A Northwoods Almanac for 2/21/20

A Northwoods Almanac for 2/21 – 3/5/20  by John Bates

January – Warm and Cloudy!

            January was quite warm, at least by Northwoods standards. According to climate data for Minocqua, the average high in January is 20°, with an average low of 1°. However, we experienced only three days in January where temperatures fell below 0° (1/12 at -2°, 1/16 at -13°, and 1/17 at -15°), and our average low for the month was 14.2° while our average high was 27.2° (from www.weather.com). Worth noting is the variation in data based on the website – Weather Underground’s website says the average high for Minocqua was 25.7, and the average low 11.7°. It’s fair to say, however, that no matter the source, it was significantly warmer than usual.

            And we weren’t the only ones experiencing a warm January. January 2020 was Earth's hottest in 141 years of record-keeping, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There has never been a warmer January in modern history.

            However, we’ve certainly had a good year for snow, with about 20” of snow as of 2/17 still on the ground in Minocqua, and up to 30” in northern Vilas and Iron counties. The snow came early in November, and it’s stayed all winter, making it an excellent recreational season for skiing, snowshoeing, and snowmobiling.

            Wildlife are the winners in the temperature analysis, at least so far. Temperature extremes, which can be killers, have been very modest. At our home in Manitowish, we’ve had two nights over the entire winter where we slid to slightly below -20°, remarkably “warm” extremes given that we used to hit -30° regularly every winter, with occasional -40°s. 

            Of course, winter is very likely here to stay until at least April. So, we’ll see what we still have in store. It’s never wise to bet on warm late winter/early spring temperatures in the Northwoods.

            January was also very cloudy. Since we installed solar panels, we now get double enjoyment out of any sunny day – we’re warmer and we’re making electricity! On our solar graph for January, we showed only 7 days of any significant solar gain, which means we had 24 days of gray for the month.

our solar production for January - only 7 days of sun!

            The good news is that February has been far brighter. As of 2/17, we’ve nearly doubled our solar production over January – 11 days have been at least partly sunny, and of those, 7 have been clear or nearly clear all day. While we’re still well below the solar production we expect to see in June, we’ll take it! 

Beaver Reproductive Cycle

            Beavers mate in February, and are monogamous, or at least until one dies, then the mate will select another partner. Gestation is about 3 ½ months, and three or four kits will follow in May to early June. The kits’ eyes are open when they are born; they can swim within 24 hours of birth; and they are gnawing trees down and building with them after only 11 days.

            They’ll nurse for six to eight weeks, and ultimately stay with their parents for two years, but then are kicked out to fend for themselves. Beavers are known to live for over 20 years, so that’s a lot of kits over a lifetime.

A beaver family spends all winter together inside their lodge. Lodges can be modest or spacious with an initial low feeding platform where the beavers can eat, groom, and dry off, sort of like a mud-room/kitchen combo in human homes. Above this platform, most lodges have a slightly higher level that’s often carpeted with wood shavings where the beavers sleep. The inside chamber can be 5 feet across and 2 feet high, though the record beaver lodge had beds for about eight beavers, and stood 16 feet high and 40 feet wide with walls 4 feet thick. The inside of an ordinary lodge usually just consists of one room, but eight or more beaver may occupy the lodge.

beaver lodge on Day Lake

Which brings up family dynamics. Most of us would be ripping at one another's throats after five wintery months inside a single dark, damp room, but a Canadian study of family dynamics within a lodge found that they got along well, even sleeping together in a friendly heap. In one study, a window was cut into the back of a lodge and the beavers were observed for two years, revealing virtually no familial problems. 

Thus, as usual, the animal world has a lot to teach us about how to get along.

Other February Breeders

            While there may appear to be little going on in February, animals know via photoperiod that spring is on its way and they need to ensure that their young are born when spring arrives. Thus, in Wisconsin, wolves breed most often in February, and the female delivers the pups two months later, typically sometime in later April. 

