggs that had taken so long to appear . . . But loon pairs that had been
reluctant incubators in mid-May suddenly bent to the task late in the month . .
. At last count, 79 of 123 pairs we cover are on nests that have survived the
crucial first ten days. Two weeks or more of incubation remain for most of
these territories. But barring some unforeseen disaster, 2018 might be one of
the most productive years for northern Wisconsin loons in the last quarter
century. Who would have guessed that a breeding season that started so
inauspiciously would gain such momentum?”
I
wonder, however, how loon nests survived our enormous rain event over last
weekend. Rising water levels can easily drown a nest, and my suspicion is that
many nests were lost.
Turtles
Crossing Roads Purposely Crushed
One
thing that gets my goat is when people purposely run over turtles crossing the
road. There’s simply no excuse for it. Not only is it plain wrong to kill an
animal indiscriminately, but the female adult turtles have survived against
enormous odds to even get to the point of laying eggs.
Here’s how those odds stack up. The snappers lay on average between
20 and 40 eggs. The nests are highly vulnerable to animals such as
raccoons, skunks, foxes, and mink that will dig up and eat the eggs. Up to
90% of the nests will be destroyed, often during the first night. In an average year, 80% or
more of snapping turtle nests will be destroyed by predators.
So, only about 14% of all clutches emerge
annually, and of those, only about 15 hatchlings actually leave a successful
nest (emergence success is only about 20 - 45%). The probability of survival
from egg to adulthood is thus 1 in 1445 individuals.
If the nestlings do survive to emerge from
the nest, the probability of their survival from hatching to adulthood still is
only 1 in 133, because while they are still under three inches in length they
get eaten by raccoons, mink, weasels, skunks, herons, and large fish. The
number of juveniles reaching maturity in any given year is only 1 to 1.8%.
Bottom line: female snappers have a
probability of death between hatching and breeding age of 99.17%. So, less than
1% survive to the moment where they are crossing the road.
 |
| photo by Mark Westphal |
Add this to the equation: Snapping
turtles don’t reproduce every year – only about 72% of the females lay a
clutch. In northern areas, age at first nesting is generally around 19 years,
but the average age of reproducing females is even higher, 34 to 40 years in
northern populations. One writer notes that “in comparison, by the time a
snapping turtle nests for the first time, more than 10 generations will have
passed for a deer.”
Then
there’s the weather. In northern areas, short cool summers with high amounts of
precipitation cause years with complete reproductive failures. Cold
temperatures in the north also slow embryonic development. If the weather is
too cold after hatching, the hatchlings sometimes try to overwinter in the
nest, which works in the south where the ground does not freeze, but in our
latitude is a very risky roll of the dice.
Thus, huge fluctuations in reproductive
success occur from year to year, and there may be only one year of ideal
climatic conditions for nesting and hatching out of 5 to 10.
One last thing to consider – these turtles
can be elders. Longevities up to 100 years can be expected especially in
northern populations where the season is shorter.
So, the yahoos who choose to run over turtles
rather than simply avoid them are killing potentially very old turtles who have
had to survive a huge array of gauntlets over many years to get to that moment
when they are crossing the road. And then some knucklehead thinks it’s funny to
crush them.
Sorry, but all I can see is red.
Thunderstorms/Firecrackers
During a thunderstorm, our mini-Australian
shepherd is a quivering, panting mess, a frequent condition for many dogs when
thunder is booming. We had a huskie once who in her fear leaped right through a
screen door. This is a very common story for many dogs.
So, when folks blow off huge
firecrackers – M-80’s and the like – what do they think is happening to all the
dogs in the neighborhood? For that matter, what do they think is happening to
all the wildlife in the area? And when they choose to light firecrackers well
into the night, what do they think is happening to all the people trying to
sleep, and, in particular, to those who have to get up early to work or who are
ill?
Here’s what I hope folks will
consider: Go to an open park area as far away as possible from homes and woods
and waters where dogs, wildlife, and people live. There, feel free to detonate
to your heart’s content. And even then, please conclude before 10 p.m. so folks
around the perimeter can get some sleep.
It’s called simple courtesy, and I
hope people will engage it.
Celestial Events
As of yesterday, June 21, the sun
now begins rising one minute later every morning.
The full moon – the
Strawberry/Rose/Honey Moon – occurs on 6/27. Look for Saturn that night about
two degrees below the full moon.
Mars will be five degrees below the
waning gibbous moon on 6/30.
July 1 marks the last of the year’s
latest sunsets – the sun now starts setting one minute earlier every night.
Thought for the Week
Rivers tell the story of everything we do.
Whatever nature or humans do in a watershed, it is ultimately revealed in the
river. . . We need to see rivers as sacred places. If we are good stewards,
they will provide us with sacred experiences. – Valerie Rapp
No comments:
Post a Comment