A Northwoods Almanac for 12/13-27, 2019
Celestial Events
The peak Geminid Meteor Shower will occur tonight, 12/13, through the predawn hours of 12/14. The Geminids are advertised to be the best meteor shower of the year with the likelihood of 50 to 100 meteors blazing per hour, though the glare of the waning gibbous moon will make viewing a lot like living in the light pollution of a city.
The Geminids emanate from a “rock comet” called 3200 Phaethon, a 3-mile-wide asteroid-type object. Every December, the debris shed by 3200 Phaethon crashes into Earth’s upper atmosphere at some 80,000 miles per hour and vaporizes as colorful Geminid meteors.
Dress warm to give yourself at least an hour of observing time, because it takes about 20 minutes for your eyes to adapt to the dark. And note that meteors often come in spurts, interspersed with lulls, so don’t give up quick if you’re not seeing any.
The Geminids will be best around 2 a.m. when the shower’s radiant point – the point in our sky from which the meteors seem to radiate – is highest in the sky. Look toward the constellation Gemini, the Twins, for the best viewing.
Another meteor shower, the Ursids, peaks in the predawn of 12/22. They’re a modest affair, averaging about 10 meteors per hour.
On the early evening of 12/22, look for Mars about 4 degrees below the waning crescent moon.
Winter Solstice
December 21 marks the shortest day of the year at 8 hours and 39 minutes for us, or if you prefer, the longest night at 15 hours and 21 minutes. But at 10:19 p.m., it also marks when the sun reaches its farthest southward point for the year, and so begins its long walk back toward summer solstice.
If the Earth wasn’t tilted, life would be very, very different, but instead the planet lists on its axis at 23.5 degrees. On this day of winter solstice in the Northern hemisphere, the earth leans the furthest away from the sun for the year. Look, for instance, early today at your noontime shadow – it will be your longest shadow of the year.
Think of the earth’s tilt this way: If you are warming your hands by the fire, you want them at a 90-degree angle to the fire to catch the most light and heat. If you tilt them away from the fire, your hands won’t get nearly as warm or catch as much light.
Same deal with the sun. So, now the tilt starts righting itself, and we’ll be blessed with longer days and, eventually, warmer days.
Just to make matters confusing, however, our latest sunset for the year occurs at 4:14 p.m. on 12/15, and the following day the sun begins setting one minute later. Our year’s latest sunrises (7:40 a.m.) won’t occur until 12/27, and the sun won’t budge to an earlier sunrise time until January 7 of 2020.
Average this out, and our days don’t actually grow longer until 12/25 – the first time since June 17! This is another good reason for celebrating Christmas!
There’s a rather technical explanation for all of this if you wish to understand why – see https://earthsky.org/?p=2951.
Seeds on the Snow
While skiing this week, we’ve noticed an abundance of both ash seeds and birch seeds on the snow surface. Ash seeds look like tiny canoe paddles, while most notable about birch seeds are their bracts. These look like a little fleur-de-lis with a single little winged seed nestled within each bract.
The birches hope their seeds will be dispersed by wind as they skitter over crusted snow, while the ash seeds float down as rigid, single-winged helicopters and hope the wind carries them a short distance from the tree. The wing typically has a slight pitch (like a propeller or fan blade), causing the seed to spin as it falls.
Basswood seeds were also present on the trails. Look for the pea-sized seeds that hang on a stem from a narrow parachute-like structure that looks like a little hang glider.
Sightings
In Manitowish, we’ve recently had three unusual birds at our feeders: a common grackle, a red-bellied woodpecker, and most unusual of all, a young-of-the-year rose-breasted grosbeak. We’ve never had a rose-breasted grosbeak visiting our winter feeders, and indeed, we’re unhappy about it because rose-breasted grosbeaks belong in Central and South America in December, not in Manitowish! It appears to fly adequately, but it may be injured or ill. We haven’t seen it this week, so it may have moved on, hopefully southward.
Common grackles typically winter from southern portions of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, south through central portions of Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and even to Texas, New Mexico, the Gulf Coast, and southern Florida. This individual doesn’t belong here either.