            Red foxes also mate in February, with 3 to 7 kits born after a 52-day gestation – usually sometime in later April. 

red fox photo by Jeff Richter

            And coyotes usually mate between February and March, with five to seven pups born in late April to early May after a 60 to 63 day gestation. 

coyote photo by Bev Engstrom

Bee My Valentine

            For Valentine’s Day, Mary and I bought one another all the equipment necessary to raise two hives of honey bees this spring. We’ve been talking about doing this for decades, but now we are exceptionally fortunate to have found a mentor who is willing to patiently walk us through all the things we need to know, and are we excited! We’re going to build a shed to house the hives in, and to do so, we’ll use wood from an old cabin that Mary’s grandfather built back in the 1920s. He later dismantled and hauled the wood across the Manitowish River to a spot below where we live now and built a shed. 

            We tore most of the shed down this fall, and we weren’t sure what to do with the wood, but now we have a project in which to repurpose the boards. Hopefully the bees will like very, very weathered wood! We bought a couple of the hive boxes with windows in the sides, so once the shed is built and the bees arrive, we can then watch how they work.

            We’ve already found out there’s both science and art involved in this beekeeping venture, and we don’t even have the bees yet! So, we’ll see how we do and keep you posted. 

            Wherever we travel, we always bring home local honey. The rumor is that I have a sweet tooth, and that’s why we’re always hauling honey around, but you should know it’s purely a myth. Hopefully, we’ll now find out how honey tastes from our own home, and we won’t have to haul it as far.

Goldfinches to Start Molting in March

            Over the last several weeks, we’ve finally been getting flocks of goldfinches at our feeders along with a few pine siskins. Bev Engstrom, ace photographer in Rhinelander, has often shared photos of male goldfinches in their dull winter plumage, and I’ve included one in this column. But that’s soon to change. Watch for the males to start changing their uninspired winter wardrobe into their brilliant lemon-yellow breeding plumage. Apparently, females prefer to mate with males that exhibit the brightest colors, so this change isn’t just for the sake of fashion.

American goldfinch photo by Bev Engstrom            

Celestial Events

            The new moon occurs on 2/23 – the darkest, and therefore best night for star gazing in February. 

            We reach 11 hours of daylight as of 2/27. We’re rapidly heading for spring equinox on 3/19!

            Venus continues through the end of February remains throughout March as the brilliant, and only, planet visible after dusk – look in the west and you can’t miss it.

            If you want to see more planets, before dawn is where the action is: look in the southeast for Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Thought for the Week

            From Thoreau: “Can he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale? Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have “seen the elephant”? These are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones; for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use.

            “I have been into the lumber-yard, and the carpenter’s shop, and the tannery, and the lampblack factory, and the turpentine clearing; but when at length I saw the tops of the pines waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of the forest, I realized that the former were not the highest use of the pine. It is not their bones or hide or tallow that I love most. It is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize, and which heals my cuts. It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.”

Please share your outdoor sightings and thoughts: e-mail at manitowish@centurytel.net, call 715-476-2828, snail-mail at 4245N State Highway 47, Mercer, WI, or see my blog at www.manitowishriver.blogspot.com.

NWA 2/7/20

A Northwoods Almanac for 2/7-20, 2020  

Susurration

            In an essay penned many years ago, wildlife biologist and author John Eastman described the sound of wind in the pines in this poetic way: Pine is the larynx of the wind. No other trees unravel, comb, and disperse moving air so thoroughly. Yet they also seem to concentrate the winds, wringing mosaics of sound from gale weather - voice echoes, cries, sobs, conversations, maniacal calls. With the help of only slight imagination, they are the receiving stations to which all winds check in, filtering out their loads of B-flats, and F minors, processing auditory debris swept from all corners of the sound-bearing world.

            I’ve often wondered if I just listened closely enough, and over a long enough time, whether I could identify trees by the sound of the wind in their leaves. English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy wrote that people could identify a tree by its “susurration” (soo-sur-ay-shun), the sound of leaves in the wind. Dictionaries identify the term susurration as deriving from the Latin “susurratus,” meaning “to whisper.” 

            So, the question is how does every tree species whisper in the wind, and can we find a word that fits the sound? For instance, I always think of the sound of the wind in aspens (popples) as the sound of rain. In fact, I’ve often been fooled into thinking it was raining when it was merely the wind whispering in the aspen leaves.

            Another writer compares the sound of the wind in aspen leaves to the “fizzing of carbonated water in a freshly opened bottle,” while another likens it to “the running of a young mountain stream” or alternatively like “the marching of feet in the tree tops.”

            There’s a scholarly Greek term, too, for this – “psithurism” – which also means to whisper.            

            But I like best this definition from the 1538 Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot, Knyght: “Susurrus: a whystering, or soft murmuring, or such noise as trees do make with the wind, or a river when it runneth, or birds when they chatter.” 

            A “whystering.” Yes, that works! But, depending on the tree, so do words that try to be the sound itself, like soughing (“suffing”), brustling, hissing, whooshing, rattling, moaning, whistling, rushing, humming, and “sweeing.” 

            I took a deep dive into Google to find other references to susurration, and found the term was used by numerous writers. For instance, this from Denise Levertov, in her poem Silent Spring: “But listen: no crisp susurration of crickets. One lone frog. One lone faraway whippoorwill. Absence. No hum, no whirr.”

            Ursula K Leguin wrote this, “. . . not visible but audible, a slanting plane of faint sound: the susurrus of blown snow.” 

            Sue Halpern in her book Four Wings and Prayer used “susurrus” to describe the wings of millions of roosting monarch butterflies as they leave the high mountains of central Mexico in early spring.

            In William Golding’s classic book The Lord of the Flies that many of us read in high school, Golding wrote, “The deep sea breaking miles away on the reef made an undertone less perceptible than the susurration of the blood.” 

            Other folks wrote the following about susurration in various Google searches:

“The sound of water through shingle? Is that susurration?” 

“Years ago I heard it, late at night, in a little house near the sea.”

“As a prairie girl, the perpetual susurration of wind in grass was background music to my life.”

“Ever heard a Red Admiral butterfly flutter close to your ear?”

“Susurration - that sound of silk skirts rustling.”

“If I think of the word, I feel great peace, the light whisper that awakens the dawn, the gentle whisper that turns off the sunset.”

            And interestingly, versions of the word appear nearly identical in numerous languages: In Italian, “sussurare” means to whisper or murmur. “Susurro” is the Spanish version. In Arabic, it means “to whisper softly.” French and Portuguese have similar words, too.

            So, it appears to be a rather universal word for the language of trees, though the world whispers in many other ways. 

            If you’re unfamiliar with the sound, wait for a windy day and then lay down under some pines, close your eyes, and listen.

Bald Eagles vs. Wild Turkeys: from Benjamin Franklin

            The Continental Congress selected the bald eagle as the nation’s new symbol in 1782, but this didn’t sit well with Benjamin Franklin. In a very long letter in January of 1784 to his daughter Sarah Bache, he expounded on his admiration for wild turkeys over bald eagles:

            For my own part, I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly; you may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing hawk [osprey] —and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him and takes it from him.
            With all this injustice he is never in good case, but like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides, he is a rank coward; the little kingbird, not bigger than a sparrow, attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district. He is therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest . . . 

            For in truth, the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours, the first of the species seen in Europe being brought to France by the Jesuits from Canada, and served up at the wedding table of Charles the ninth. He is besides, (though a little vain and silly tis true, but not the worse emblem for that) a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.

Happening Now or Coming Soon

            It’s February and winter will be with us for several months yet, but life is stirring. Bears give birth to cubs in February, each of which weighs about a half-pound, each blind and helpless, but who will feast on milk that may be as much as 40% butterfat. The nursing sow will often lose one-third of her body weight over the winter feeding her cubs.