The red-bellied woodpecker, on the other hand, is doing quite the opposite: expanding its winter range into northern Wisconsin. Since the 1950s, they’ve been expanding to the north, probably due to maturing forests and a continued increase in backyard bird feeding. However, the red-bellied is among the most climate-sensitive species in the eastern U.S. (along with the yellow‐bellied sapsucker, tufted titmouse, Carolina wren, white‐throated sparrow and northern cardinal). Its distribution is strongly limited by the average minimum temperature each winter, and once that average falls to near 5°F, red-bellieds tend to stay south. Minocqua’s average minimum temperature in January has historically been 1°F, but as our winters continue to moderate in temperature, we will likely see more and more red-bellied woodpeckers at our winter feeders.
Greenhouse Gases
Carbon dioxide levels hit an all-time high of 407.8 parts per million in 2018, according to a report released by the World Meteorological Organization. The last time the Earth had comparable concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was approximately 3 million years ago, when the temperature was approximately 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer and sea levels were up to 65 feet higher.
Data is obtained by a suite of over 100 monitoring stations around the globe. As of 12/7/2019 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, CO2 is at 411.4 ppm.
Northern Highlands “Ecological Landscape”
In 1995, an effort was begun by the Wisconsin DNR to identify ecoregions within Wisconsin with the goal of producing a book that assessed each region’s ecological resources and socioeconomic conditions. A combination of physical and biological factors, such as climate, geology, topography, soils, water, and vegetation, were used to differentiate the ecological regions, and ultimately, 16 ecological landscapes were mapped within the state. The goal then was to determine how to sustain these resources by highlighting ecological management opportunities best suited for these landscapes. In simpler terms, the planning team wanted to ensure all species and habitats found in Wisconsin were maintained somewhere in the state.
This enormous book was finally published 20 years later, and unfortunately is only available online, but what a wealth of information it contains! The chapter on the Northern Highlands Ecological Landscape is 83 pages alone with numerous maps, photos, graphs, appendices, citations and references.
Winter provides lots of reading time, and if you want to know more about where we live, and the opportunities we have for honoring it through our best management, I can’t think of a better source to read.
Check https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/landscapes/Book.html for the entire book on the 16 ecological landscapes of Wisconsin.
Go to https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/Landscapes/documents/1805Ch14.pdf#view=Fit for the specific chapter on the Northern Highlands Ecological Landscape.
Gratitude
While Christmas has devolved largely into consumer mania, I hope there’s still room for simply expressing our gratitude for this life we’ve been given and this remarkable place we’re so fortunate to live in. I hit my 68th birthday a few days ago, and over the last few years, I’ve been challenged to come up with anything I “need” for my birthday or for Christmas. We certainly don’t live an extravagant lifestyle, and yet we have more than enough of just about everything I can think of. In fact, we’re at the point like many folks of similar age where we’re trying to figure out how to give away things, not accumulate more. Not only that, but we’re trying to be aware of how lucky we are, and to be grateful in every moment. Getting old, of course, lends itself to such reflection.
Wendell Berry, writer and farmer from Kentucky, has written 25 books of poetry, 16 volumes of essays, and 11 novels and short story collections, and he has this to say about wanting more: “As Thoreau so well knew, and so painstakingly tried to show us, what a man most needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can do without, and of how to get along without it. The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums.”
Growing older also slows one down, or at least is supposed to – some of us have to-do lists that keep us busier in retirement than we were in our work life! Mary and I continue to try and live in the most balanced way we can, though we often find ourselves still caught in the hurry of accomplishments. Herman Hesse, the Nobel Prize-winning German writer best known for books like Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, wrote, “The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.” (Hesse lived a moral life: He reviewed and publicized the work of banned Jewish authors in the mid-1930s, and from the end of the 1930s, German journals stopped publishing Hesse's work, with the Nazis eventually banning all of his writings.)
So, for this Christmas, Mary and I wish you the deepest feelings of gratitude and joy in your life and for this place we call the Northwoods.
Thought for the Week
From Albert Einstein: There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
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