            Great horned owls are on nest, incubating eggs while snow falls upon the incubating female. She will incubate her eggs for 30 to 37 days, and the male will deliver prey to keep her alive. The female can successfully incubate her eggs even when outside temperatures are as low as -27°, and if she leaves the nest, the eggs can withstand her absence for up to 20 minutes when the temperature is as low as -13°.

Celestial Events

            The full moon occurs on Sunday, 2/9. Known in various native traditions as the “hunger” moon, the “snow” moon,” or the “when coyotes are frightened” moon, the names all reflect the fact that the winter is still alive, snow cover remains deep, and often hunger now commences for both people and animals.

            We’re up to 10 hours and 29 minutes of daylight on 2/17. On 2/18, look before dawn for Mars just below the waning crescent moon. On 2/19, look before dawn for Jupiter above the moon. And on 2/20, look again before dawn for Saturn which will now be above the moon.

Big Hearts, Fast Hearts

Valentine’s Day approaches with all its trappings of chocolates, heart-stickers, and greeting cards, but how fine it is that we celebrate a day for love and the heart. In nature, however, all that matters is that the heart is still pumping: every day, all day. 

Some animal’s hearts, like a hummingbird’s, pump with wild abandon. Hummingbirds drive the Ferrari of all hearts, their hearts racing at a maximum of 1200 beats per minute, or twenty beats a second. If you could place one’s heart in your palm, you would hold an engine about the size of a dull pencil point. 

A hummingbird’s breath must come equally fast to fuel this race engine – nearly 250 breaths per minute, or four breaths a second, and accordingly, at least says one source, hummers suffer heart attacks, aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. 

            On the opposite end of the speed and size scale, there’s the blue whale, whose heart weighs nearly a ton, and is as big as a small car. The heart of a blue whale pumps about 15,000 pints of blood with every beat, compared to about 8 pints in a human, thus its aorta is large enough for an adult human to crawl through. A blue whale’s heart at rest is said to beat 4 to 8 times a minute, while its breath may come only once every hour before and after a sustained dive. 

Whether at 10 to 20 beats per second in the hummingbird, or indiscernible, as in the painted turtle dug into the lake bottom and waiting out the winter in a suspended animation, the heart operates as life’s engine, race car fast or glacially slow. 

We humans have chosen the physical heart to symbolize the source of our life force, our vitality, our will to live. We say a person has a great heart when he or she is courageous, or generous, or compassionate. We speak of the heart of the matter as the most important thing among all others. If something is heart-felt, it derives from love, from caring, from humility. When we are heart-broken, we are distraught and hit bottom. If we are heart-sick, we feel a deep loss; a heart throb is someone we are physically attracted to; a heartless person sees only himself and no one else.

            So, from Kathleen Dean Moore, take this to heart about our lives here in Wisconsin’s Northwoods: “To love is to affirm the absolute worth of what you love and to pledge your life to its thriving – to protect it fiercely and faithfully for all time.”          

NWA 1/24/20

A Northwoods Almanac for 1/24 - 2/6/2020   

2019 Weather Summary – Hot and Wet

            Earth’s warming trend continued in 2019, making it the second-hottest year in NOAA’s (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) 140-year climate record, just behind 2016. The world’s five warmest years have all occurred since 2015 with nine of the 10 warmest years occurring since 2005. It was also the 43rd consecutive year with global land and ocean temperatures, at least nominally, above average. The average temperature across the globe in 2019 was 1.71 degrees F above the 20th-century average.

            NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) scientists conducted a separate but similar analysis which concurred with NOAAs ranking. NASA also found that 2010-2019 was the hottest decade ever recorded.

            In contrast to the near-record global heat, average temperatures across the contiguous United States made 2019 the 34th warmest year in records that go back 125 years, and the coolest year since 2014. The year closes out a decade that saw nationally averaged temperature alter from intense warmth (including the hottest year in U.S. history, 2012, and the next three warmest years on record, 2015–2017) to more typical values. However, temperatures in the 2010s averaged more than 2°F above the values seen a century earlier, in the 1910s.

            Alaska was a different story, experiencing its warmest year on record. At 32.2°F (0.1°C), this was the first time in the nearly 100 years of recordkeeping that the statewide annual average came in above the freezing mark. 

            Climate change as we all know is all about long-term trends, not one year records. So, looking at trends, the NOAA report shows the number of daily record highs to record lows in the United States has increased every decade since the 1970s. The decadal ratio of record highs to lows comes in at around 2 to 1. That compares to 1.9 to 1 in the 2000s, 1.4 to 1 in the 1990s, and 1.2 to 1 in the 1980s. Thus, the long-term data shows a dramatic increase in record high temperatures compared to record lows throughout the United States. That’s our present, and our future. Read for yourself: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-201912.

            As for rainfall, according to NOAA’s annual summary, the contiguous United States saw its second wettest year on record in 2019. In five states—Michigan, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Wisconsin—2019 was the wettest year on record. Fifteen other states from Nevada to Rhode Island saw a top-ten-wettest year. The nationwide annual average precipitation for 2019 of 34.78” was 4.84 inches above the average and just 0.18” shy of the record-wet year of 1973. However, the last 24 months easily set a record for the wettest two-year calendar span in data going back to 1895. 

            If we add all the snow we’ve received so far this winter to the record high moisture of 2019, there’s legitimate concern regarding what our water levels will look like this coming spring. Time will tell.

Sightings: Western Meadowlark, Wood Duck, Goldfinches

            Karen, in the town of Oma, Iron County, has a western meadowlark coming regularly to her feeders. While a wintering western meadowlark was confirmed in Bayfield County in 2014 and 2016, this is a rare winter sighting for our local area. Western (and eastern) meadowlarks are grassland birds associated with hayfields and pastures where they feed on seeds and insects found on the ground. Our heavy Northwoods winter snowfall usually forces all ground-feeding birds, including meadowlarks, to migrate to far less snowier climes. Why this one chose to visit Oma and remain there is anyone’s guess.

            Kris Nelson, who lives year-round on the Manitowish River in Boulder Junction, reported observing a lone female wood duck keeping close to her home throughout the day. She noted, “Our property sits on a wide, lengthy stretch of open water, and she's been feeding and sheltering off the shoreline.” Kris wondered what they might do to help it survive the winter. I wrote back and said that cold isn’t really a major issue for wood ducks, but food is – the woodie should survive if she can find sufficient food. Wood ducks are somewhat unusual in the Northwoods world of ducks because they eat not only aquatic vegetation but quite a lot of tree seeds and grains. They commonly eat corn at people’s feeders in the spring, so I suggested to Kris that she might put corn out for her, or if she could find acorns under the snow, the woodie would love them as well. In a second email, Kris noted that she now has two hen wood ducks.

            During our Manitowish Waters Christmas bird count, we found a wood duck wintering on a tiny open creek in Lac du Flambeau, and in speaking with a neighbor there, she said a pair had wintered on the creek the previous year. So, woodies can survive our winters, but why these apparently uninjured individuals chose to stay when they ordinarily migrate south is a mystery.

Birds and Winter – Strategies for Survival

            By my very unofficial count, around 155 birds nest in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, but only about 25 of those are permanent residents who remain the winter. The rest, exercising apparent wisdom, are currently sipping pina coladas somewhere well south of here. In fact, out of all of Wisconsin’s 226 confirmed breeding bird species, at least 133 (56%) are neotropical migrants, meaning they winter south of 25° latitude, including both Central and South America. 

            Historically, northern Wisconsin averages around 5 months of ice cover and snow cover, as well as 8 months of temperatures that dip below freezing. It’s a true test of resilience for birds to balance their caloric checkbook, so that energy-in equals energy-out.

            Finding sufficient food to keep the internal furnace stoked is the toughest issue. Birds employ many strategies, one of which, scavenging, is seen every day on roadkills. Our wintering birds have little choice but to be opportunists, and many are quite happy to scavenge a recent kill. Bernd Heinrich, author of Winter World, writes that ravens, for instance, will kill almost any animal they can catch, “but given their high-energy needs, surviving winter for them means feeding on the carcasses of large animals they could never kill. The raven’s carnivore connection is most prominently displayed by association with wolves. Under natural conditions, ravens arrive at and feed on wolf kills within minutes after a pack kills an ungulate . . . By accessing large clumped food resources, ravens can range as far north as their providers—wolves, humans, and polar bears.” 

            Many of us have seen a recent kill in the woods or along a road, and go back the next day to find innumerable tracks around the carcass. A friend of ours refers to the aftermath gut piles of the annual deer hunt as “coyote Christmas,” but he could call it “chickadee or raven Christmas” as well.

            Many people are surprised to learn that chickadees and nuthatches feed on animal remains, too. While around a half of their winter diet is the larvae/pupae of insects and spiders found by probing tree bark, many people have watched chickadees and nuthatches feeding on the fat of dead deer, skunks, and even fish. Hang a deer rib cage in a tree after hunting season, and you’ll feed many a chickadee and nuthatch. Even brown creepers and golden-crowned kinglets are known to forage on fat. 

            When food is found in abundance, a necessary strategy is to figure out how to store some of it for leaner times. Ravens, as well as blue jays, crows, chickadees and nuthatches, also cache surpluses. 

            Chickadees cache food mostly in the autumn, hiding food in bark, dead leaves, clusters of conifer needles, knotholes, and even in the ground. Researchers studying their caching have found that chickadees can accurately find their cache sites even after 28 days by using landmark clues and sun compass orientation to find them. Chickadees in harsher northern climes stash more seeds and insects than more southern chickadees, and their hippocampus, the brain region associated with spatial memory, is proportionately larger. In a study comparing Alaskan to Coloradan chickadees, the Alaskan chickadees stored more food, were more accurate and faster in finding their caches, and had larger hippocampi. 

            Ruffed grouse don’t need to cache food because in 15 minutes they can nip off enough nutrient-rich buds from an aspen or birch tree and store them in their crop to eat later, which lasts them through a day and night. Instead, their more important wintering strategy is to “snow roost” on cold winter days to conserve heat, but also to reduce predation since they are the favorite prey of winter raptors. Heinrich studied ruffed grouse through two Maine winters and found that if there was fluffy snow, ruffed grouse spent most of the day under the snow. He surmised that “their winter problem . . . is not so much to find enough to eat, but rather not to be eaten.”

            And then there’s golden-crowned kinglets. These little dynamos have to constantly forage for insects the entire day to make it through a winter night. Heinrich found that they huddle together to stay warm: “On one evening I saw four kinglets disappear into a pine tree. Later that night, with extreme caution and armed with a flashlight, I climbed the tree and spied a four-pack of golden-crowned kinglets huddled together into one bunch, head in and tail out, on a twig. One briefly stuck its head out of the bunch, and quickly retracted it – indicating it was staying warm, and not in cold torpor. Using each other as a heat source, as a means of reducing their own heat loss, is an ingenious strategy, as it alleviated these birds from searching for or returning to a suitable shelter at the end of the day. By traveling as a group and converging to huddle, they were their own shelter instead.” 

            There are numerous other strategies that individual species employ, each nevertheless a life-risking gamble against the rigors of a northern winter. Heinrich notes, “Surviving winter is not always survival of the biggest and strongest.” Indeed, it’s a matter of thousands of generations struggling to perfect strategies that make the most sense for who they are. Each species has its own story, an ever-evolving one, that we can only try to understand and marvel at.

Celestial Events

            The new moon occurs tonight, 1/24. On 1/28, look after dusk for Venus about 4 degrees above the crescent moon. For planet watching in the next two weeks, look before dawn in the southeast dawn for both Jupiter and Mars, and look just after dusk in the west for Venus. 

            Our days are growing longer by 3 minutes per day as of 1/31. February 4^th marks the average midway point between ice-up and ice-out on Foster Lake in Hazelhurst according to Woody Hagge’s 40+ years of data.

Thought for the Week

            “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees.” - William Blake